HANSON – The outcome of Hanson’s special Town Meeting on June 17 will hinge on how effectively the sole article is explained to voters as to exactly what “yes” and “no” votes mean, and will do, regarding the fiscal 2025 budget and the W-H school assessment’s effect on it.
Select Board, in an emergency meeting on Thursday, May 30 voted final approval of the warrant article, contingent on minor language changes being made, for the June 17 special Town Meeting Town Administrator Lisa Green attended the session remotely via phone.
A lack of clarity, particularly centering on the explanation of the article which allows voters to have another conversation about the fiscal 2025 budget, which passed May 6, but after the May 18 Town Election result shooting down the Proposition 2 ½ override, there remains a $350,212 budget that has already been established with the deficit, and asks them to examine an insert outlining cuts the Finance Committee is working to recommend. The third option would be the discussion of other amendments from the floor.
“The article itself is just a recitation of what we already have, and what we have every year as the budget item in the warrant,” Select Board Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
“If they vote no on this article, it means we do not reconsider the budget, we do not talk about it anymore and then we have a $350,000 shortfall that we have to figure out on our side how to resolve and it goes back to the School Committee for a third assessment and a super Town Meeting,” Board member Joe Weeks said. “I understand that it’s frustrating to talk about this now, but I’m telling you right now, there’s a whole bunch of people saying ‘I’m voting no for this because they think no means [it rejects the assessment].”
“This is not clear,” Vice Chair Ann Rein said, agreeing with Weeks’ point. “People out there think no means no and it doesn’t. Voting yes means we stick with the budget as voted in May and they don’t get it.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said people have to come not thinking what they want to vote against, but what they will vote for.
Both FitzGerald-Kemmett and Select Board Administrative Assistant Lynn McCowell reviewed the budget article and Town Counsel Kate Feodorff was asked to do the same and made some minor changes.
Noting her own suggestion at the last meeting that two warrant articles be used, FitzGerald-Kemmett said that after speaking to Feodoroff, who thought the approach would be more confusing to voters, it was decided that the article’s wording and an insert covering the board and Finance Committee’s recommendations, would “really be driving it and the way that it would be voted.”
Feodoroff, who joined the meeting late via Zoom, also “very strongly counselled” the Select Board that a single article was preferable to avoid confusion as to what voters would be asked to decide according to FitzGerald-Kemmett. Before she did join the meeting, FitzGerald-Kemmett suggested any tweaks to be made be done that night.
“We need to have this on lock-down so the warrant can be delivered by the constable tomorrow morning [Friday, May 31],” she said.
Member Ed Heal had already voiced concern over the final paragraph: “The purpose of this article is to deliberate on the budget as a whole to determine whether or not to ‘fully [missing word]’” and insert the word ‘fund,’ “the Whitman-Hanson regional School budget,” FitzGerald-Kemmett read. The board voted to make that change.
“I’m still kind of caught off-guard,” Weeks said, noting that on May 30, they discussed three options that do different things. “If we were to just vote ‘yes’ on this article, given that we have three options drastically different things. … I wish we just had something that says, a ‘yes vote does this.’”
He asked if the votes would cover two options.
FitzGerald-Kemmett said there would be just one vote.
“To approve the budget as it is, as it was voted at the last Town Meeting, and that is the way Mr. Kealy’s motion will be updated,” she said. “We are keeping the W-H regional school budget as the budget that was voted at the last Town Meeting.”
Heal asked whether it makes sense to declare it to be a yes vote.
“How do you get to a vote?” he asked. “How do you get to item one?”
“Through the motion,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “Mr. Kealy will read the motion.”
“How do you get to item one?” Heal asked.
“It’s through the motion,” FitzGerald-Kemmett replied. “If option one carries, there is no need for further discussion because we [would have] voted to stay the course. If option one doesn’t carry, then we go to Option two, which is the potential service cuts that will be outlined, but not necessarily recommended by us or the Finance Committee.”
To help clarify it further, Weeks said “If you vote ‘yes’ on this, then Option 1 is going to carry.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said the article would not require multiple passes if Article 1 passes with the motion that the town will not back away from officials’ stance that they will only fund what Town Meeting has already voted.
“In other words, we’re saying we’re not changing anything,” she said. “We had to get together. We had to present other options, but what we’re moving tonight is ‘stay the course, then there’s no further discussion needed, and then we adjourn.”
Feodoroff, joining the discussion said if Town Meeting does nothing than the budget is approved.
“Since they sent that assessment back, if we do nothing, then their budget is approved,” she added. “We have 45 days – use them … without having a source of funding, you become obligated legally to fund the whole budget. … So you have to do something.”
The failed override would have created additional revenue capacity, but since it failed, Feodoroff explained, officials need to bear in mind that a different group of people show up at Town Meeting and would be well within their rights to vote to fully fund the schools. The situation demands that it be counter-balanced with budget cuts.
The Finance Committee is meeting to determine where they would prefer those cuts should be made.
“We don’t want people just randomly deciding they want to cut the whole thing out of police or the whole thing out of fire, without knowing what the impact is,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
By presenting a budget and moving it the exact same way that you did [at the May 6 Town Meeting] – the exact same budget, with not even a period changed and is resubmitted to the schools – it reaffirms what you did and that budget schools.
“But the option has to be given to the voters to make a different decision,” she said.
Rein confirmed that “staying the course means the 5-percent increase, and that’s it.”
“In order to revisit the budget, you have to say this language that’s in Article 1,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “It allows the conversation about any potential change to the budget.”
Weeks summed up that the average voter is going to want to know, if they’re voting “no” on this, they’ll want to know what kicks it back to the School Committee for the potential of a lower assessment.
“People that want to keep the assessment, know they are going to vote ‘yes,’ is what I’m guessing,” he said. “The people who vote “no” will want to kick it back to the School Committee for the potential for a lower assessment. … I’m just hearing a lot of people saying they want to kick it back.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said the only way the issue avoids going to a super town meeting is if it’s voted to appropriate more money for the school district budget.

HANSON – The warrant article for the June 17 special Town Meeting was reviewed by Select Board on Tuesday, May 28, but no vote has been taken as of yet due to questions over the clarity of syntax and the need for Finance Committee’s recommendation.
Finance Committee was also meeting on May 28 and Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said by next meeting the Select Board will have that committee’s well-thought-out cuts.
The Select Board plans to meet again at 7 p.m., Friday, May 30 once the articles are revised and clarified, with a tentative fallback time set for 5:30 p.m. Friday, May 31, if needed. The Town Meeting Article must be posted by June 1.
“Basically, what we are doing is we are having a special Town Meeting to vote the budget with the school assessment minus an override question,” Town Administrator Lisa Green said. “The budget that’s going to be presented will show approximately $372,141 in budget cuts, with the numbers they will be getting. The Finance Committee is meeting this evening to discuss those.”
The initial language of Article 1, as drafted by Town Counsel Kate Feodoroff asks the town to vote in Town Meeting whether it should “rescind its approval of the town budget under Article 5 of the May 6, 2024 annual Town Meeting and to determine what sums of money town will raise and appropriate by taxation, transfer from free cash, transfer from town ambulance funds, Water Department revenue, water surplus, the Title V special revenue fund, MWAT loan repayment receipts reserved for appropriation, Conservation Notice of Intent fund, overlay surplus and unbalanced reserve for reduction of future excluded debt to defray charges and expenses of the town.”
Those expenses include payment of debt and interest while providing for a reserve fund for fiscal year 2025.
Feodoroff’s original text of the Article 1 explanation reads that on May 6, the town approved the “FY 2025 annual omnibus budget in Article 6, and disapproved the contingent appropriation for the W-H regional school district.
“The disapproval of Article 6 resulted in the rejection of the budget as assessed by the district,” Feodoroff wrote. “The original budget request was $14,974,735; but $14,602,595 was approved at Town Meeting and the contingent appropriation of $372,141 failed.”
The School Committee then met and revoted to resubmit the school assessment of $14,974,735 “for this town meeting’s consideration,” the explanation continued. “The purpose of this article is to present and deliberate upon the district’s reassessment and determine whether to approve:

• A reduced budget for the W-H regional school district as previously approved which would be sent to the School Committee, which would determine whether to accept the reduced amount or reject it, forcing a district-wide meeting;
• Approve the full school assessment with reduced services in the town’s budget; or
• Approve such other budget as may be deliberated upon by Town Meeting.
  “I don’t want people to need a decoder ring to make it through this explanation, FitzGerald-Kemmett said, suggesting that it be edited by making bullet points of the options “so it reads, ‘here’s a choice, here’s a choice, here’s a choice.’”
  She argued that would make things more apparent.
  Board Clerk Ed Heal said the “decoder ring” issue for him was in the main text of the article where it said the original budget was approved, “but then, they came back with the same number,” he said.
  “It’s not the same number,” Rein said.
  “It’s not crystal clear, the way it’s written,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “Why are we using the words ‘omnibus budget?’ Does anybody even know what the hell that means? I’m not saying I don’t know what the word omnibus means, I’m saying it just adds extraneous words that don’t need to be there.”
  After discussing the vocabulary used the Board composed a more direct way of explaining the article for submission to Town Counsel for approval.
  “This is where I think it jumps the track,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said about the original legal syntax of the article. “Can we just say ‘did not approve the contingent appropriation?”
  “It’s not wrong, it’s convoluted,” Vice Chair Ann Rein said. “It’s too wordy.”
  “You’re all in the know, you pay more attention to this than the 300-plus people that are going to show up [for Town Meeting], said Board member Joe Weeks. “The more information and the more [direct] you could make the language, the more you’re going to have informed voters.”
  Heal suggested that the language make clear the difference, making clear that the $372,141 is the difference between what was requested and what was voted upon.
  FitzGerald-Kemmett said the board has consistently outlined the difference between what was described and what was requested and what we appropriated.
  FitzGerald-Kemmett wanted to try a different approach providing more clarification of the articles.
  “We need it to be clear,” she said.
  The final language the board worked out for town counsel approval reads: that “on May 6, the town approved the annual budget and did not appropriate the contingent appropriation for the W-H Regional School District. The disapproval of Article 6 resulted in the rejection of the budget as assessed by the district. … The original budget request was $14,974,735; but $14,602,595 was approved at Town Meeting and the contingent appropriation of $372,141 failed. (The contingent appropriation ‘the delta’) between the School District and municipal budgets.”
  The Town Meeting options here are:
• A reduced budget for the W-H Regional School District as previously approved;
• To present and deliberate on the district’s reassessment and to determine whether to approve it;
  Appropriate a full schools assessment amount with reduced services in the town budget; or
  Approve such other business could be deliberated on Town Meeting floor.
  FitzGerald-Kemmett said even that language seems to be contradicting ourselves, because we say that we approved the [municipal] budget in Article 6 and disapproved a contingent appropriation, but in the next sentence talks about, the disapproval of Article 6.
  “It’s like, pick a lane,” she said. The two lanes should be Article 1, tied to an explanation in Article 2 is no change, the budget is the one passed May 6.
  Heal and Weeks suggested the contingent appropriation was Article 7 of the May Town Meeting.
  In the June 17 warrant.
  “I really want to go into this meeting without using ‘lawyer speak’ to pull something over on people,” Weeks said, noting the three possible outcomes if the budget passes. “Which of the possible outcomes are we going to get? Heal asked if each of the options would be voted on.
  “We are absolutely trying to avoid making cuts from the floor,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We want to be thoughtful about what the cuts are. We don’t want to be flying by the seat of our pants and cut the Veterans Agent or some other crazy thing that we haven’t all thought about and [asked ourselves] what are the ramifications?”
  The Finance Committee’s meeting that night was for just that thought as they advise the Select Board on cuts and the Town Accountant is also going through that process with the aim of those recommendations reviewed by the Select Board Thursday or Friday, May 30 or 31.
  “Ideally, we’ll align, but we may not,” she said, adding the Town Meeting will have two choices in the end:
  A budget with no cuts – in essence, another “no” back to the school district; or
  Not saying no, but saying yes to the budget by making cuts in services and other budget line items.
  “Those will be presented side-by-side, just like we presented the line budget at Town Meeting, we’ll have a line budget for this, which will show where we’re cutting,” she said.
  A third option is because someone could stand up at Town Meeting and cut things the board had not anticipated or planned to cut.
  “If we vote yes on Article one, what happens,” Weeks asked. “The explanation is supposed to tell me what happens, but it’s not. It’s giving me every single option under the sun, which is obvious… If I was the casual or semi-casual [resident] coming to Town Meeting, knowing this is something I’m passionate about and wanting to know exactly what I’m voting for … Even me reading this right now I don’t know what I’m going to explain to people.”
  In unison, Heal and Weeks suggested that, instead of a list of options for cuts, it be presented as “a yes vote means this and a no vote means this.”
  FitzGerald-Kemmett instead suggested that it be presented as two articles, with Article 1 carrying the explanation “we’re not going to rescind anything” but rather the choice should be to approve the school assessment with reduced services in the town budget.
  Article one is the explanation, and if Article 2 is rejected, it would lead to article 3 to the information of where the cuts will be made, Weeks suggested.
  “… You have to arm people, in a very specific way,” he said.

HANSON – Now begins the work of meeting the W-H Regional School District’s operational assessment in the wake of the second failure to pass an override – at Town Meeting on May 6 and at the ballot box Saturday, May 18.
A funding gap of $372,141 remains.
The Select Board on Tuesday, May 21, met with Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak in an effort to better understand what drives rising school budget costs and what the defeat of the override will mean for Hanson’s finances.
Now that the ballot question failed on Saturday [see related story], the Select Board discussed what comes next since the “override question is dead,” she said.
“That’s one path that’s been eliminated from the map,” she said of the override. “Now what we have before us is a question of how do we fund that delta between what we had budgeted for and what the school [operational] assessment was. … We’re in the same position we were in without any method of paying that difference.”
Select Board member Joe Weeks asked for a bumper-sticker view of what the current budget situation would mean to the district’s schools.
“If I don’t have a budget in place by July 1, the commissioner of education takes over and I have no say in what he decides on giving us,” Szymaniak said. “It can be even to fiscal 2024, or he could decide it could be more.”
What the bumper-sticker would say is: pink slips for staff, according to Szymaniak
“The challenge is, once you get a pink slip, you don’t have a job and you qualify for unemployment,” he said. “On July 1, if those are 60 folks, they will qualify for unemployment until I can give them a contract, and I can’t give them a contract until I have a certified budget.”
Szymaniak said the district is OK until July in paying teachers according to their contract.
“It gets a little gray by August if I don’t have a budget,” Szymaniak. “The day that a teacher doesn’t have a contract, they’re eligible for 40 percent of their salary going forward. Some would call that double-dipping because they’ve already gotten paid.”
The district had challenged the practice during COVID, but lost.
“We learned a lot during that time-frame just because of that situation,” he said.
Where things stand
Town Meeting voters were told at the May 6 Town Meeting that balancing the municipal budget was dependent on the $372,141 increase for the W-H operating assessment being “expressly contingent upon passage” of a proposition 2 ½ question on the May 18 ballot.
This time at Town Meeting, the question will be structures such that there will be two options – voting no and voting to fund the difference with various budget cuts the Select Board will explain, according to Chair Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett. At that time, voters will be provided a line-by-line look at what the board has voted.
On Tuesday, May 14, she had advised the board that “there’s only so many things we can do to fund this budget,” while ticking off the options. They remain: drastic across-the-board cuts; funding some of the gap with free cash and make modest cuts at Town Hall and other departments; fund a bit more with free cash and make; use of free cash and more drastic cuts; free cash or even more drastic cuts or just cuts.
The Finance Committee has not yet voted on the new warrant article being drafted for the June 17 Town Meeting, FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
“Again, saying no is not an option,” she said. “We have to present some option to Town Meeting, or de facto that assessment is in place and we just don’t have a method anyone’s voted on to pay it.”
In fact, Hanson’s available free cash is $627,000. “To pay $350,000 for the assessment would perilous,” FitzGerald-Kemmett May 14.
Town Accountant Eric Kinsherf has cautioned that “It would be irresponsible” to balance the budget with free cash now.
Kinsherf, Town Administrator Lisa Green and the Finance Committee are all looking at whether there are open positions that the town should not fill right now or positions where hours can be trimmed back without drastically impacting services.
FitzGerald-Kemmett also put to rest – again – the rumor that the town has $1.4 million in free cash.
“We do not,” she said. “We have roughly $600,000 in cash.”
Kinsherf and Green are also meeting with department heads, considering options including whether it could be a lot of little cuts that could fill in that dollar amount.
“Some of it may be free cash, but we’re going to use as little free cash as we possibly can,” she said.
The board will be meeting again on Tuesday, May 28 to review and sign that warrant then.
It has been considered whether the meeting could be made to the high school…. but that option in recent years was permitted by the state because of COVID and may not be available again.
In the past, when a high turnout was anticipated at town meetings at Hanson Middle School, the gym or cafeteria had been configured to handle overflow crowd with a TV screen for people to follow the meeting and a teller to track questions and votes.
“We were caught flat-footed at the last Town Meeting,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “We didn’t anticipate that number of people and we need to do better.”
The town is planning on having the meeting at Hanson Middle School, but having the gymnasium in place with plenty of printed materials available for voters.
Budget craft
School budget is based on an estimate of funds the district expects to be refunded by the state.
“Every year, it’s a bit of a crap-shoot,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said. “It’s the best guess that the School Department can do.”
This year the important funds the budget was based on was $30 per-pupil reimbursement and a 74 percent reimbursement on busing. But right now, both the House and Senate on Beacon Hill have increased those numbers to $104 for per-pupil costs with an 84 percent transportation reimbursement. Those two budget bills translate to a $190,00 in state funds.
“However, that is not a sure thing,” she said, calling on Szymaniak. “It’s not on lockdown and it probably won’t be until mid-July.”
FitzGerald-Kemmett said the clock on the wall should make town and school officials look at the timing of everything.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get to a point where we could have Town Meeting so late that we’d know [the state budget] numbers,” she said. “But there’s got to be a better way of doing this.”
“We don’t have those numbers, but they look encouraging,” Szymaniak said. “Last year, we expected a little bit more and when the budget came in on Aug. 5 with less, so we had to make cuts on the fly.” The state is asking the towns to pick up more funds and the towns say they can’t, he said.
“If they came back with $300,000 more in [reimbursements], we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
Those cuts amounted to $250,000 in personnel cuts.
There are two bills, with some teeth to them, on state Sen. Mike Brady’s desk to increase regional transportation and special education 100 percent, he said, urging people to call Brady and other state senators to support them.
“Regional transportation and special education reimbursement are the core of our funding,” he said. “If we can get more from the state, it will help us out.”
But there are four or five more conference committees to go through plus objections before it goes to the governor’s desk, Szymaniak added.
“There’s no way that we could time a super Town Meeting before July 1 at which point, you must go into the 1/12 budget,” FitzGerald-Kemmett said.
Ed Heal asked how the public could get salary information, to which Szymaniak said teachers are listed by unit salaries in Town Report. Complete budget information is available at whrsd.org.
“We’re looking at cutting staff also,” said Select Board Vice Chair Ann Rein. “It seems to me the School Committee needs to look at that themselves and not try to force us to go onto this fiscal cliff every year.”
Later in the meeting, Weeks also requested more meetings — joint sessions with the School Committee — be added to the Select Board’s schedule with the specific intention of making formal requests of the School Committee.
“We all know this isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and we had discussed last year being more diligent about being more transparent about having these financial meetings,” he said. “It’s really hard to put somebody on the spot when we didn’t provide them with an agenda, we didn’t provide them any materials to get ready. They weren’t here for this.”
Weeks said that kind of scenario can lead to people putting their foot in their mouth or promising something off-the-cuff that they cannot keep.
“Everybody here has had questions they’ve been asking to cameras and they haven’t had the ability — quite frankly, we haven’t done a forma request … and then we can have our questions answered.
FitzGerald-Kemmett said it makes sense for January or February.
“What’s stopping us from having a meeting in a couple of weeks that the superintendent was asked on the fly?” Weeks said.
Rein said it makes more sense to get throught the special Town Meeting first.
Member David George said he primarily wants to speak with the Hanson School Committee members about their support for the budget because he is still looking for an answer as to why 31 staff members were added with one-time money.
“I think you have to meet all of them,” Rein said.
“I don’t know the ask,” Heal said.
Weeks said he envisions a joint meeting with Whitman Select Board and the School Committee several times during the budget season.
George said he doesn’t see why it wouldn’t help just to get the Hanson members of the School Committee at Select Board meetings to ask the questions people have.
“We’re not asking them to make decisions or change anything, we just have some questions that we need answered,” he said.