By Nate Jones
Staff Writer
Cape Elizabeth School Board members and town councilors entered new territory last week after 60 percent of voters rejected a proposed $19.7 million school budget. A 1,891 to 1,250 vote was tallied after the town’s first budget validation referendum June 10.
The school board voted to “stand behind” its original proposal of a 6 percent increase from last year’s budget in a special school board meeting Monday. Councilor Mary Ann Lynch said she expected the council to discuss the proposed budget at their meeting scheduled for June 26.
Jim Rier, Maine Department of Education director of finance and operations, said the referendum must take place within 10 days of the council vote, meaning the polls could be open again as soon as July 8.
Cape Elizabeth residents are not the first voters to reject the school budget during the referendum mandated by the school consolidation law. Maine Department of Education’s David Connerty-Marin estimated about 12 percent of towns in Maine have also sent their school budgets back to workshop – although possibly for much different reasons than Cape Elizabeth residents.
According to results from an advisory question included on the ballot asking voters if they thought the proposed budget was too high or too low, more than 1,600 Cape Elizabeth residents are in favor of increasing the school budget by more than the proposed 4.6 percent over last year’s budget.
Now the school board and town council are trying to figure out just how much higher to go.
During public hearings last month, some residents advocated a 6 percent, or roughly an additional $263,000 increase in spending from last year’s budget.
A 6 percent increase would allocate nearly $20 million for the schools in 2009, and could mean a 6.6 percent overall increase in property taxes. Hawkins said at $12.62 per $1,000 of assessed value, the tax bill for a median home in Cape Elizabeth could increase by more than $200 a year if the 6 percent increase is approved.
David Hillman, a member of the town’s Citizen Advocates for Public Education (C.A.P.E.) organization, said if the next budget proposal includes an increase any less than 6 percent, it too would likely be rejected.
“[Voters] really were deciding between 4.6 and 6 percent,” he said. “A fair reading of the vote is the people want 6 percent and they want it over with; 6 percent would do it.”
Hillman said the group was pleased with referendum results and impressed with the “outstanding turnout” of Cape Elizabeth residents who took the time to vote on the issue. He said he hoped the town council’s interpretation of the vote would motivate them to present a budget with a 6 percent increase in the next referendum, which could take place as early as June 30.
Several emails between town councilors and the Sentry following the referendum show some already agree that moving forward with the 6 percent increase to the next referendum is the right thing to do.
“Before the public vote I said that if a majority of the voters rejected the 4.6 percent budget increase and indicated that they thought the 4.6 percent was too low, I would support sending the school board’s 6 percent proposed budget increase to the voters for approval,” Councilor David Backer wrote.
Councilors Anne Swift-Kayatta and Sara Lennon – who both voted against the 4.6 percent increase – wrote they will also support presenting a 6 percent increase to voters.
Hillman said this is the only rational option for councilors after what he called a “super majority” of residents showing their support for additional spending. Some councilors, however, interpret the results of the advisory question differently.
“We can see that voter sentiment may actually be quite evenly divided,” Councilor James Rowe wrote. “Does a 52 percent majority constitute a mandate to move the next public vote to 6 percent? I’m frankly not sure and am very open to hearing further discussion.”
Both Lennon and Hillman said they disagree with Rowe’s interpretation that only 52 percent of voters favored additional spending, an opinion that relies on arithmetic based on his assumptions of the different ways residents responded to the advisory question. Hillman, after reviewing the email from Rowe, determined Rowe had “created 393 fictional votes” to justify his reasoning that the referendum resulted in 52 percent majority being in favor of increasing the school budget.
“The difference is 528 votes,” Lennon wrote. “That means a sizable percentage voted that the budget was too low. It defies simple fairness and logic, to create voters and then create how they might have voted. Of the real voters who actually voted, 60 percent said ‘too low.’”
They may have different opinions of the advisory question results, but most town councilors are in agreement the vote was, as Swift-Kayatta described it, “an example of democracy in action.”
Rowe congratulated the “no, too low” supporters and Lennon wrote the referendum was “an affirmation to all of the incredible people who work for our schools.”
“In these times of apparent recession, when fuel and food prices are putting families under financial pressure, as a community we should have some sense of pride that our residents feel so strongly about the quality and strength of local education and that they mobilize and organize themselves to ensure that their taxes are raised even more than their elected officials are inclined to tax them,” Backer said.
Per the new state school consolidation law, Rier said the school board can present a revised budget to the council no sooner than 10 days following the referendum, making today the earliest they could have presented the 6 percent increased budget to the town council.
During Monday’s meeting, the school board encouraged Lynch to hurry the process along, as teacher contracts cannot be ratified until the budget is finalized. Superintendent Alan Hawkins said during the delay, one teacher had already accepted a position in Gorham.
“Every day I have to wait; you can imagine where the anxiety level is,” Hawkins said.