A representative from Hudson introduced a bill yesterday to cut Franklin's state school funding allotment from $7 million to $0. But even the bill's sponsor doubts the idea has much of a chance.

Rep. Steve Hellwig contends that Franklin must be penalized for refusing to send money to a charter school last year. The Franklin Career Academy closed its doors last spring.

"There's no way this bill is going anywhere, in my humble opinion,"Rep. Fran Wendelboe, a Republican from New Hampton who is a charter school proponent herself, said in an interview yesterday. "There is no way that we are going to economically penalize the taxpayers and schoolchildren of Franklin."

Hellwig, a freshman legislator, was the bill's only sponsor and he alone testified in favor of it yesterday before the House Finance Committee. He argued that the city of Franklin had "stolen" $75,000 that should have been sent to the academy. This kind of misuse of funds must be prevented in the future, he said.

"They went and took that education funding, and now their hand is out for more education funding," Hellwig said. "It seems to me - you could use any number of synonyms, it was skimmed off the top, misappropriated - but it's a softer way of saying theft."

When questioned by the committee, Hellwig said that he thought merely withholding the $75,000 allotted for the Career Academy - as the state Board of Education did this year - was not enough. In an interview yesterday, he said he hopes that the subcommittee that will now deal with the bill will reduce the fine to some "reasonable" figure, somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000 to $300,000.

"A lot of people would be hard-pressed to vote for it in the form it's at right now," he said.

Hellwig said that when he filed the bill, he did not know how much money Franklin received from the state. (Franklin gets $7 million, 54 percent of its $12.6 million total school budget, from the state, according to superintendent Robert Braman.)

"I got the financial note last week," Hellwig said. "I was like, 'Wow. That's going to make somebody upset.'"

At yesterday's hearing, opposition to Hellwig's plan came out in force. Franklin's mayor, city manager, superintendent, historical society president and a half-dozen others turned out to argue against the bill. Rep. Jim Ryan of Franklin, who rang the alarm bell around Franklin about the bill, corralled the crowd.

"I feel like I'm coaching the Rose Bowl," Ryan joked on his way into the hearing.

In the end, Ryan alone spoke against the bill. He offered to call up others to speak about the bill's potential impact on Franklin if the committee so required. It didn't.

Ryan pointed out that the bill -a single sentence long - mandated only that Franklin should receive no funding, and was "unadorned by any rationale."

Ryan did get some tough questions.

Wendelboe, who also sharply questioned Hellwig, made an analogy between the situation for Franklin schools and that of the Career Academy.

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