We are all getting used to working from home and having school from home. Can we get used to holding annual meetings from home, complete with amendments from the floor?
They’re going to try in Hopkinton.
“My goal is to try to make it look as much like a regular meeting as possible, keeping in mind that this is very difficult,” said James Newsom, who as moderator of the Hopkinton School District has developed a unique set of proposed rules for this coming week’s annual meeting.
“I wouldn’t say I’m inventing the rules; I am operating within the guidelines of the statutory provisions of the RSAs, which are admittedly fairly loose,” Newsom said, noting that voters have the final say. “The first question on ballot is: Do you accept these rules? If not, if it’s rejected, we’ll go off and reconvene and try to come up with a better system.”
Much of the schedule for the system was tried by the Bow School District last month and worked well, producing a much-higher-than-usual turnout and no obvious controversy. But there’s one big difference: Bow did not allow articles to be amended and Hopkinton will.
The general structure of the meeting will echo Bow School District. First comes an online meeting Tuesday evening to present the warrants, including the budget, and to take comments and questions; then two days in which comments and questions can be emailed or called in; then another video meeting Friday evening to discuss the final warrant. Next Saturday morning, voters can drive to the high school to present their filled-in ballot.
Floor amendments at a traditional annual meeting work like this: An article is brought before the meeting – for example, a $1 million budget. Then somebody comes to the microphone and proposes an amendment – for example, cutting the budget by $100,000.
After discussion, the amendment gets an up-or-down vote. If it is approved, then the meeting goes ahead and votes on the amended article – in this case, a budget of $900,000 rather than the original $1 million. If the amendment is rejected, the meeting votes on the original article.
Next week at drive-up voting, however, Hopkinton School District residents will have to consider both the original article as well as any proposed amendments at the same time. In the above example, voters would have to decide whether to approve the budget even though they don’t know whether the proposed amendment is going to pass and therefore don’t know how much money is involved.
“It’s tricky,” Newsom said.
He is proposing a system to handle the situation that has been worked out with weeks of consultation with the Attorney General’s Office and lawyers and officials with the New Hampshire School Board Association and Municipal Association, plus the district’s own officials and attorneys.
Newsom plans to read through comments and proposed amendments presented by voters during the week and distill them down to a few. This will be made easier by the fact that school district warrants are usually much simpler than town warrants, with fewer articles covering fewer types of expenditures. Further, Hopkinton has no major bond or construction issues to consider this year and most articles on the warrant cannot be amended, including teacher and staff contracts, and a petitioned article that seeks to move Hopkinton School District to SB 2 ballot voting.
(Ironically, if Hopkinton School District used SB 2 already this meeting wouldn’t be necessary, since the earlier deadlines for SB 2 means it would have gotten the whole process done before the COVID-19 lockdown began.)
Newsom, who has been moderator for five annual meetings, said it’s likely that the only article that might attract multiple amendments is the operating budget.
Under the Hopkinton system, amendments will be listed on the ballot as part of the warrant article in descending order of dollar amount, ending with the original article itself. Approving an amendment will automatically mean approving the amended article.
As an example, consider two amendments being proposed to a $1 million budget, with one amendment cutting it by $200,000 and another amendment cutting it by $100,000.
On the ballot for this article, voters would first see a question asking if they wanted to cut the budget by $200,000 and approve the budget, totaling $800,000. The second question would ask if they want to cut the budget by $100,000 and approve the resulting budget of $900,000. Finally, they’d see a question if they want to approve the original $1 million budget.
They can only vote for one because, Newsom said, “We can’t have two battling numbers.” The majority vote will win.
If Hopkinton voters fail to pass any budget the whole process will have to start over, since traditional annual meeting warrants don’t include a fallback default budget, as SB 2 ballots do.
Hopkinton will start with an online meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday featured on Zoom, YouTube Live and over the telephone for those who don’t want or can’t make an internet connection. Information for the meetings will be on the district website: www.hopkintonschools.org/schoolmeeting
There will be presentations on the warrant articles by the school board and the budget committee as well as a presentation by the people who put together the petitioned warrant article seeking to change annual meeting to the SB 2 ballot-voting format.
Comments and questions will then be taken online or by phone. As at a regular meeting, people will have to identify themselves by name and address. A recording of the meeting will be available and over the following two days more comments will be accepted, as will proposed amendments.
On Friday at 7 p.m. there will be a follow-up meeting to incorporate comments and suggestions, with Newsom giving any amendments that will be on the ballot. Then on Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to 1 pm. at the Hopkinton Middle and High School, voters can bring their filled-in ballot, or get a ballot there, and vote.
“If this can create a roadmap that is accepted and provides an ability to amend that is meaningful and accurately determines the will of the legislative body, that would be great,” said Newsom.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
