Roy Schweiker lives in Concord.
Concord voters may be surprised to know that there is no legal requirement that the “explanation” of a charter amendment on the ballot must contain information on what the amendment would do, which may be under investigation by the state’s Special Committee on Voter Confidence.
They may be even more surprised to know that the Concord School District Charter Commission is taking advantage of this to deliberately hide the effect of the fourth proposed charter amendment. This is what the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas calls malinformation, using true facts to obscure what is actually happening.
The fourth proposed amendment would remove the procedure for future charter amendments from the charter and return it to the state legislature by replacing that section of the charter with a reference to RSA 49-B which is for cities and towns. This is a step backward from returning control of the charter to Concord voters which occurred 11 years ago.
The Concord School District would become subject to any changes to the statute made by the legislature which might not be appropriate for a school district. The immediate effect would be that charter commission members would be required to be elected at large, and they would no longer be required to file campaign finance reports. This can be seen by comparing the statute (Title III, Towns, Cities, Village Districts, and unincorporated places, Chapter 49-B) with the existing school charter which can be found in Appendix A of the School District Charter Commission report available through the school district website.
This is allegedly to simplify the charter amendment procedure which may be true for a few dozen attorneys who are familiar with RSA 49-B, but makes it more complex for everyone else, because instead of just looking at the charter people will have to look at both the charter and the statute which contains many irrelevant provisions which confused even me.
The ballot explanation provided by the Charter Commission explains the difference between RSA 49-B and the proposed charter which is of value only to the selfsame few dozen attorneys, not the difference between the existing and proposed charters which is what people are voting on. And this is deliberate because when this was pointed out at a Charter Commission meeting, the commission voted unanimously to stick with the bogus explanation.
Now that you know what the article actually does, you are in a position to make an informed vote on whether you support it. But I would suggest that you never again vote for any member of the Charter Commission for any office, now that you know they may try to hide things from voters.