For more than 150 years, a small band of Loudon property owners who live along a winding country road have sent their children and education tax dollars to Concord schools instead of their own.
Next year, that should change.
Town residents on Saturday overwhelmingly approved a warrant article to end this strange historical vestige, effectively repealing a state law that has remained on the books since 1859.
The town meeting vote was the culmination of a decades-long effort by Loudon residents Paul and Beth Morrissette, who reside in one of the 13 properties that exist in this legal holdover. The Morrissettes and their neighbors pay town taxes to Loudon but school taxes to Concord. The situation is a clear instance of taxation without representation: the residents are ineligible to vote in Concord’s annual school elections due to their residence in Loudon.
“I want my money from my taxes to go to my kids in this town,” Paul Morrissette said on Saturday to rousing applause.
The change, which will take effect in July 2027, barring any unforeseen complications, will not be purely trivial.
The property owners collectively paid $86,000 to the Concord School District last year, a Concord Monitor analysis found. Transferring the properties to the Loudon tax rolls will slightly benefit taxpayers there and hurt those in Concord.
Tim Herbert, the superintendent of the Concord School District, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the implications of the change for his district.
Only a couple of children from these properties attend Concord schools. Under the law, they can continue to do so until 2030, though Merrimack Valley would be required to pay Concord tuition.
The law being repealed dates back to a period before town-level school districts existed, when students received their education in one-room schoolhouses dotted around neighborhoods. At the time, the land now occupied by 13 properties was made up of three farms. Down the road from the farms, just over the border in Concord, stood one such schoolhouse.
The 1859 law zoned those farms into that schoolhouse’s district.
At the time, the law was not unusual. A review of statutes from the 1850s revealed seven similar school district zoning changes. But in each case, the laws appear to have long since been repealed.
In Loudon, even as town-level school districts formed in the late 1880s and the one-room schoolhouse closed a few decades later, no one ever bothered to update the law.
Soon after the Morrissettes built their home in 2005, they learned about the complex tax structure, but it wasn’t initially clear how to change it. For a long time, they thought it would require state legislative action. Paul Morrissette contacted his state Senator, Loudon resident Howard Pearl.
But as legislative staff researched a fix, the Morrissettes’ lawyer, Bruce Marshall, spotted a statutory remedy. An 1893 law laid out a simpler process through which a town meeting body could restore annexed territory back to its own school district.
That approach ended in the successful vote over the weekend.
“It went better than I thought,” Morrissette said in an interview on Monday. “That’s a great town with good people.”
Charlotte Matherly contributed reporting.