This November, Concord residents may partake in a practice usually reserved for towns, not the capital city: voting directly on their school district property taxes.
Lawmakers hope to pose a ballot question to voters statewide, asking whether they want to place a cap on their local school property taxes for two years. If three-fifths of voters approve the measure in a given school district, taxes could not be raised beyond their current level, after it is adjusted for inflation.
Attempts to reduce spending and cap taxes are run-of-the-mill in many New Hampshire towns, but state Rep. Ross Berry, a Weare Republican who was an architect of the bill, said local government garners low participation. Timing the ballot question with a general election, he said, will increase turnout.
“A lot of people have been shut out of this process … They’re obviously screaming about their property taxes, understandably, and they can’t get redress at the local level,” Berry said in an interview.
His solution is to “put it in front of as many people as possible.”
In Concord, the Board of Education authorized a 12.2% tax increase this spring, resulting in a budget of program cuts and layoffs while simultaneously charging residents hundreds more in property taxes after revenue sources dropped off.
Residents are also calling for budget cuts in city government as the Concord City Council weighs a 5.5% tax increase. The legislation would not apply to city hall.
Ayotte hasn’t said specifically whether she’ll sign House Bill 1300, which passed the House and Senate on Thursday, but expressed support for the idea.
“The state is basically saying, ‘Have a local election on this,’ so people are going to have the opportunity to weigh in,” Ayotte said.
She added that “having people weigh in is a positive thing.”
The ballot question would go to voters in the 2026 and 2028 general elections — a compromise between the Senate and the House, which initially proposed adding it indefinitely.
It would also ask voters if they want to limit spending on the school administrative unit’s central office to six percent or less. Neither measure would apply to bonds for capital projects.
If a tax cap is enacted, it can be overridden later on with a two-thirds supermajority of a municipality’s legislative body.
Critics call the bill unclear, misleading and state overreach.
“If municipalities want to enact a tax cap, they are able to do so today,” said state Sen. Rebecca Perkins-Kwoka, the Democratic minority leader. “They do not need the state telling them what to do and what to put on their state ballot.”
In Concord, Penacook residents already participate in the annual town meeting style of government as part of the Merrimack Valley School District and have voted on large budget cuts in recent years.
Sam York, the district’s business administrator, said if a tax cap passed, Merrimack Valley would adhere to it — but he has questions about implementation. He said he wonders about how the ballot question will be distributed in Concord, where residents are split into two different school districts, and about how inflation would be calculated.
“It would certainly put us in a bind,” York said. Merrimack Valley voters easily passed a 3.4% budget increase this year, but he said he’s worried about what a tax cap would mean for “ever-increasing” utility costs and unanticipated costs that could crop up.
Other districts are already, in essence, operating on a tax cap. The Mascenic Regional School District, which houses the rural towns of Greenville and New Ipswich, is facing program cuts as it enters its third consecutive year operating on a default budget.
The school board put forward an 8% budget increase this year to catch up to rising costs, which was shot down by voters. Mitch Gluck, chair of the school board, said he would’ve preferred to face a more balanced two percent rise each year rather than the larger cost of the build-up. Tax caps, he said, aren’t a long-term solution to New Hampshire’s education funding system.
“A tax cap runs the risk of school districts never being able to keep up with expenses, so there will have to be a slow reduction every year of how to cut this and how to cut that, and eliminate this and eliminate that, until somewhere down the road, I believe it will be just bare bones,” Gluck said. “And it won’t be a very good system.”
He doesn’t oppose the idea of putting the question to more voters, Gluck said, but he wants more information and education to accompany it.
“Anything that increases awareness and knowledge of something for the voters, I think, is good,” he said, but there’s a caveat. “After the pebbles hit the pond, will they understand those ripples so that they understand the true downstream consequences of making a decision?”
