This year’s school tax cap referendum represents a perfect opportunity to depart from the interest group domination that has come to dictate town budgeting and get back to local government that is responsive to grass roots concerns. Any consideration of the referendum needs to be placed in the context of the current state of budgeting by towns in New Hampshire.
New England annual town meetings were once held out as the ultimate examples of local governance through direct democracy. Unencumbered by impure and unhealthy outside interests, ordinary citizens, perhaps with a little guidance from their town fathers, addressed relevant local matters and followed the will of the people.
These arrangements seemed more wholesome than the “iron triangles” that typified state and federal governments. In political jargon, iron triangles are cozy cooperative power structures — with relevant bureaucracies, legislative committees and interest groups forming their three points — that tend to control policy without grassroots citizenry having real input.
When I moved to New Hampshire, I may not have had the gauzy view of the historical town meetings, but I still looked optimistically at their successor arrangements: town governance through proposed warrant articles placed on an agenda through petitions, town deliberative sessions and ultimately direct votes on the articles covered in the deliberative sessions.
I did not know that the first time I strode into a deliberative session, my ears would be ringing from the sound of iron triangles.
On one side of the assembly sat every imaginable character who seeks suckle from the town teat. The early birds who showed up on that side were led by the teachers’ union and the public employees’ union. (Yes, they need one just like mill laborers working 14-hour shifts and miners breathing coal dust. Woody Guthrie sang passionately for the public employees!)
They were followed by cops and firefighters and local business interests eager to lend support to the aforementioned groups in exchange for something bordering on intimate congress with the town in the form of free services.
On the other side of the room were disorganized infighting late-arriving taxpayers who just got out of bed. Guess who prevailed?
The overwhelmingly largest part of a town’s budget is, of course, the school budget which, as a product of the iron triangles, forever rises at greater than the rate of inflation.
This year, however, New Hampshire voters in each school district will have an opportunity to circumvent the iron triangles and control school budgets. The vehicle is a referendum to cap school budget increases at the rate of inflation plus capital expenditures and limit administrative expenses. It will appear on ballots in each district this November.
The caterwauling protests from predictable quarters have, of course, begun, but the participants in the iron triangles have proven unable to assert discipline over themselves, so going over their heads with a direct referendum is the only way for sensible grass roots to take control.
The starting point is not a state that is underspending on education. It is a state that ranks seventh in overall spending per student and even higher in administrative spending. The referendum will allow healthy increases over already high budgets; it will simply apply some modicum of discipline where, for structural reasons, it has been absent until now. Even if the referendum is adopted, the iron triangles in individual districts can override it with a three-fifths vote in future years.
The relative success of the individual district referendums will depend on an elusive bird: the alienated, low-participation, low-information, vaguely conservative voter. This cranky sod is not even generally sure what he wants, but he knows that he does not like ever increasing property taxes.
It is up to the GOP, whose legislators and governor put the referendum on the ballot, to get these foot dragging voters to the polls. They had some luck with them by offering Donald Trump as an act of defiance, and these voters dislike school tax hikes far more than they ever liked Trump.
Jonathan F. Mack lives in Hampton.