The two towns in the John Stark School District will face multiple local election days this year, although exactly when and for which offices is still up in the air, as a reflection of a statewide scramble to deal with last-minute changes in annual meeting dates due to COVID-19 concerns and the governor’s executive order last week.
“A lot are postponing meetings but a lot are not postponing – there’s definitely no overwhelming consensus on what to do,” said Cordell Johnston, who is Henniker School District moderator as well as government affairs counsel for the New Hampshire Municipal Association. “They’re also trying to coordinate if they have a cooperative school district.”
That last point has plagued Henniker and Weare, which jointly comprise the John Stark Cooperative School District. Officials in the two towns disagree whether annual meetings should stick to the traditional schedule in February and March or whether they should be pushed back to late spring or summer in hopes that the pandemic will have eased and warm weather will allow more social distancing.
These scheduling issues are entangled in the question of how to safely hold meetings amid COVID- 19: online, in person, with drive-through voting, or some combination thereof.
Delaying became an option last Friday, Jan. 22, when Sununu signed Executive Order No. 83, which overrode scheduling mandates in law and allowed towns and school districts to push back meeting and election dates to as late as July. That order arrived after some communities had already publicized traditional meeting dates or held budget and bond hearings, the first step of annual meeting.
In Henniker and Weare, after several meetings among the five different elected boards – two select boards, two school boards and one cooperative school board – here’s what is happening:
The Weare School District will not to postpone its meeting. It plans to hold deliberative session, the first step in SB2 process, next Wednesday, Feb. 3, with an in-person gathering.
However, that may change.
Weare School District Moderator Luther Drake has the authority to postpone the deliberative session under state law. Drake said Thursday afternoon that he wants to delay it for months, citing fear of COVID-19 that could keep too many people away.
“I do not believe this is the time or these are the locations, and particularly with this audience, given the average age, that we should be putting them in this situation for what is a relatively non-controversial warrant,” he said.
Drake said he is awaiting attorney’s advice on his authority, noting that the law allowing moderators to postpone sessions “anticipates a snowstorm, it does not anticipate a pandemic.”
Specifically, the law allows moderators to postpone a meeting for 72 hours. The question is whether Drake can continue to invoke that law over and over, every 72 hours, until he feels in-person gatherings are safe weeks from now.
Such a rolling delay might run into an obscure legal hurdle due to the fact that towns, not school district, control ballots – even ballots on which people vote for school offices. It’s possible that as school moderator Drake can’t push the date of ballot voting beyond the traditional March 9 date set by the town selectmen, which probably isn’t enough of a delay to make a difference for his his safety concerns.
As of Thursday afternoon, Drake said, his legal authority in this matter wasn’t clear.
The Henniker School District and John Stark District have both invoked Sununu’s executive order and delayed their SB2 meetings. Their separate deliberative sessions are tentatively set for mid-April with ballot voting on warrants the first Tuesday in May, although that schedule is not final, Johnston said.
The town of Weare is also not postponing its annual meeting, but it operates under the traditional schedule and will not gather until March. The same situation holds for the town of Henniker, which plans to hold town meeting in March as usual.
There’s another complicated part: Voting for town and school offices.
As it currently stands, Weare voters will cast ballots on traditional voting day, the second Tuesday in March, for town offices such as selectmen and for Weare School District offices such as school board member. However, the school district budget and warrant articles may not be on the ballot if moderator Drake has authority to postpone the Weare School District meeting long enough; if that happens, it’s unclear exactly when they would come up for a vote.
Weare voters will have to vote by ballot again in May, or whenever the final schedule is set, for Weare seats on the John Stark School Board as well as the John Stark warrants and budget.
Henniker voters will cast ballots on traditional first Tuesday in March for town offices only. They will have to vote again, probably in May, for seats on the Henniker School Board as well as Henniker seats on the John Stark School Board.
As complex as this is, Drake said it could have been worse.
“The way it was set up, there could have been five separate election days! Moderators have been focused on trying to get the fewest number of possibilities they could,” he said.
Both Drake and Johnston joked about how the pandemic has turned the moderators job from a few hours now and then into almost full-time work.
“We’ve had postponement issues in four of the last five years. The first time people said this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but it’s starting to become the norm,” Johnston said. Annual meetings were scrambled by blizzards in 2017 and 2018 and by pandemic-related shutdowns last year. “I hope one of these years we’ll get back to normal and can just worry about budgets and the usual arguments of town meeting.”
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
