Everything you wanted to know about annual meeting but were afraid to ask

Residents gather at the Inter-Lakes Middle/High School for the Meredith Town Meeting last March. AP file
Published: 01-05-2025 12:00 PM |
If you’re new to a community that has annual meeting for town and school, the whole process can be intimidating. With that in mind, the Monitor hereby presents Everything You Wanted to Know About Annual Meeting But Were Afraid to Ask.
Basically it’s the local legislature for your town or your school district. Annual meeting is the entity which decides on local laws and regulations. The unusual thing is that any resident who is a registered voter and shows up automatically becomes one of the legislators.
Towns and school districts are almost always distinct legal entities and have separate annual meetings, although sometimes they are held back-to-back. If you live in a city, you won’t have annual meeting.
There are two types of annual meeting: Traditional and SB2, which stands for Senate Bill 2 , the law that created the system. We’ll discuss the difference further down.
Town meetings vote on three main things: one-time expenditures via what are known as warrants; the operating budget for the upcoming fiscal year; and changes to local zoning, historic district or building code ordinances. School meetings vote only on their warrants and budgets.
There can be overlap between warrants and budgets. For example, some towns buy new police cars with warrants, which gives voters a chance to say yea-or-nay on that one purchase without affecting anything else. Other towns include the purchases in the annual police budget, meaning residents can comment on whether they think a new police car is warranted but their only vote is on the overall budget, in which case police could still buy a car even if the meeting was opposed.
Using warrant articles for purchases gives voters more control but can create long ballots. It’s not unusual for voters in some communities to have 25 different things to decide on as well as the entire town budget, making for a very long meeting that might discourage participation.
Traditional town meeting dates back to colonial days and is very straightforward: Everybody gathers together in a public place and votes on everything in one long session. Traditionally in New Hampshire it happens on the second Tuesday in March, although other nearby dates are also common. A few towns delay town meeting until April or May.
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SB 2 was created in 1995 because of concern that modern life made it difficult for people to attend traditional annual meetings. It breaks the meeting into two pieces.
First comes “deliberative session” in February, at which warrant articles and budgets are presented, talked about and can be amended – but they are not voted on.
On the second Tuesday in March, which is election day, warrants and the budget are presented in ballot form. People have all day to come by the polling place and cast a vote, along with voting for offices like select board and school board.
Any town resident can comment and vote on items at deliberative session in February or traditional town meeting. You need to be a registered voter: You can’t register during town meeting or deliberative session although you can register at the polls for town and school elections.
Residents can also place items on the warrant to be voted on, via the petitioned warrant article process. It only takes signatures from 25 voters or 2% of the total number of voters, whichever is less, to put a petitioned article in front of voters but there is a strict deadline.
Petitioned articles must be submitted by Feb. 4 for traditional meetings, by Jan. 14 in SB2 communities. The deadline is Jan. 10 in SB2 communities if the petitioned article would be covered by a bond rather than one-time payment.
Petitions to amend zoning or historic district ordinances or building codes had to be submitted by Dec. 11.
Wording for petitioned articles doesn’t need to be written with lawyer-level exactitude as long as it’s clear what it seeks to do. As the New Hampshire Municipal Association says, “The N.H. Supreme Court has said time and again that technical rules will not be used to defeat the plain intent of the voters, using ordinary common language.”
The actual meeting or deliberative session is run by the elected moderator, who will explain the rules and the process. The moderator’s rulings can be overriden by a majority vote.
Most votes require a simple majority of votes cast to pass unless the article involves going into debt via a bond, in which case a 2/3 majority is needed to pass.
Meetings and deliberative sessions usually discuss the operating budget line by line, but that’s a bit misleading since voters only have legal authority over the total amount of money that can be spent. Even if the meeting votes to change a particular line item on a budget, such as reducing the amount spent by the school library or increasing expenditure for the road agent, that change is not legally binding and can be ignored.
Decisions on warrants can be changed later in the same meeting, unless the meeting votes to “restrict reconsideration” after the warrant vote.
By default at in-person meetings, voting is done by show of hands. Any five voters can request that the vote for any article be done by secret ballot, as long as the request is made in writing and in advance. Polling on secret-ballot items must stay open for an hour.
If you really want insight into how your town or school district is operating, attend earlier budget hearings at which department heads like school principals, road agents and fire chiefs present the amount they think their department will need in the upcoming fiscal year. (Fiscal years usually run from July 1 to June 30, although not always.)
Budget hearings start in December for traditional meeting or November for SB2 communities, which have much earlier schedules.
The school board, select board or budget committee edits those recommendations and puts them together into the annual operating budget and list of warrant articles that voters will consider.
Not all places have separate budget committees. In some towns or districts the budget committee is advisory, meaning it tells the annual meeting whether it likes a particular warrant or budget, while in other communities it is official, meaning it puts together the actual items that are voted on.