The annual Lyme School Meeting will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 8, at the Lyme School. Town Meeting will be held at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, March 13, at the Lyme School gymnasium with voting by ballot on town and school officers and four zoning amendments between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
Lyme
In both cases, the increases primarily are driven by salaries and benefits, including health insurance costs. Outside of the operating budgets, voters in separate articles also will be asked to approve a new roof for the school, all-day kindergarten and repairs to two roads: River Road and Baker Hill Road.
On the school side, voters will decide an operating budget of $6.98 million, up about $122,000 from the budget voters approved last year.
Aside from increases in previously negotiated salaries and benefits, the School Board took pains to keep costs down in light of anticipated costs to repair the town’s roads, School Board Chairwoman Elizabeth Glenshaw said.
“A budget isn’t in isolation,” Glenshaw said. “The town roads are the critical issue and activity this year.”
To contain costs, Glenshaw said the School Board is not proposing any staffing increases that would otherwise help with anticipated increases in enrollment.
“We still have a pretty robust population of kids,” she said. “Class size is an issue.”
In a separate article, voters will be asked to approve a $180,000 bond to repair the school’s roof and spend about $20,500 for the first year’s payment.
“The roof is failing,” Glenshaw said. “(We) can’t keep putting it off.”
Three other articles on the school warrant relate to extending the kindergarten school day by 2½ hours. The articles give voters two options to extend the kindergarten school day. In one, voters would be asked to approve raising $57,000 though taxes, qualifying the school for the maximum available funding from the state’s full-day kindergarten grants — to be funded through keno revenues.
Another option voters will consider is whether to establish an after-kindergarten capital reserve fund, seeded with $15,000 from taxpayers and otherwise funded by parents choosing to enroll their children in the program.
The School Board does not support the first option, but does support the second. The town’s Budget Committee doesn’t support either option.
“If we had unlimited resources, we would certainly be supporting many things for students,” Glenshaw said.
For example, Glenshaw said she also would like to see science better integrated into the elementary school curriculum, in accordance with the school’s strategic plan.
Though Glenshaw declined to speculate which option voters might choose, she said, “It will be a robust conversation.”
At the School District meeting last year, Lyme voters debated a proposal to expand the kindergarten class to a full-day program for more than 90 minutes before rejecting it, 148-79, on a ballot vote.
On the town side, voters will be asked to approve an operating budget of $2.25 million, up about $57,000 from the prior year. The increase is due to greater costs in salaries and benefits, as well as in materials — sand, salt and gravel — for the highway department, Selectboard member Sue MacKenzie said.
The town needs to purchase more sand because as temperatures generally creep upward, MacKenzie said, “we’re getting more ice.”
Lyme voters also will be asked to approve an appropriation of nearly $250,000 for River Road repairs. This project, which MacKenzie said is “shovel ready,” aims to stabilize the portion of the road that sits south of Grant Brook.
Another article asks voters to approve spending $200,000 to repair and stabilize Baker Hill Road, which was damaged in a storm on July 1, 2017. Baker Hill Road is a north-south road that serves as an alternative to Route 10.
MacKenzie said repairs to Baker Hill are necessary to prevent that “severely compromised” road from being closed.
Among the four zoning amendments up for voters’ consideration, is a petitioned article to extend the southern boundary of the town’s commercial district for two lots on Route 10, which belong to Lyme resident Bret Ryan, MacKenzie said. The change will allow the lots to be developed for commercial use, she said.
Though the change is not recommended by the Planning Board, it is recommended by the Selectboard.
“We’re struggling in town trying to pay taxes on a very small tax base,” MacKenzie said. “All these restrictions prevent us from doing anything about that. (We) need more opportunities to expand and develop something to help offset the increase in taxes.”
Also to that end, the Selectboard has proposed an article that would divert funds collected when landowners remove their properties from current use from the Conservation Fund — where such funds are now deposited — to a Land Use Change Tax Fund, which could be used to offset tax increases, MacKenzie said.
Such a change is necessary, MacKenzie said, because about 94 percent of land in Lyme is either in conservation or under current use, meaning that the town is left to collect taxes to pay for town services from just 6 percent of the land in town.
“Enough’s enough,” she said.
Other articles on the town warrant ask voters to approve a culvert inventory project, a town-sponsored Independence Day celebration and milfoil treatment for Post Pond.
Neither Glenshaw nor MacKenzie knew what the effect of the spending would be on the tax rate. But, MacKenzie estimated that the town’s spending would result in a more than 4 percent tax rate increase, as has been the trend in recent years.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
