The Grantham School District meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 6, at the Grantham Village School. Town Meeting will be at 5 pm. on Tuesday, March 13, at Grantham Town Hall, where voting by ballot will occur from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Grantham
A separate spending article on the warrant includes nearly $50,000 to pay off-duty officers for being available during after-hour time periods that would otherwise be covered by New Hampshire State Troopers. The town is further seeking approval for nearly $23,000 toward the first-year lease of a new cruiser as well as $19,000 for the Fire Department to buy new thermal imaging cameras and defibrillators.
Those special request items are all apart from the Selectboard’s proposed 6.6 percent increase in the town’s municipal and highway budget to $4.1 million, or $255,000 more than last year’s.
In addition, the town is asking voters for permission to tap $145,000 from the general fund’s “unassigned fund balance” to pay for upgraded radio communications equipment that would be used by police and the fire department.
Grantham Police Chief John Parsons, who joined the department last year, said the reason for the multiple spending requests from the police department is because several pieces of public safety equipment are simultaneously reaching the end of their service periods and need to be replaced.
For example, the current video camera equipment in the cruisers is no longer made and parts are hard to obtain, and the Fire Department’s defibrillators are approaching their expiration date. The police department’s 2013 Ford Expedition, with more than 60,000 miles on it, was supposed to be replaced in the current budget cycle and includes outdated lights from prior vehicles.
“We’re talking about all things that have come to the end of their useful life,” he said.
Parsons explained that the nearly $50,000 being asked for police department “on-call coverage” is to reduce reliance upon the State Police when Grantham officers would normally be off duty. But trooper staffing is strained and their response sometimes depends upon availability.
Having a Grantham officer on-call after the last shift would alleviate that problem and give the department more control over handling situations during off hours, according to Parsons.
The police budget also includes $8,000 to buy “ballistic helmets” and body-armor vests known as “plate carriers” to protect Grantham officers during a “potentially hostile” situation, according to a budget presentation.
Even though he said the equipment purchases and upgrades are necessary, Parsons nonetheless said he can empathize with voters who might think the department budget requests are a lot for a single year.
“I live in Grantham,” he said. “I’m a taxpayer. I feel the pain.”
Grantham Town Administrator Melissa White estimates that proposed budget would increase the town portion of the tax rate about 50 cents per $1,000 of valuation — or $125 more on a property assessed at $250,000.
On the school side, the budget for the 206-student Grantham Village School is proposed to rise 3.4 percent to $9.4 million from $9.1 million this school year, of which $7.3 million is to be raised through taxes.
That would result in a 3.2 percent higher tax rate of $17.94 per $1,000 of assessed valuation compared to the rate voters approved last year. The projected 55-cent increase would add about $138 in taxes on a $250,000 home.
Sydney Leggett, the new superintendent of SAU 75, noted that the school tax rate residents eventually paid last year was lower than the rate voters had expected because Grantham benefited from an influx of $1 million in state money that is no longer available.
That might give the impression that the tax rate is going up dramatically, but in fact is more modest when compared against the rate that was set at last year’s Town Meeting, she said.
“It’s a very conservative budget,” Leggett said. “There is nothing big or new in it really. … We’ve been really careful knowing that the tax rate was fluctuating to present something conservative to the community.”
As in past years, the biggest line items in the budget are for tuitioning Grantham students to middle and high school: $2 million for high school students, up 0.8 percent and $1.3 million for junior high school students, up about 9 percent.
One line item that is practically not showing any increase is costs for health and dental care, which is increasing less than half a percent to $773,000.
“We really benefited from our group rate,” Leggett said. “We were pretty excited when we got that letter.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
