Vote no on New Hampshire tax cap
I’m hoping New Hampshire voters will reject the proposed tax cap provided by HB 1300 and vote no on the ballot question.
While pinning the growth of property taxes to inflation may seem like a reasonable way to discipline school and town officials from spending beyond our means, it actually undermines a sound process already in place. We have an elected board made up of our neighbors, who are directly affected by the choices they make, and we have a school district meeting where we can override their decisions if we find them too costly.
School boards have the difficult task of meeting the requirements of state and federal law while maintaining a reasonable budget that supports a quality education for our kids. Are we so bad off now as a community that we can’t afford the same quality education we gave the kids who passed through the system a few years ago? We’ve already stolen from our children’s future by our failure to seriously address climate change; are we going to cheat them in the classroom now too?
I also think it’s important to look at where this bill comes from: a Republican legislature that is known to be hostile to public education. They continuously try to find ways to defund the schools. With HB 1300, they’re putting forward a confusing and borderline disingenuous proposal. (Despite how it’s worded, this proposal could affect classroom instruction.)
I don’t trust this legislature that, in the same session, passed:
1. A measure to form a committee to investigate converting all our public schools to be charter schools.
2. A measure to make it easier to ban books.
3. Expanded a school voucher program that is siphoning public money into an opaque system that benefits a powerful minority in our State.
Let’s solve our school funding problems as a community, sensitive to the needs of all our citizens, not by using a device proposed by ideologues in Concord who constantly fail at funding public education.