August 4, 2007
To address the most common question - why does the override include a line item for B-R if the July 30th Special Town Meeting already voted to provide the schools with $1.495M? Technically, the only current approved budget is based on Town's May Annual Meeting - this set funding levels. Thus, a new budget needs to now be created. The Selectmen, under advice of Town Counsel, crafted the article language specifically to both raise the funds and allocate. The funding to B-R is set now, and cannot be adjusted, so perhaps that better solution would have been to have a Town Meeting move money from town departments to cover the $1.495M and then have the override questions relative to those numbers. In fact, that is the approach that was taken by the Advisory Board - example is a potential reduction of $8,500 to the Planning Board to accomodate a share of the $1.495M, and then an override amount of $11,500 to the Planning Board. Compare to the Article which seeks just $3,000 for the Planning Board. Math semantics.
Again, let me emphasize that the B-R Schools have a locked-in appropriation. The crafting of the Articles is merely to accomplish two things at once - rasing funds and adjusting the budget. Thus, if the override Articles fail, there would be a Town Meeting to reduce Town Department budgets similar to the Advisory Board's Preliminary Budget Outline. {click here to download the Advisory Board's document}
Perhaps a better way of thinking about the situation is the 3rd column - Funding District Request - as this shows the department reductions. Then the 5th column - Override Budget - shows the funds added back to the departments. In the end, the results will be the same.
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Joseph Gillis Jr.
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