Reorganization Planning Committee Meeting
27 February 2008
DRAFT Minutes
Present: Chair Gail Marshall, Vice-Chair Brian Hubbell
Bar Harbor: Paul Murphy, Bob Garland Mount Desert: Jeff Smith
Southwest Harbor: Kristin Hutchins Tremont: Amy Murphy Cranberry: Ted Spurling
Others in attendance: Gary Friedmann, George Peckham, Mia Brown, Elsie Flemings, and Rick Barter
Commencement of Meeting
Gail Marshall called the meeting to order at 7:05 p.m.
Review of Draft Minutes from 6 February 2008
MOVED by Paul Murphy, seconded by Jeff Smith, and unanimously voted to approve the minutes of 6 February 2008 as presented.
Update from Augusta
Gail Marshall – Legislative update is that we prevailed in the Senate on Monday by a 20 – 13 vote. It became clear that for many Republicans the big deal is making sure towns are forced to go through the budget validation process at the ballot box. It’s a big difference from how we do our budgets. Within our amendment, there was no separate provision for having a budget validation vote on the Union part of the budget. It hadn’t been put in the original bill because of complexities that were generated by the way the EPS system works. That was a deal breaker for many of the Republicans. The vote to move everything out of the Senate and move it over to the House was much more along party lines than it had been previously. There were a number of Republicans who voted against it who had made it clear to us that they did not oppose the Damon amendment; they would have supported the Damon amendment if they thought it wasn’t going to pass. But by not voting for it, they prevented there being a 2/3 majority vote to approve 1932, therefore it can’t be considered emergency legislation. They hope to accomplish their objective of preventing a delay in the budget validation process for this year because by the time regular legislation takes effect we all will have had our town meetings and have gone through that process under the current law anyway.
Brian Hubbell – There is still a question of whether or not the Governor will veto.
Gail Marshall – The Governor has refused to say he would veto it. He says he doesn’t like the bill.
Paul Murphy – It’s right that there are still a couple of opportunities for 1932 to die and one is in the House and one is if it gets to the Governor’s desk.
Gary Friedmann - How much impact does an article like Brian’s that was in the Bangor Daily have on the discussions?
Gail Marshall - It has quite a bit of impact. The thing that really has a lot of impact is Brian’s charts. We had legislators coming out and saying, “We’re trying to understand your chart here” and that’s their primary source material. They’re relying on a lot of our stuff.
Paul Murphy – They are reading our list serve as well. Including the opposition. They are definitely paying attention.
George Peckham – Are there any other members of a school district, like yourselves, attending those [legislative] sessions?
Gail Marshall – Scott Porter, Bucket Davis, Dick Gould, people active in the Maine Small Schools Coalition. Other than that, people aren’t there.
Paul Murphy – We are fortunate to have some flexibility in our work lives to get down there. A lot of people can’t do that.
Ted Spurling - You mention Brian’s charts being source material for a lot of legislators. Are they looking at the Commissioner’s charts? If not, does the Commissioner have any credible charts?
Brian Hubbell – I may supply them, at least the education committee, with a lot of material, but I don’t think they were really doing that aside from the two handouts that we saw floating around. They’re not peppering the legislators in general with material.
Gail Marshall –It’s $1,032 more to educate a child in a school union because it’s a school union. Legislators already at this point look at that and say, “Really?” And then we can come back and say “No, not really and here’s why.”
Brian Hubbell – We’re fortunate to be able to do this because we were in a way nearer to what was going on than they were. It was our amendment and so we knew the progress of it.
Gail Marshall – Brian is putting out a factual document, not a piece of propaganda.
Jeff Smith – In one of the last articles in the paper, it’s the first time that the chairman of the school board actually suggested that withdrawal is a viable option. Good strong position to take. It may be the option. We’re in a position where we don’t care about the money. This is not a bad place to be.
George Peckham – The thing that bothers me, listening to this conversation, is that decisions are being made on a political basis. I’ve served on the board of selectmen and twice on the school board around here and I’ve never gotten the impression that there were Republicans over here and Democrats over here. As you know, Damon went out on a limb because politically he could hurt himself. That shouldn’t be in making decisions like this.
Paul Murphy – It’s very partisan there. It’s a highly partisan atmosphere.
Jeff Smith – That’s the idea of local control. Local control is non-partisan.
Gail Marshall – That’s one of the reasons we sell our high school board. You can’t tell when we’re doing business what town we’re from. We’re here trying to provide the best we can for our communities as a whole.
Gail Marshall – Legal fees. We’re hoping not to need to use Dick Spencer in any substantive way going forward in the legislative process.
Paul Murphy – The count, in terms of money available from the towns from school budgets and select boards is $27,500. We needed to do several things. Find out where we are. Alert Drummond Woodsum as to what our limit was at the moment so that if and when we approached it, they could alert us and stop work until we figured out how to deal with it. Third is to come to this committee and talk about what our course of action ought to be when and if the $27,500 has been exhausted. Rob called Drummond Woodsum and spoke with Dick Spencer. He assured Rob that we have not reached the $27,500 but did not have a firm figure on where the meter was. Rob’s best guess is somewhere between $22,000 and $24,000 which leaves somewhere between $3,500 and $5,500 available. So Drummond Woodsum knows that $27,500 is what we have approved and that they are not authorized to run the bill up beyond that. However, there are several positions we need to put ourselves in. One is we need to be able to avail ourselves of Dick Spencer’s expertise if we need to. The last thing I think we want to do is not be able to employ them if we need to. It’s expensive work but I think it has proven itself to be money well spent to this point. There’s not a lot of money left, probably 8-10 hours of Dick Spencer’s work if we need that. We ought to be thinking about how we use them wisely and how we put ourselves in a position to use them as much as we absolutely need to. We had urgency as a reason the last time to spend our communities’ money without prior approval, but I don’t think we would be wise to go that route again.
Gail Marshall – Hoping that unless some other unforeseen objection that requires drafting of a different sort comes up in the house, we need Dick Spencer less in the hallways than we used to. No doubt that he is monstrously influential there and knows the system intimately, but we are becoming better at buttonholing representatives which was one of the big reasons to have him with us. Do you have some suggestion what we would propose to our communities?
Jeff Smith – It seems like the law has been proposed. The politicking is a different issue.
Paul Murphy – That amendment doesn’t pass on the 18-17 vote unless he’s in the background pulling strings.
Brian Hubbell – What Dick was doing was explaining what was in the law. He wasn’t trying to convince people to vote for it. That’s why it was important to have him at that point. At this time, any modifications to the law work against us. I don’t see that there is any particular role for him to play. The job that he was critical for has been accomplished.
Brian Hubbell – One thing we need to be careful about is that we’re not stopping the position of fixing problems for everybody else. At some point reconciling all this isn’t our problem, but I don’t think we can justify to our communities hiring somebody to take care of the state’s problems.
Jeff Smith – Just like being falsely accused of a crime. When you have to pay all the money for your own defense for something you never did to begin with.
Paul Murphy – If 40 or 50 thousand spent once gets you $750,000 a year for a number of years then it’s money well spent.
Gail Marshall – 281’s – subsidy cuts and their relationship to consolidation. The big stick over our head has always been that we would lose half of our special ed money which clocks in at 1.5 million dollars. The state budget is in disaster mode. The amount of deficit is actually probably double what they originally thought. It may be one of the reasons the Department of Education is not in the hallway.
Right now we’re not getting 100% of special ed which we’re supposed to be getting. We’re getting 85%. The Education Committee said they would recommend to the legislature that if they want to make cuts they should cut half of the allocation of special ed to minimum receivers. Rob doesn’t know if that is half of 100% or half of what we really get. It’s hard to understand how they can avoid cutting special ed reimbursement. Our communities right now may be looking at significant budget losses that we’re going to have to deal with even if we play ball with them.
Brian Hubbell – The other part of that recommendation was to cut 40 million dollars in GPA which wouldn’t affect us.
Gail Marshall – It isn’t just special ed. We are lucky because the EPS funding that we don’t get anyway is going to be brutally cut. We’re going to be shielded from some of the worst horrors. As communities, we need to factor in our cost benefit analysis with our legal fees, our struggles with the state, with our observation of what is happening in other communities around this issue, at what point we say talk to the state about consolidation if we do get to that point.
Paul Murphy – Opting out is becoming cheaper.
How are the political dynamics likely to change as we get closer to elections?
Brian Hubbell – They are all hypersensitive to the election consequences but they may manifest in different ways in different places. The big issue is whether or not it’s worth it not to solve the problem in relation to that. There are people who don’t want to risk putting themselves in a tough place by coming up with any kind of solution. It can go either way, but everyone is in tune with their constituents.
George Peckham – Read something today that the Governor was vacillating on raising taxes.
Gail Marshall – He’s got to.
Amy Murphy – Do we know when this is going to the House?
Gail Marshall – Hannah would like to run it as soon as possible but not before it’s time in terms of having enough support being generated. It is possible they may be caucusing tomorrow or it may move forward next week. They have a lot else to do.
Jeff Smith – I personally have had it. I would rather own than rent and I feel that is the sense of the people in my town. Tired of this $700,000 being held over our heads and if they withdrew that I would like the press to know they withdrew special education funding because the town wouldn’t comply. I would certainly support any idea of separation because what have we really got to lose? The stakes are becoming less and less high.
Gail Marshall – I would make a pitch to run this amendment to the ground and after that, that’s it. We could be non-conforming districts and the great two-edged rub about that is that they’re all stuck on 80 – can’t have more than 80 school districts – we’re all going to be individual little school districts that she’s going to have to count towards the 80 if we’re non-complying. It would be nice for our school governance system to be able, if possible, to get beyond that issue as long as we can do it in a way that meets our needs, and put that behind us and not have that for future boards to continue to be a source of friction with the state.
Paul Murphy – We reached our bottom line in principle some time ago. We haven’t done anything since that compromises that principle. There’ s nothing in the amendment we put forward that is contrary to the plan that we submitted which was rejected. I don’t think any of us are advocating anything that would compromise that plan or that principle. We owe it to ourselves, to our town, and to the state to see 1932 to its end. If it doesn’t come out as we need it to, I’m open to changes like the one last week, that will make it more palatable to members of the House of Representatives. There’s nothing that we have done or that we will do that will put us in a “renting” position.
Bob Garland – Very good thing that a personal face is being put on this in Augusta because my sense is that no matter how intelligently crafted it had been, if this was just sent down to Augusta with no personal face behind it, that Mount Desert Island would not have held much sway in Augusta at all. We’re a cash cow that they want to keep as far at arms length as they possibly can.
Paul Murphy – If we can be inside this law, we’re better off. We may opt out, but eventually they’re going to make us opt in to some sort of compromise. If we can craft it in a way that keeps us where we need to be, we’re better off.
George Peckham – What is the status of Trenton and Lamoine these days?
Gail Marshall – We don’t know. The Commissioner approved our configuration - essentially Union 98. There have been a couple of people from Lamoine who said if the union thing passes they may be able to join with us. It would have to work for all parties to consider going forward.
Next meeting Wednesday, March 19 at 7:00 p.m.
Adjournment
MOVED by Paul Murphy, seconded by Brian Hubbell, and unanimously voted to adjourn the meeting at 8:32 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Selena Dunbar, Recording Secretary