House Republicans are ramping up efforts to take control of local school spending in New Hampshire with a mandatory statewide budget cap for all districts. The move comes just weeks after several local communities rejected a similar — but optional — spending cap.
The cap is a piece of the Republican-backed House Bill 675, sweeping legislation that would cap local school spending at the rate of inflation while also increasing state education spending from the current level of $4,100 per student to $7,356. That additional money would be raised through property taxes.
Republican Rep. Keith Erf, of Weare, proposed an amendment during a House Education Funding Committee meeting Tuesday that would eliminate the increased state aid and keep only the spending cap.
Local school district voters could override the cap with a two-thirds vote, a threshold Democrats said is so high that it’s likely out of reach.
“They barely manage to get a majority vote to pass their existing school budget,” Rep. Hope Damon, a Croydon Democrat, said during the meeting. “Now, the idea that they would get a two-thirds vote to overcome a cap is completely unrealistic.”
School districts can already adopt local spending caps under a bill Republicans passed last year. So far, voters have largely rejected the option.
Residents have proposed local spending caps in at least seven districts this year, with proposed limits ranging from $1 per student in Salem to $29,000 in the Hollis-Brookline district. In five districts, residents moved to defeat the proposed limits, mostly by increasing the caps high enough to all but ensure they will fail in March when the district votes.
The Epsom School District was among them. Republican Rep. Dan McGuire of Epsom proposed capping spending at $25,000 per student there. Voters increased that to $100,000 to ensure it would be defeated at the polls in March.
McGuire was among the Republican lawmakers Tuesday who voiced support for HB 675’s statewide spending cap. “We need some controls on spending and this would give us that,” he said.
House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, an Auburn Republican, hinted in January that a statewide spending cap proposal was coming, after voters in the Kearsarge School District overwhelmingly rejected a proposed cap in student spending.
Osborne told the New Hampshire Journal last month: “Perhaps, if [local voters] are unwilling to cap themselves, the state will step in and cap local taxes for them.”
Rep. Sallie Fellows, a Holderness Democrat, raised a concern Tuesday about asserting state control over local decisions.
“It's not our business at the state level to be meddling in how towns and cities manage their budgets,” Fellows said.
The bill’s next steps are unclear.
Erf withdrew his amendment Tuesday, but committee chairman Rep. Rick Ladd said they’d return to the bill next week. Erf referred calls to Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Salem Republican and the bill’s prime sponsor. Sweeney did not return messages.
