This story was originally produced by The Keene Sentinel. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
People throughout the Granite State are asking their towns to push back against state downshifting — a process often described as a series of state-level cuts to revenue sources that have forced towns to raise more money in taxes. It’s an issue that has also popped up in county and school district budget discussions, as local officials say they’re being asked to foot the bill for more and more services the state requires them to provide.
Local petitions got the call for action added to the warrants voters will consider at annual meetings next month in at least five area towns.
“Do we call on the New Hampshire Legislature to protect local tax payers by ensuring adequate state revenues for essential services, and by avoiding policies that shift costs onto local property taxpayers?” Jaffrey’s version of the article asks.
Reductions to revenue sources in recent state budgets, the article continues, are “forcing towns and counties to raise property taxes to maintain education, healthcare, county nursing homes, public safety and infrastructure.”
The petitioned article, a version of which also appears in Alstead, Antrim, Surry, Walpole and Winchester, says downshifting puts the burden of paying for those services on working families, strains local budgets and undermines the long-term prosperity of communities, the article says.
Surry resident Judy Lundahl said Wednesday the petition in that town was a non-partisan effort that aimed to point out that local officials are working with tied hands to keep property taxes down.
Winchester resident Lindseigh Picard, who has served on the town’s selectboard and the Winchester School Board, said via text message she signed the petition in her town because she’s “tired of my community being pit against each other at small town meetings trying to pinch every dollar in order to balance our budgets. We all want the same things for NH, and there are better ways to get there. The constant down shifting needs to stop. Our communities deserve to be heard.”
If the articles pass, selectboards will be tasked with sending the results of the vote to Gov. Kelly Ayotte and the state representatives and senators who represent the town.
The articles are advisory, meaning they’re not a binding change to town policy.
“We’re just trying to make a statement,” Lundahl said.
‘Downshifting’
“Downshifting” is not a new problem. In fact, municipal and county officials have warned of it often in the past, with the county flagging the issue at least five years ago, according to Cheshire County Administrator Chris Coates.
Since then, lawmakers have continued to balance the state budget “by reducing aid, altering funding formulas, or stepping away from long-standing financial commitments to local governments,” Coates wrote in a January news release lamenting state downshifting. “While these actions may stabilize the state’s finances on paper, they shift real and unavoidable costs onto communities.”
Services the county is legally required to provide, like Medicaid-funded long-term care and other human services, have become increasingly reliant on local property taxes as state support wanes, he said.
Coates said rural counties like Cheshire are particularly impacted by reductions in cost-sharing. Cost-sharing distributes the cost of services across the state by funding them from one state pot rather than by direct local dollars.
“Many of these pressures stem from fiscal commitments made by the State of New Hampshire decades ago that were never fully realized,” Coates wrote, citing revenue sharing tied to meals and rooms taxes, the business profits tax falling short of original estimations, highway block grants and bridge aid failing to keep pace with inflation, and the shifting of long-term care costs for Medicaid recipients down to the county level.
According to Cheshire County officials, the state has shifted some $3 billion in costs to local governments statewide in the past decade. Meanwhile, cuts to revenue streams like the business profits tax, business enterprise tax and interest and dividends tax have collided with tariffs, high health insurance costs and wage competition to create what Coates called “the Perfect Storm.”
Fed up with school costs
Winchester School Board Chair Karen Jerome was among those who signed a petition to get an article about downshifting on her town’s warrant.
She said her experience on the school board has informed her perspective. “It is a balancing act between ensuring the students are provided with what they need to be academically successful and being fiscally responsible to the taxpayers,” she wrote in an email, adding “It has a disproportionate impact on small towns like Winchester with a small tax base.”
That “balancing act” has fallen to local school officials to strike, leading to conflict in some towns.
Several area towns also have petitioned articles on their warrants specifically calling out the state’s current approach to school funding. Those towns include Jaffrey, Alstead and Walpole.
At the annual deliberative session of the Jaffrey-Rindge Cooperative School District last year, district-provided data showed state funding had fallen $1.5 million over the previous five years. The share of the budget covered by state funding in 2020-21 was about 36 percent, according to that data, while the projected contribution for 2025-26 was 23 percent.
In Jaffrey-Rindge last year, voters cut $3 million from the school budget in a display of frustration with property taxes. Local officials called the cut devastating.
In the district’s annual report this year, released in mid-February, school board Chair Chris Ratcliffe said decreasing state revenue to the district is one of the factors contributing to an expected increase in local property taxes.
For 2026-27, the district is estimating a decrease of $0.56 million from state sources, according to Ratcliffe.
“How New Hampshire funds public education is a topic that is being discussed in our legislature, courtrooms and in school districts all over the state. It is not something that our local school board can control,” he wrote.
Like the county, local school districts have a host of services they’re legally required to provide, and need to raise taxes to cover those services when state and federal funding falls short.
In July 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court said that, when it comes to school funding, the state isn’t providing enough money. The court sided with the ConVal school district, which brought a lawsuit alleging under-funding. Eighteen other school districts had joined the suit, including Fall Mountain, Monadnock and Winchester.
The court said the current education funding statute violates the New Hampshire Constitution, and called on the governor and the Legislature to remedy the problem.
On this year’s Jaffrey town warrant, petitioners placed an article about school funding as well as the broader article calling for an end to downshifting.
In a statement provided by Town Manager Jon Frederick, the Jaffrey selectboard said it supports “the ability of our residents to gather and voice their opinions regarding any issues placed on the Town Meeting warrant,” but warned that “the state’s education funding issue has been ignored despite several N.H. Supreme Court decisions. Therefore, the call for action from a Town Meeting vote in Jaffrey will not likely result in any change at the state level.”
The school funding article asks the selectboard to reach out to the state lawmakers who represent the town and seek their support for change.
Tom Hsu, a Jaffrey resident who ran for New Hampshire House in 2024 and is running again, said the goal of the warrant article was to encourage the selectboard to apply “upward pressure.”
“It’s a real problem for property owners,” he said, adding that change can’t come from locals alone. He said he believes the state needs to find or revive solutions, like a stronger statewide property tax to spread out the cost of education.
“There is enough money statewide to support education, it’s just very inequitably distributed,” he said.
In Jaffrey, Alstead and Walpole, articles on the warrant by petition are also asking locals to call on state lawmakers to more thoroughly monitor Education Freedom Accounts — a controversial program that pays for students to attend schools of their choice, including private ones.
