{"id":658,"date":"2016-04-12T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/?p=658"},"modified":"2016-04-12T06:00:47","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T10:00:47","slug":"lt-listening-to-the-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"LT: Listening to the Voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Londonderry Times:<\/p>\n

Listening to the Voters<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Editor<\/a> <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

Last year, voters turned down engineering costs for a proposed auditorium for the Londonderry School District. The project didn\u2019t go away, however, and remains on the Capital Improvement Plan.<\/p>\n

This year, just as they have in years past, Hampstead voters defeated a bond request for construction of new classrooms and renovations at Central School, and removal of portable classrooms. The ballots had hardly been counted and put away, however, before the School Board agreed to pursue the project yet again.<\/span><\/p>\n

While neither of those actions goes against the \u201cno means no\u201d rule in the state, which doesn\u2019t allow a project to take place in a given year if voters turn it down at the polls, they do beg the question as to whether boards of elected officials pursue their own agendas regardless of the no votes of their constituents.<\/p>\n

What makes it worse are comments by the proponents of the defeated warrant articles that voters misunderstood or didn\u2019t realize what it was the project would have done. What never seems to rise to the level of discussion is that residents may well have cast their \u201cno\u201d vote because they didn\u2019t think they could afford a \u201cwant\u201d when there were so many other requests for \u201cneeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Central School issue is especially interesting because a second warrant article on that same ballot would have funded renovations \u2013 and \u201cneeds\u201d \u2013 at the school but not the proposed new construction. Had that passed, work on significant improvements could have taken place this year. But it was all or nothing for the School Board, which chose not to support the lower-priced article, and both the bond and the smaller article went down to defeat.<\/p>\n

Bringing a money issue back to the voters over and over again is not necessarily wrong. Both Hampstead and Sandown were able to replace their seriously inadequate police stations by perseverance \u2013 and also by cutting costs.<\/p>\n

But we aren\u2019t seeing cost-cutting as a priority in these school matters. Instead, ego seems to get in the way, and to lead down a path that ends in personal attacks, both of voters in general and of vocal proponents of a different point of view.<\/p>\n

And we also don\u2019t see a desire for understanding or respect for people who just don\u2019t think they can afford multi-million-dollar projects, or who don\u2019t equate funding a new building with support for educating students.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that respecting the voter is vital in getting projects passed on the warrant. That would be a position worth promoting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Londonderry Times: Listening to the Voters April 6, 2016 by Editor Last year, voters turned down engineering costs for a proposed auditorium for the Londonderry School District. The project didn\u2019t go away, however, and remains on the Capital Improvement Plan. This year, just as they have in years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"From the Londonderry Times:\nListening to the Voters","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townunderground.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}