Last night, Mad Dog attended a "Deliberative Session" for the Winnacunnet High School school district where the budget for the high school was voted on.
Mad Dog was interested because he had been appointed to serve on the high school's budget committee, replacing an elected official who could no longer serve, and so he had learned over the course of four committee meetings about the complexities of the budget for a high school of just over 1,000 students, with over 200 security cameras, multiple playing fields, a windmill, 100 unionized teachers, and sundry custodial workers.
During that time, Mad Dog learned that the school's budget could be wrecked if too many families with special needs students moved into any of the four towns which send kids to the school, and he learned about how the new state voucher program to fund private schools (including religious schools) and home schooling draws its funds, in part, by tapping into funds for Winnacunnet, bleeding the school's money, a strategy which delights people who don't like public schools.
In short, from his brief two months on the Budget Committee, Mad Dog learned why you need professionals, who do this sort of work all day, to manage the school. The spreadsheets alone filled a hundred pages.
So, the committee developed a budget, but that budget would have to be approved by "the voters" or "the towns" which pay for the school with their ever rising property taxes. This process of approval involves placing the budget on "warrant articles," but first the articles have to be "considered" by voters at town meetings so they can be changed, tweaked or outright destroyed.
Unlike the elementary and middle schools, where the kids all come from Hampton, the high school gets kids and funds from four towns: Hampton, North Hampton, Hampton Falls and Seabrook. These comprise a "district" with an odd name "SAU21." (Why they couldn't just call it the "Winnacunnet High School District," Mad Dog never learned, but presumably it had to do with the number of letters.)
Because he walked into the auditorium where the meeting took place, Mad Dog, having proved his place of residence, he automatically became a town legislator. The group of 25 people who showed up constitute, by law, the legislative body for the four towns, and they could vote to amend the budget, to kept it or to reject it, thus defunding the school.
That last may sound absurd, but Mad Dog once attended a similar meeting for the grade and middle schools, where in a bizarre series of amendments and counter amendments, the 100 people in the auditorium considered an amendment which would have directed the entire town school budget, which runs into the millions of dollars, entirely to the town's Catholic school of 244 students. (The amendment was defeated.)
As a newly minted member of this 25 person legislature, Mad Dog now legally represented 45,396 (give or take) citizens of the four towns.
This was kind of a heady experience, as the representatives elected to the state legislature represent 3,300 citizens each, where Mad Dog was now a temporary, unelected official, representing 12,000 of his fellow citizens as their evanescent representative, by virtue of having shown up at 7 PM on a bitterly cold workday night a few days after a snowstorm, when most people of the town were doing dinner, trying to manage kids, their homework and then getting ready to go to work the next day.
The meeting of this Brigadoon-like legislature was presided over by a masterful "Moderator," who had been elected to this position. On the stage was a school board for the high school of roughly 12 members, drawn from the four towns.
The work of this fly-by-night legislature was now to vote up or down each of four warrant articles detailing the budget for the high school. A month later, the voters of the four towns would vote these refined warrant articles up or down. If the voters rejected these articles the budget would revert to whatever it was the previous year.
The Moderator ran the meeting by certain rules:
1. Any member of this rump legislature who wished to speak on one of the four warrant articles of budget being considered would have to address only him and the board.
That meant the speakers had to face only the Moderator, and could not turn around and speak to the audience. No exchange of views between the speaker at the microphone and members of the audience behind him is allowed. All remarks are director to the Moderator.
2. Speakers are not allowed to engage in a "back and forth" with any of the board members on the stage, who are not allowed to engage in conversation with any member of the audience/legislature. They are to sit on the stage like gods from Mt. Olympus, listening the the prayers of the legislators, but not replying to those prayers or asking any questions of those making the prayers.
Before the meeting, Mad Dog had asked the Moderator why the legislator/meeting attendees were not allowed to engage in a conversation (the dreaded "back and forth") with the Board on the stage or with each other, and he was told this system is designed to reduce rancor, to keep the discussion controlled and civil.
Actually, this resembles "Prime Minister's Questions" --if you've ever watched that must see TV--which is the British Parliament, where the members of the British parliament (MOP's) address their remarks to a "Speaker" who remains mostly silent, as the MOP's conduct conversations with each other by addressing the Speaker as if the other MOP, the target of their derision, is not even there listening, referring to the right honorable MP from Finsbury: "I rise to inform the Speaker that the member from Finsbury has muddled his 'facts,' which are, in fact, closer to fantasy than to any event which has occurred in his majesty's islands or, for that matter on planet Earth. In fact, the right honorable MP has shot beyond the fantastic to the surreal."
Anyway, one member of this evanescent legislature offered an amendment to an article which made sense to Mad Dog--an effort to clarify on the ballot what the cost of the budget item would be for the average taxpayer--so Mad Dog seconded the motion, feeling very virtuous, having engaged in representative democracy, having participated in a small republic which would warm the heart of Benjamin Franklin.
But then another representative/member of the audience suggested that the clarification printed on the warrant article ballot would likely confuse voters because it would be a different number for each town--so the effort to clarify would, in fact confuse, and, at any rate, it seemed like a big change to be wrought at a late date with so little time to think about it.
Mad Dog was moved to say that he felt a little uncomfortable voting on behalf of 15,000 Hampton residents (not to mention the 30,000 residents of the other towns) without having any input at all from any of them, so he wound up voting against the very amendment he had seconded.
What really stuck with Mad Dog is what a travesty this form of town hall government, called the "SB2" form really is.
A small group shows up, while the rest of town is distracted, and speaks for the town and votes on "warrant articles," which will fill 34 pages of paper the voters will try to read through and vote on in March.
Most voters will make that visit to vote on one or two articles which they care about and know something about, and then they will plow through the other articles, looking for the recommendations from the School Board or the Budget Committee, or the Planning Board, which are printed right above the Yes/No boxes, conveniently guiding the voter how to vote.
The whole thing feels like something somewhere between travesty and performance, a theater of the absurd.
And the thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. This SB2 system arose from a time when the towns had populations in the hundreds, and town hall meetings were actual democracies among neighbors who knew each other.
This SB2 is a sort of mutant descendent of democracy, having about as much in common with democracy as Homo sapiens has with his ape ancestors.
It can in fact be changed, and several towns across the state have discarded it, although how this is done legally nobody in Hampton seems to know.
