Another budget adoption meeting, another validation vote by referendum – that’s the law, attorney Robert Nadeau told Sheepscot Valley Regional School Unit 12 board members during their recent monthly meeting.
For the fourth time, voters in January rejected a $26.1 million spending plan for the geographically long and narrow eight-town unit encompassing Wiscasset, Westport Island, Alna, Whitefield, Chelsea, Windsor, Somerville and Palermo.
“Under state statute, that’s the process that needs to be repeated until a budget is adopted,” Nadeau said when contacted this week at the Portland law offices of Drummond Woodsum and MacMahon. Despite Legislative proposals seeking to change state consolidation law, a regional adoption meeting, followed 10 to 14 days later by referendum vote in each town, is the only option available at present, he added.
Consolidation law provides voters the opportunity every third year to discontinue the budget validation process and “go back to just a budget meeting process, but that wouldn’t have an impact on the RSU 12 budget this year,” Nadeau said.
The unit began operating last July.
RSU 12 Supt. Greg Potter invited Nadeau to the Feb. 11 meeting in Somerville to discuss legal issues, requirements and strategies.
A key strategic element is “making sure that people who support the budget go to the meeting. That’s not the problem for this RSU,” Nadeau said. “The budget adoption meeting has been successful,” it’s the follow-up referendum vote that fails, although by an increasingly narrow margin since the first budget was presented last June.
Nadeau noted that when and if a budget fails to be validated, the school unit operates according to expenditures approved at the previous district meeting.
Nadeau’s firm represents most of the 200-plus public schools in Maine, including alternatively organized structures and municipal units. “It’s not that unusual to have school districts (experience) trouble getting a budget passed,” he said. With more state subsidy cutbacks looming in 2011 and 2012, he predicted, “There’ll be an increased burden on local units, so I think (budget rejection) will happen more frequently. It’s a very expensive process.”
Nadeau said the RSU 12 board “impressed me as concerned people trying to do the right thing. It’s not something they’re taking lightly. They’re serious about getting a budget passed.”