ROCKINGHAM — Only one contested seat for Selectboard, and a relatively non-controversial warrant, await voters next week on Town Meeting Day.
On Monday, March 5, at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall auditorium (Falls Cinema), the annual Rockingham Town and School District Meeting commences, giving residents an opportunity to discuss and vote on all articles but one, the fiscal 2013 school budget, which will be voted on by Australian ballot the following day.
From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m on Tuesday, March 6, at the Masonic Temple on Westminster Street, voters will cast ballots for town officers and on Article 3, to appropriate $9,855,000 to operate and maintain public schools for the 2012-13 school year.
Voters will be asked to fill three Selectboard positions. Ann DiBernardo will not be seeking re-election for her one-year seat on the board, so Thom MacPhee and Stephan Golec are unopposed for the two open one-year seats on the board.
Josh Hearne and Lamont Barrett will face off for the single open three-year seat on the Selectboard.
Barrett, owner of The Rock and Hammer jewelry store in The Square, said that he has more than 20 years of experience in business and in public service on various town boards.
“I believe we have to be more creative in funding the services that we all need, just talk of cutting taxes is not a viable long term solution,” he said. “We have seen in the past what a positive impact a focused hard working board that is dedicated to putting in the time it takes can make. In all my years on the Selectboard, I always tried to make things happen rather than let things happen.”
Hearne was not available for comment at press time.
MacPhee, an incumbent, said, the board “still has a lot of things hanging, like the Bartonsville Bridge [repair], FEMA issues we've got to walk our way through, and there's the TransCanada negotiations.”
TransCanada, the owners of the Bellows Falls dam, is in the process of negotiating a new agreement with the town following the end of a three-year agreement last year.
“We've been doing a lot behind the scenes,” MacPhee said. “We believe they still owe us ... based on values at the time of the agreement. The listers dropped the value of the property [but] we still believe they owe us a commitment.”
MacPhee's decision to run again, instead of following through with his planned retirement this year, came at the behest of his wife.
He said that she fell on Nov. 11, and “broke her neck and is paralyzed from the neck down. She convinced me to run again since we won't be going anywhere, at least for the next year [while she is in physical therapy]. She's really the one who got me to run again.”
Two Rockingham School Director seats are open, a two-year and a three-year, but no one is running for them.
Town Clerk Doreen Aldrich said that the School Directors will have to appoint someone to fill the two vacant seats.
As for the town budget, municipal manager Tim Cullenen said that Rockingham is struggling with a shrinking grand list and steadily increasing budget demands.
In his monthly community television show, “The Manager's Office” on FACT-TV in Bellows Falls, Cullenen said that the grand list has decreased this year, largely due to a combination of properties damaged or destroyed during Tropical Storm Irene, as well as several commercial buildings in town found to be “functionally obsolete” by the listers.
Cullenen said that “when property values fall, [the overall town] tax rate goes up” to bridge the gap between the estimated budget and property tax income for the 2013 town budget.
Money for the highway department and highway capital funds, repairs of sidewalks in Saxtons River, and renovations to the Rockingham Free Public Library are the biggest line item votes on the ballot for voters this year.
Voters will decide whether to fund allocations of $368,632 for the library, $41,000 as the town's match for a $216,000 Transportation Enhancement Grant awarded by the state for the Saxtons River sidewalk repair project, $99,500 to retire debt within the Capital Fund, and $74,378 for social service agencies in Rockingham.
The total amount for the town portion of the meeting warrant is $4,095,413, which is an estimated total tax of 0.8742 cents per $100 of assessed value, an increase of about 0.1456 cents for the 2013 fiscal year.
Other articles on the town portion of the warrant include:
• Appropriating $1,500 for the Greater Falls Food Hub to “help, create, and support community gardens” in Rockingham.
• Appropriating $1,500 for Youth Services of Windham County.
• Increasing the property tax exemption available to disabled veterans from $20,000 to $40,000 of assessed value.
• A property tax exemption for the Bellows Falls Moose Family Center on Westminster Street.
Requests on the school portion of the warrant include:
• Creating a reserve fund of $100,000 to offset expenditures in fiscal year 2014.
• Spending $30,000 on new school buses, $55,700 to update technology resources, $10,000 for new safety street signs at the Bellows Falls Middle School, and $5,000 for improvements to the sewage disposal system at the Central Elementary School.