Budget Committee delivered - now it's up to you

On Thursday. January 20th, the Goffstown Budget Committee delivered on its promise of no new taxes, finalizing a proposed town budget of $18,927,383 and a proposed school budget of $36,085,268.

In both cases, the resulting budgets represent a level tax rate for Goffstown.  That means the tax rate per $1,000 of assessed value on your properties will not go up if these budgets stick.

The Budget Committee has done its job.  Now it's up to you to make sure these budgets stick.

SELECTMEN AGREE

The Board of Selectmen have agreed to support the Budget Committee's proposed budget - in fact, that budget is roughly $186,000 higher than selectmen had proposed after revising their original budget.  As such, the Town Deliberative Session on February 7th will see something rare indeed:  the Board of Selectmen and the Budget Committee in agreement on the proposed town budget.

SCHOOL BOARD STILL WANTS MORE

The school board, however, is a different story.  On Monday, they decided not to support the Budget Committee's proposed school budget and shoot for their entire request at school deliberative session on February 5th.

Obviously emboldened by what they viewed as overwhelming support for their budget at public hearing on January 13th, the school board will be making a motion on February 5th to increase the budget by at least another $1.4 million.  And if they are able to stack the deck at deliberative session the way they did at the public hearing, they will succeed once again in raising all of our property taxes.

The only way to prevent this is for all of you to show up at Goffstown High School on February 5th at 10:00 AM and vote 'NO' to any increase to the school budget that is proposed.

If you don't, and your school taxes go up again, you'll have only yourselves to blame.

Guy Caron can be reached via e-mail at: GuyC@GoffstownResidentsAssociation.com

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