BIDDEFORD – With a recount Monday confirming that a proposed school budget was again rejected last week, residents are likely to get another chance to vote on a school spending proposal before the end of the year.

In an e-mail sent to the Portland Press Herald, City Clerk Carmen J. Morris said that the recount showed no significant change in the results of the Sept. 20 school budget validation vote. Monday’s recount gave budget supporters two fewer votes. The number of those opposed remained the same.

“The vote stands. The budget referendum did not pass,” Morris wrote in her e-mail.

Mayor Alan Casavant, who also chairs the School Board, said voters will likely be asked to validate the school budget on Nov. 6 — Election Day.

Last Thursday, voters rejected the budget for a third time, with 1,035 opposed and 902 in favor. The recount gave supporters 900 votes.

In an advisory question, which gives voters an opportunity for feedback, the $32.6 million budget was considered too high by 1,153 voters and too low by 614 voters.

The city’s budget process has been particularly tortuous this year. The City Council approved the school and city budgets this spring, but they were vetoed by Casavant, who said the combined budgets would hit taxpayers too hard.

The council cut the city budget by the $170,000 that Casavant sought, but left intact the school budget as approved by the School Board.

Voters then rejected the school budget in late June, after which the School Board approved about $500,000 in cuts and sent the package back to the council.

The council, however, restored the cuts and sent the original school budget to voters a second time. Voters again turned it down, but supporters argued that too many voters were unaware of the second referendum and the council sent the same budget to voters a third time, with the same result.

“People are upset that the council simply ignored their votes. It’s polarizing the community,” Casavant said. “You couldn’t write a script like this.”

Casavant said budget supporters have unfairly characterized opponents as “anti-school.”

“It’s not that at all,” he said. “It’s taxes. People are just being squeezed.”

Casavant said it’s up to the council to decide what happens next, but he said that he expects whatever budget they come up with will be sent to voters on Nov. 6. At least no one should be able to argue that turnout is too low, he said, with the presidential, congressional and state elections also on the ballot.

In the meantime, the state law requiring school budget validation votes stipulates that the schools continue to operate under the previous year’s budget — nearly $31 million in Biddeford — until a new one is adopted.

Former Mayor Joanne Twomey said she went door to door before last Thursday’s referendum, visiting senior housing complexes to try to get out the vote in favor of the budget.

Twomey said her kids are no longer in the public schools, but she doesn’t think it’s fair for older residents to turn their back on education simply because their own children would no longer be affected.

Twomey, as mayor, backed a $34 million bond to renovate and expand Biddeford High School in 2009. She said it makes no sense to spend that kind of money on the building and then seek to cut programs at the school in subsequent budgets.

“This community has been awesome about education,” she said, but added that she’s frustrated by the repeated rejections of the budget.

 

Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at:

emurphy@pressherald.com

 

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