By RAY CARBONE, InDepthNH.org
During the next few weeks, citizens throughout the state will begin heading to the polls, town halls and schools to make decisions about how their community will be organized and operate over the next year.
It’s the time of the year when local issues are addressed, which sometimes indicate what’s on the minds of voters throughout New Hampshire.
But that’s not the case this year, according to Margaret M.L. Byrnes, executive director of the NH Municipal Association. “There’s no significant shared trends across the state,” she said. “And that’s not unusual. These are local meeting with mostly local issues.”
Still, there are some common threads. Taxes, as always, are on the mind of virtually all property owners as are the cost of public schools that drives so much of our taxes. At the same time, some towns are also looking at increased costs of ambulance services, and zoning changes that could be related to affordable housing.
Taxes/Dollars
“We are hearing more conversations about tax caps proposals and about budgets in general this year,” Byrnes said. “There are a lot of petition articles where voters are planning to make proposals to amend or change budgets.
“I think municipalities are dealing with what the rest of us are dealing with, which is inflation,” she added. “We all feel the effects of the cost of goods going up. Municipalities have their projects, they have to purchase goods, they have employees and there’s the cost of labor rising, competitiveness in the labor market.”
Without a sales or income tax, New Hampshire relies principally on local property taxes to fund both municipal and school operations, which means that we now have some of the highest property taxes in the country. Scott Warde of Newbury said that since he built his home here in 2012, his tax bill has risen from $8,000 to $18,000. “In ten years, it’s more than double,” he related. “If this rate continues, when I’m 82 years-old, it will be $38,000.”
Robert Blake, who now serves on the Warner budget committee after a lengthy career in high finance, said his town’s tax rate is going up 28% this year for myriad reasons including the end of the federal funds that were part of the COVID-19 ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds.
“People are voicing concerns that it’s unsustainable,” he said, suggesting that the town should try to track its annual increases on a par with inflation or the earnings of residents. “They can’t afford the taxes.”
In most communities, the local property tax bill is made up of municipal costs, the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT), and funding for local public schools. Because the latter is sometimes twice what the other two combined, it’s usually where taxpayers look when they try to hold the line on municipal spending.
That’s what residents in the Kearsarge Regional School District did earlier this year. Using a new law, they proposed reducing the district’s annual proposed budget by asking voters to lower the projected per-public costs.
Kearsarge has among the highest per-student costs in the state but its educational ranking by the NH Department of Education is only 34th, Warde said. He and his colleagues drafted a petition article outlining their idea and came to the meeting hoping to open a dialogue with the community. But their argument never got off the ground. More than 1,500 residents came to the early January meeting, soundly rejecting the article, 1,434-113.
Similar per-student petition articles have been turned aside in other communities recently.
Still some places are likely facing budgetary challenges. Byrnes said that some districts and towns where tax caps already exist to hold the line on how much annual taxes can rise every year, there have been discussions about altering its original language to make it harder for voters to approve a one-year override provision.
At the deliberative session of the Monadnock Regional School District in January, voters cut their school board’s proposed budget by more than $3 million. The Pembroke school board held a less formal public meeting recently to explain its request for a budget increase; last year, voters rejected the board’s recommended bottom-line, but the informational session seemed this year to have worked as voters approved an increase a few days ago.
And a petition article in Moultonborough is asking the town to consider a tax cap that holds the annual tax rate to no higher than 0%.
Housing
New Hampshire is not alone when it comes to dealing with a housing crisis. In some sense, the problem is worldwide, caused by a growing population, a shrinking stock of affordable housing, the rise of construction costs, and housing costs that have grown faster than income and/or inflation in many countries.
As the state government grapples with the problem, some towns and cities have already begun working to remove obstacles that could deter the construction or development of more housing units, especially workforce or affordable housing.
A few years ago, some Warner residents suggested that the town consider making changes to the town’s zoning regulations, allowing for more areas where multi-family housing structures could be built, a reduction in allowable lot sizes for homes, and more places where Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADUs, i.e., smaller housing units attached or nearby primary dwelling units) could be built.
The petition articles didn’t pass but they kicked off a conversation in town. More housing was needed, some residents felt, to allow senior citizens and younger people to stay in town, and to provide reasonable housing for employees of local businesses.
Ian Rogers, a member of the Warner planning board, said that over the last year, his community used money from a Housing Opportunity Planning Grant Program (HOPS), provided by New Hampshire Housing Authority, to work with citizens and the Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission to redraft the Housing section of its Master Plan.
If voters approve the new chapter, the town wants to reorganize a housing study committee that can use the new data and plan to develop more affordable housing options. (Rogers himself lives in a house on Main Street that his grandparents once owned; an aunt and uncle live in a separate apartment in the same building.)
Next week Hopkinton voters will consider changes to their zoning regulations that will allow for affordable nonprofit-provided workforce housing to be developed in residential areas without seeking a special exemption from the town’s zoning board.
Meredith voters will look at allowing multi-family use structures in areas where apartments are already available, which will let property owners build new apartment units without going before its zoning board. Other proposed changes would allow for easier establishment of ADUs, and permit those same small housing units to be placed further away from the primary residence on a lot.
But not everyone in New Hampshire likes the idea of a statewide effort to expand affordable housing. Jane Aitken of the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers says that some of the ideas being proposed could result in the end of single-family residence neighborhoods that many people enjoy. And talk about statewide initiatives sometimes feels as if Concord is ignoring the Granite State tradition of local control.
Ambulance Costs
Another challenge municipalities have been dealing with over the last year has been changes in the billing systems of ambulance services. Plaistow and five adjacent smaller towns recently decided to bring their ambulance services in-house to their fire/rescue departments after the company they utilized for years said it would bill the towns for its calls, rather than billing patients’ insurance companies.
Blake said that the change is related to the steady rise in insurance costs, which are going up much faster than inflation. And New Hampshire’s aging population means more service calls in the future.
In addition, there’s a problem finding labor for specialized jobs like EMTs, Blake said.
“People are retiring and when you try to hire replacements, there’s not a lot of young people who want to do that work,” he noted. “And for the ones that do, the market rate is for those with the skills is much higher.”