Fact Check: Concord Monitor Endorsement Editorial Misstates Facts

As often happens with newspaper endorsements, the editorial board members lead with their opinions about candidates they want to win and often fudge what the facts are. The Aug. 31, Concord Monitor editorial endorsing Concord School Board member Kass Ardinger in the Democratic primary for the District 15 state Senate seat against Dan Feltes, is a perfect example.

The editorial focuses heavily on Ardinger’s life experience but then turns to the district’s elementary school consolidation project and from there, gets the history, details, and facts wrong.

The schools went from eight to five

The first mistake in the editorial was when it stated that Ardinger oversaw “the replacement of four outmoded elementary schools with three new schools.” This is not correct.

In 2003, when this process began to take steam, there were nine elementary schools in the Concord School District. Dewey was closed first, leaving eight: Beaver Meadow, Broken Ground, Conant, Dame, Eastman, Kimball, Rumford, and Walker. Four of the schools were shuttered (three were sold); two were demolished (along with the district’s offices, the former Morrill Elementary School); two older elementary schools remained with two new elementary schools and a new primary school.

In other words, the elementary consolidation project went from eight (or nine, if you count Dewey) to five, not four replaced by three.

Taxes did increase

The editorial states that the schools “were built without increasing the city’s tax rate.” This is a falsehood that continues to be perpetuated by both the Monitor and Ardinger.

The tax rate for the district’s debt service both increased and was kept artificially high after past bonding expired. A quick check of the archives of the Monitor proves this.

First, five years ago, school officials stated that the debt service tax rate was being kept artificially high to stick money away to pay for part of the project after previous bonding expired (“Consolidation unknown: How to pay?,” August 2009).

As noted a year later, that artificially high rate – $0.83 cents per $1,000 assessed value of property – was budgeted to rise to $1.15 this year and $1.30 next year, to make the $3.2 million annual bond commitment work (“Total Bonds for schools: $55 million,” November 2010; “District debt payments to rise in 2014,” December 2010).

Property taxes, on a $250,000 home, on average, increased by $72 this year to pay for the project’s debt; next year, it’s $97. In 2016, it’s $108, with increments of $10 more, each year, until 2041 (“Schools $1.8 million under projected cost,” August 2012).

How the Monitor editorial board could miss what is clearly a flat out falsehood about property taxes not increasing to pay for the schools is simply astounding.

Suppressing voting rights

The act of preserving the artificially debt service tax rate after bonds expired is something that no other school district in the state can do without voter approval. But in Concord, it’s allowed, because the school district is autonomous from the voting public.

Legislators tried to change this in 2008 with a bill requiring any bonding at $5 million or more to be put before the voters. The House unanimously approved the bill in 2009.

However, Ardinger, along with School Superintendent Chris Rath, state Sen. Sylvia Larsen, and others, met in secret in May 2009 and rewrote the bill, allowed for a rigged public hearing to take place, and then a study committee, along with other shenanigans.

This act, which was investigated by the New Hampshire Attorney General, permanently suppressed the voting rights of Concord residents, rights that everyone else in New Hampshire has, including the residents of Henniker, Hopkinton, and Warner, the other communities in state Senate District 15 that Ardinger now wants to represent. One of the school district’s attorneys, John Teague, of Upton & Hatfield, was later reprimanded by the NHAG in September 2010 for violating the state’s lobbying law.

Despite being given the AG’s report and a packet of other information about the investigation, the Monitor refused to report on the incident, so many in the community never found out about Ardinger’s role in suppressing voter rights and the illegal activity by Teague, while billing the same taxpayers he was repressing.

Full-day K

The Monitor editorial also called Feltes’ raising of the issue of Ardinger’s decision to reject full-day kindergarten as part of the consolidation plan a “distraction” and “mischaracterization.” But nothing could be further from the truth, as already shown by Patch last week.

Ardinger was quoted directly from the minutes of the board meeting. She, and other board members, made the decision to build three schools, at a cost of $90.8 million, without a little extra space in each of the new schools for expansion. This decision completely eliminated any opportunity for full-day K to be added to the Concord schools. Ardinger may publicly support this as policy for the entire state now. But she didn’t support it when she had the power to act, regardless of the reasons why.

The cost of the schools

All during the process, the Monitor never reported on what the actually cost of the buildings would be to the public. It took the newspaper until August 2012, in a story by reporter Sarah Palermo, to reveal the actual figure of $90.8 million.

So it’s strange that now costs are a defense for not implementing full-day K. The editorial stated, “Adding rooms would have increased the budget for the school construction project, affected the tax rate, increased opposition to the project and proven unnecessary if school enrollments declined as predicted.”

Adding the extra rooms would have been a few cents annually to the debt service tax rate and would have been fiscally responsible since it would ensure the new schools weren’t obsolete when they opened.

As well, there were also other proposals floated by community members that would have allowed an expansion to full-day K and other programs, including preserving the jobs of countless teachers and aides, while saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. While there was – and still is – wide opposition in the community to the consolidation scheme, this opposition wasn’t about creating parity or educational opportunities for the city’s youngest children; it was about preserving intimate neighborhood schools and not demolishing three structurally sound, historic buildings.

While it is true that elementary school enrollments have declined in Concord, about 30 students a year during the last 10 years, the state of New Hampshire’s 2030 population survey predicts that the city will have around 60,000 people (it’s now 43,000) in the next 16 years, with the expectation that the bulk of new residents will be young people staying in the state and raising families … with children, meaning enrollments could be higher than they are now.

Regardless of which candidate voters support on Sept. 9, or whether or not full-day K is good public policy, these are the facts about Concord’s elementary school consolidation project.