Manchester Board Of Aldermen's Tax Hike Plan Hits Resistance

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

The budget from the Manchester Board of Aldermen, which increases spending by $22 million, wasn’t winning hearts and minds at Tuesday night’s meeting.

“This is not overriding the tax cap. It’s obliterating it,” said resident and GOP activist Rich Girard.

Mayor Jay Ruais and the full Board of Aldermen heard resident after resident voice opposition to the budget being floated by Aldermen Jim Burkush (D-Ward 9) and June Trisciani (D-at-Large).

Manchester residents told Ruais and the board no one can afford more taxes. Sen. Victoria Sullivan (R-Manchester) reminded Ruais and the board that many of them got elected promising tax cuts.

“You’re not thinking about what you’re doing to the people that you’re here to represent. You have to make tough decisions, like every family in this city is doing right now at their kitchen table, trying to figure out what they cut,” Sullivan said. “This is not sustainable. We have elderly people that, every time you make this decision, have one foot out the door of the home that they worked their whole lives for. They supported this city their whole lives. They raised their families here. And you’re telling them, ‘We don’t care.’”

Ruais has made it clear he does care, opposing two of the school budget options from the Manchester School Board because they bust the tax cap.

“One (budget) would have been about an 8% increase in taxes, one would have been about a 16% increase in taxes. I opposed those,” Ruais told WMUR earlier this month. “I supported the tax cap-compliant budget.”

At Tuesday night’s meeting, resident Ken Tassey said people are fed up with spending more and more money on a failing, shrinking school district.

“We’ve lost 3,000 students over the past five years … taxpayers are screaming, as you can see tonight. They’re tired of being taxed out of their homes,” Tassey said.

The sole member of the public not opposed to the budget proposal was School Committee member Jim O’Connell, who claimed that taxpayers have been seeing lower bills over the past few years.

“I don’t envy the work you have to do. But there’s a disconnect between some of the good people who have spoken here tonight, who say, ‘We’ve got to do something to hold the line on taxes,’” O’Connell said. “And I just want to be clear, as a Manchester School Board member, that when it comes to your schools, you have paid less than 1.5 percent a year over the last six years, and you got a decrease of 2.5 percent last year.”

Ruais said he has a different focus.

“How do we balance the needs between what the school district needs, what the city needs to pave our roads, pay our police officers, and then most importantly, at the end of the day, what our taxpayer needs as well? So there’s that balance that we have in governing, that macro view from a mayoral perspective that we have to meet.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.