RUMFORD — The Board of Selectmen voted 3-2 Thursday on a motion to reject a petition for a municipal spending cap amendment to the town’s charter.
Selectmen Jeff Sterling, Brad Adley and Greg Buccina voted for the motion, while Mark Belanger and Frank DiConzo voted against it.
The vote was taken following a written legal opinion submitted by the town’s attorney, Jennifer Kreckel, which concluded that the petition is a charter revision rather than a charter amendment.
The petition, which carried 575 signatures, comes from a committee of Rumford voters coordinated by Phil Blampied of High Street.
Blampied asked the town to schedule an election under a section of state law that allows citizens to petition for changes in a local charter. He said the voters would be asked whether to add a section to the charter to put a $6 million cap on town spending. The cap would not affect the school budget, nor would it limit initiated articles or the overlay, an amount the town puts aside each year to cover tax abatements. It could increase if the total tax base increased, but would decrease if the tax base decreased.
Earlier, Charter Commission members voted to indefinitely table discussion of a municipal spending cap, because it previously decided not to include it in the charter.
“This issue has to be decided once and for all,” DiConzo said. “I don’t want this coming back next year or two years to work on, or a new board to make that decision. The state doesn’t have any guidance. Let the people decide.”
Spending-cap petitioner Jim Windover agreed.
“Why don’t we just go forward with it and let the voters decide? That would be the easiest way about it and if the voters like it, and if they don’t, it gets voted down,” he said. “You realize there’s 600 and some odd signatures of people who want at least a chance to vote on it. And now we’ve got it down to five people who are going to decide if we’re going to vote on it or not.”
Sterling said, “We haven’t been against giving this to the people. We just wanted to do it the right way. Tonight, we received another opinion, basically the same opinion that was received the last time that says that in our town attorney’s opinion, this is the correct way of doing it. We have a sitting Charter Commission, who’s been sitting now for more than a year that, in any point of time, could have put this cap in their revisions. They have chosen not to, for whatever reason.
“Based on this and the opinion we received tonight, I would make a motion that this board not accept the petition as an amendment, and if the proponents so choose, they can go to the next step,” he said, adding that it would be up to the Charter Commission to accept it as a revision.
Adley seconded that motion.
Belanger said that with 575 signatures on the petition, “it would be nice if some action was taken at some level to give people a chance to vote on it. There’s a large group of people out there who would like some kind of cap, whether it’s worded like this or finessed and could be interjected into the charter.”
Adley said, “It saddens me the amount of energy … spent on this when we already have something in place already. It’s called the secret ballot. We, as a legislative body of this town, can vote down budgets. And it’s been done. We’ve lived it. So again, we’ve been chasing our tail on this for a couple of years. It’s such a drastic waste of energy when we have a mechanism in place that works very, very well.”
tkarkos@sunmediagroup.net
Send questions/comments to the editors.
