SAU 6 Board, FY25 Budget Public Hearing — December 14, 2023

OBSERVATION About thirty-four minutes of this meeting are missing from a twenty-two-minute recording — and because these minutes survive, the cut can be measured instead of estimated

The published file has no break in it anywhere. The largest gap between any two consecutive transcript rows in all 196 rows is 4.4 seconds, and it falls in the middle of a budget question. Across the nonpublic session the gap is 0.08 seconds: the chair's row ending "we're going to move to nonpublic session, and we will return to a public meeting at the end of that session" runs to 0:07:04, and the motion to come back out starts at 0:07:04. Continuous audio is not the same as a continuous meeting, and here the arithmetic is exact rather than inferred.

Anchor the clock at the call to order. The agenda scheduled it for 6:50 PM, the chair apologised for being ten minutes late, and the minutes record it at 7:00 PM — so recording position 0:01:01 is 7:00 p.m. On that anchor the three checkpoints before the nonpublic session agree with the minutes to within about a minute: the hearing opens at 0:02:11 against a minuted 7:02, closes at 0:03:19 against 7:03, and the nonpublic session is entered at 0:06:33 against a minuted 7:05. After it they never agree again. The return to public is minuted at 7:40 and sits at 0:07:11, about thirty-four minutes early; adjournment is minuted at 7:55 and sits at 0:21:50, about thirty-four minutes early. The whole discrepancy opens across one item and stays constant afterwards. The nonpublic session ran roughly thirty-five minutes of wall time and occupies thirty-eight seconds of the file.

None of that is improper. RSA 91-A:3 makes a nonpublic session nonpublic, and broadcasting one would defeat the exemption the board had just voted; nothing in RSA 91-A requires a public body to record a meeting at all, still less to publish an unedited file — the record the statute requires is the minutes. What it costs is precision, and the cost is worth stating because the corpus keeps meeting this pattern. Recording positions on this page are exact pointers into the published file and every timestamp links to the moment it names; they are not clock times after 0:06:33. The December 7 page reached the same conclusion from a shorter cut and could only estimate its size, because the minutes that would have measured it do not exist. The comparison is the useful part: an edited broadcast is only readable against a minute book, and this board's minute book has a hole in it a week earlier.

Sources: RSA 91-A:3 (nonpublic sessions; nothing requires one to be broadcast); RSA 91-A:2, II (2023 codification — minutes, not a recording, are the required record); draft minutes of 12.14.23 (the clock times); the December 7 page, flag 23.

OBSERVATION The public hearing on a $2.49 million budget lasted about sixty-seven seconds, and both citizens' comment periods closed to an empty room

The agenda gave the hearing a full hour, 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM. It opened at 0:02:11 and closed at 0:03:19. Inside those sixty-seven seconds sit fourteen seconds of shuffling, a forty-two-second budget overview, and a citizens' comment period of about ten seconds. The general-business comment period later ran about six. The minutes record both as they were: "No citizens were present for public hearing, hearing closed" and none.

Nobody was turned away and nobody was cut short, and no rule is asserted to have been broken. RSA 189:74 requires that "School boards shall provide the opportunity for the public to comment on school district matters at a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2" and that "The public comment period shall be for no less than 30 minutes." Two questions about it are open and this page settles neither. First, whether the section reaches an SAU board at all: it speaks of "a school board" and "school district matters", while RSA ch. 194-C, not RSA ch. 189, is where this board's authority lives. Second, whether the thirty minutes is a floor on elapsed time or on the opportunity offered — the text does not say.

The fact worth recording is the one the numbers make plain. A budget of $2,489,151.03, apportioned between two towns and raised at their district meetings, was presented to the public in forty-two seconds at a hearing no statute required, and no member of the public came to either of the two openings offered. The board did more than the law asked and the room was empty; both halves of that are part of the record.

Sources: RSA 189:74 (School Board Public Comment Period; 2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022); RSA 194-C:5 (the SAU board's own authority); draft minutes of 12.14.23.

OBSERVATION The transcript has the budget presented as "$2,489,153.03"; the motion, the minutes and the printed budget all say $2,489,151.03, and only that figure reconciles

At 0:02:27 the dialogue file records "So the bottom line budget was $2,489,153.03, for a total overall increase of $93,151.03, or 3.89% difference." Every document says otherwise, and consistently: the motion at 0:09:22 is "in the amount of $2,489,151.03"; the minutes print "$2,489,151.03 proposed" in the hearing summary and again in the motion; and the December 12 budget report foots to "Grand Total: $1,735,716.10 $1,771,416.90 $2,396,000.00 $2,489,151.03 $93,151.03 3.89".

The arithmetic decides it. $2,396,000.00 plus $93,151.03 is $2,489,151.03, and that quotient is 3.8877%, which rounds to the 3.89% stated in the same sentence. $2,489,153.03 would require an increase of $93,153.03, a figure that appears nowhere. So the correct number is $2,489,151.03 and the page uses it throughout.

What the page does not do is say the business administrator misspoke. The source here is an automated transcript, and a one-for-three substitution inside a nine-digit figure is among the commonest errors it makes; the same file renders "Tempesta" as "Mr. Pesto" and "99 years" as "99 minutes" within the same twenty minutes. The transcript is quoted as it stands, the documents are quoted as they stand, and the discrepancy is left visible rather than repaired in the quotation.

Sources: SAU#6 Budget Report 12-12-23 Board V1 (1).PDF (grand total line); draft minutes of 12.14.23; dialogue transcript 15472 SAU6121423.mp4.CSV.

OBSERVATION The Business Office alone rises $111,171.50 in a budget whose whole increase is $93,151.03, and Special Education Administration falls $69,147.71 at the meeting that announced the special-education director's departure

The adopted budget's seven functions move in opposite directions. Growing: Business Office (2520) +$111,171.50, +17.74%; Human Resources (2521) +$44,598.13, +24.84%; Information Management (2225) +$31,535.63, +9.47%; and the brand-new School Board function (2310) +$15,600.00. Shrinking: Special Education Administration (2490) −$69,147.71, −14.85%; the Superintendent's Office (2321) −$39,283.42, −5.22%; Maintenance (2600) −$1,323.10. The four rises total $202,905.26 and the three falls $109,754.23, netting to the $93,151.03 the board was told. So the Business Office's increase on its own exceeds the entire SAU increase by $18,020.47, and Business Office Salaries alone rise $92,882.22 — within $269 of the whole budget's growth. That is the arithmetic behind Candace Crawford's questions at 0:09:44, and it was not stated to the hearing.

The special-education line needs care, because the obvious inference is not supported. Superintendent Tempesta announced Ben Nester's resignation at 0:18:01, twenty minutes after the board adopted a budget that cuts his department's salaries by $48,303.43. But the November 30 version of the same budget already cut that line by $25,428.34, two weeks before the announcement and before the board's own reductions, and nothing in any document or on the recording connects the two facts. Both are recorded here; no causal claim is made.

One smaller line is worth naming because of what the corpus knows about it. Business Office Auditors was $10,000 in FY24; the November 30 proposal raised it to $15,000; the December 12 version adopted here puts it back to $10,000. The district's audits in this period were chronically late — the FY2022 audit was not issued until 2025 — and a proposed 50% increase in the audit line was withdrawn without discussion on the record.

Sources: SAU#6 Budget Report 12-12-23 Board V1 (1).PDF (function totals); SAU6 FY25 Proposed Budget (1).PDF (the November 30 version); the December 7 page, flag 9 (the reclassified business-office post).

OBSERVATION Between the two published versions of this budget, twelve days apart, four prior-year actual lines moved by $13,216.50

The column headed "Actual Exp FY23" — a closed fiscal year, ended June 30, 2023 — is not the same in the two documents. Four lines changed: Information Management equipment, $3,352.00 to $4,338.92; Superintendent's Office postage, $3,727.15 to $4,725.93; Business Office contracted services, $11,710.90 to $22,703.02; and Maintenance electricity, $6,569.31 to $6,807.99. Together +$13,216.50, moving the FY23 actual grand total from $1,758,200.40 to $1,771,416.90. The FY22 actual column did not move at all, and the differences reconcile to the cent, so this is a restatement rather than a transcription problem.

Nothing about it is necessarily wrong — late invoices and accrual entries move a prior year's ledger for months after it closes, and one of the four lines was also renamed, "Info Mgt Svcs New Computers" becoming "Info Mgt Svcs Tech Equipment". It is recorded because the two documents are the only two public versions of this budget, because the change is nowhere mentioned in the minutes or on the recording, and because a comparison column that shifts by $13,216.50 in twelve days is a fact a reader comparing the two files will otherwise trip over. The report software's own version stamp changed too, from "Report: 2023.1.26" to "Report: 2023.1.27".

Sources: SAU6 FY25 Proposed Budget (1).PDF, printed 11/30/2023; SAU#6 Budget Report 12-12-23 Board V1 (1).PDF, printed 12/12/2023.

OBSERVATION The budget was adopted as a single total; RSA 194-C:9 requires it to be apportioned between the two districts and certified to each board chair before January 15, and no apportionment is anywhere in this record

RSA 194-C:9, I does two things. It sets the deadline this meeting existed to meet — "At a meeting held before January 1, the school administrative unit board shall adopt a budget" — and it prescribes how the cost is divided: "the apportionment shall be based 1/2 on the average membership in attendance for the previous school year and 1/2 on the most recently available equalized valuation". It then requires a second, separate act with its own deadline: "Prior to January 15 in each year, the board shall certify to the chairperson of the school board of each constituent school district the amount so apportioned."

The board voted a total and nothing else. Neither published budget document carries an apportionment schedule: both are object-code detail footing to one grand total, with no Claremont and Unity columns, no average-membership figures and no equalized valuations. Apportionment is not mentioned on the recording, and the minutes that record the adoption do not mention it either. RSA 194-C:5, III separately requires the board to "apportion the expense of the salaries and benefits among the several districts, and shall certify the apportionment to their respective treasurers and to the state board of education".

This is an observation and not a finding. Certification is an administrative act whose deadline falls a month after this meeting; it may well have been done, and the absence of a document from a packet share is not evidence that it was not. What the public record shows is that two towns' boards approved a shared total on December 14, 2023 without any public statement of how it splits between them. The point is sharper here than on December 7 because the vote is now final: after this meeting the number is fixed, and the apportionment is the only thing left that tells a Claremont or Unity taxpayer what their town owes.

Sources: RSA 194-C:9 (2023 codification — paragraphs I–III only); RSA 194-C:5, III (apportion and certify to district treasurers and the state board); the December 7 page, flag 15.

OBSERVATION Nothing in any public record says what the nonpublic session was about, or who spent the hour before the meeting with legal counsel

Three separate closures stack up on one evening. The agenda opens with "I. 6:00 PM SAU6 Board Non-Meeting with Legal Counsel"; RSA 91-A:2, I(b) excludes "Consultation with legal counsel" from the definition of a meeting, so no notice, minutes or attendance record is owed for it, and none exists. The board then went into nonpublic session under RSA 91-A:3, II(a) and (c) for about thirty-five minutes (flag 8), and sealed those minutes for 99 years (flag 6). The public account of a fifty-five-minute meeting therefore covers about twenty minutes of it.

The exemptions the agenda named are the employee ones: (a), "The dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee or the disciplining of such employee, or the investigation of any charges against him or her", and (c), reputation. This board terminated the superintendent's contract on January 11, 2024, twenty-eight days later, after another nonpublic session whose minutes were sealed for thirty years. Nothing on this record connects those events, and this page does not connect them: the December 7 nonpublic session at this board arose from an unrelated question about an ESSER-funded business-office post, which is a working demonstration that the exemption letters do not tell you the subject. What is on the record is the sequence, and the fact that the only documents that would resolve it are sealed until 2122.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I(b) (consultation with legal counsel is not a meeting); RSA 91-A:3, II(a) and (c); the agenda, items I and VI; the December 7 page, flag 4.

OBSERVATION The minutes carry four small errors of their own, in a document that is otherwise the most complete this board produced in 2023

Recorded so that a reader checking names and codes against them is not misled. The attendance list spells "Jennfier Gallagher"; the budget discussion spells "Candance Crawford" twice, then "Candace Crawford" once; the policy motion pushes "policy GBAA to a second reading" where the agenda item, the packet document and the chair all say BGAA; and the item numbering repeats, with "VI. 7:05 PM Non-Public Meeting Session" followed by a second "VI. 7:45 PM Discussion/Action Items" where the agenda has VII. The agenda has its own: the file name begins with an underscore and carries a doubled space, and the reproduced statutory exemptions read "other than a member of this board" and "shall extend to include" where RSA 91-A:3, II(c) says "other than a member of the public body itself" and "shall extend to".

None of these changes the sense of anything, and they are listed rather than argued. They belong on the page because this same document is the source for eight movers, eight seconders, a named eleven-member roll and every clock time on which flag 8 depends — and a reader is entitled to see both the care and the slips in the record they are being asked to rely on.

Sources: draft minutes of SAU6 Budget Public Hearing 12.14.23.pdf; _SAU6 Budget Public Hearing Agenda 12.14.23.docx (6).pdf; RSA 91-A:3, II(c) (the statutory wording).