Concord Voters To Consider Ballot Questions on Election Day

Depending on which school district you live in, Concord voters will see between one and three questions on the ballot on Nov. 8.

The city will ask all voters to approve that were created in the wake of the 2010 U.S. Census. Due to population changes, mostly in the northern end of the city, which has seen the bulk of new housing construction, new wards had to be created. Over the summer, a met to discuss the population changes and look at new ward lines. After some , the Concord City Council approved the new wards and sent the proposal to the voters.

Concord voters will see a on the First-in-the-Nation primary ballot on Jan. 10, 2012, calling for the process to be changed, removing the voter approval process from future redistricting.

Voters in the – which includes most of the city, with the exception of some parts of Ward 1 and 2 – will be voting on approval of a new . They will also have a second ballot question proposing to change the way school board members are elected, moving from nine at-large members to a mix of both at-large and district representation. The districts would be made up of multiple city wards, according to the proposal. State officials although suggested it would be better for Concord to have a 49B process, not unlike virtually every other community in New Hampshire.

The district recently sent out a double-sided “voter guide” mailer to homes in Concord, attempting to educate voters about the proposed changes to the school district’s charter. The mailer, which was written in a relatively neutral way, presented the exact wording of the two ballot questions and then seven question and answer offerings, explaining the need for changes the specifics within the ballot questions.

The district paid for the mailer, according to Superintendent of Schools Christine Rath, using the district’s nonprofit bulk postal meter.

“We sent it out in lieu of a newsletter,” she said, “We sent it out for information purposes … It was meant to be strictly information, trying to be totally neutral, just discussing the facts.”

Not included in the mailer though was any reference to a minority report written by two members of the who suggested that the proposal should be rejected due to its super-majority requirement, a provision that opponents have suggested is too high a standard for implementing changes to the charter. Also not included in the mailer was the district’s website which features all of the information that was seen and consider by the Charter Commission, including documents, minutes of the meetings, comments from the general public about the proposals, as well as the minority report.

In an interview, Rath said, in hindsight, the mailer should have included the website link so voters could seek more information about the proposals.

“If I did it again, I would have put the link,” she said. “That would have been easy to do. We’ve got all the links on our webpage.”

According to Rath, the school district has a budget line item for mailing. In the past, households received four newsletters a year. However, due to budget constraints, the district has cut mailer expenses down to two per year, at a cost of about $2,000 annually. Some years, she said, they haven’t done any mailers, instead relying on the district’s website to deliver information to parents and taxpayers.

“The option is the website and we discussed that with this,” she said. “But, there is something about people getting a piece of mail that they could carry to the polls.”