001result ends up being the same. People in this town support the schools. Your town hall, guess what? That's an old school. Not everybody knows that, but I always enjoy when Brendan brings it up. Um, we have our town meeting. We have our select board meetings every two weeks in an old school. And the reason why it's there is because someone's wife believed that education was that important. and they decided to make that building. So again, I don't understand why people are surprised at these outcomes. And it's not some kind of a tyranny. It's the majority of the people just simply support the schools. And no matter how you change the system, that's not going to change. And it's not democratic to continue to try to find ways to change the outcome without respecting the fact
002that people have turned down these warrant articles year after year after year and people continue to support these budgets year after year after year. Eventually, you just have to accept. Yes. >> Thank you, ma'am. >> Thank you. Um, Kate Elkins, 97 Mason Road, just speaking on on behalf of my personal opinion, not my finance position. Um, and I I just have to say that I support this article, we again for folks that are maybe new to this process as we come here tonight, we discuss, we have rich conversations, we hear from both sides, we debate each other. And that could be, for example, what we heard tonight on the default budget. We heard that we may need to cut a teacher if we were to vote for the default budget. And so just so the
003that we're all clear then that goes so we've all discussed as Ed said you know the vegetarian diet analogy but in in the fact is that's going to go to the voters who have not come here tonight who have not watched the recording who have not looked at the minutes who have not been in any of the school board meetings and they're going to say you know what I don't want to pay taxes is and they have no idea what it means as one of our previous um folks mentioned what the repercussions are. They just vote simply on the language that they see. And that's why it is so important to vote this to vote on this and and to support this because it is just so deceiving. It's so deceiving this mechanism that uh
004that we would vote and and being a small community, I I think it's just such a disservice to to use this um this mechanism of voting. Thank you. >> Thank you very much, sir. >> Hi, I would like to stand in support of article 8. Um >> and your name is >> I'm sorry. your name? >> Tyler Fredani. >> Um, >> learn it one of these days. >> It's okay. Um, >> we've addressed this idea of the difference between what happens here and what makes it to the ballot. And in particular, I really want to stress that when it comes to something like the first articles we discussed tonight, these statutory um budget items that you would think because the language is very particular that would mean that there's very little word smithing to be
005done. But the reality of what happens is that only one side at the end of the deliberative session is going to propose the number they wanted to see on that ballot. The default budget is in almost all circumstances not the number that anyone walked into this meeting being okay with. There are people in here who wanted to fight for the budget that the school board supported and make sure that that appeared on the ballot. There are also people who wanted to see it amended to alleviate our tax burden. But there wasn't really anyone here saying that a default budget is okay. And I understand this because we're here to discuss the articles. But the reality is what appears on the ballot is a decision between a option that no one wants and one of the
006two sides of the argument from this session here. So it stands to reason that the ballot will never reflect the actual discussion that needs to be had. So I do oppose SP2 and I support this article. >> Thank you very much, sir. Melanie Leake to McDaniel's Drive. I just want to say first of all that I support everyone's right to vote. My ancestors, your ancestors fought and died so that people had the right to vote. So it is very important. But I will also say that we have experienced firsthand changes in or language that goes on to an SB2 ballot. And I have one from 2023. The original petition said, "To prevent taxpayer dollars from funding lobbyists against the interest of parents and citizens, shall the Brookline School District zero out budget line items dues."
007And we heard it also today because we were at deliberative session and fortunately we were. The language was changed to pre to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding the Brooklyn school district's portion of SAU41's membership in the New Hampshire School Board Association. Shall the Brookline School District zero out budget item item budget item dues and then 102310 810 0. But this is this is the kind of stuff that is why SB2 can be very dangerous intentional or not. This is misinformation. and we will have misinformed voters and we have a room of I don't know probably 40 people 50 people now voting on all of this when we could have a meeting with our school with all of our participants and we can discuss and we can amend together. I don't think we're at the point
008now where SB2 is working