Two Towns Vote Against Central Berkshire Regional Agreement
DALTON, Mass. — An update to the Central Berkshire Regional School District's Regional Agreement that was thought to be uncontroversial has turned out not to be the case.
The item failed during the Hinsdale annual town meeting on May 15 and the Peru town meeting on June 1. The regional agreement needed six out of the seven towns to vote in favor of passing.
Hinsdale voted against the Regional Agreement draft because it wanted included in the agreement that the School Committee's decision on the voting method for incurring debt needs to be unanimous; not a two-thirds vote, Superintendent Leslie Blake-Davis said.
During the School Committee meeting on May 23, School Committee Chair Richard Peters highlighted how the document is not supposed to be controversial because the district is just documenting what was already agreed to and getting the agreement up to date with state law
The district has been working on updating the agreement for more than a year, receiving aid from Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools consultant Stephan Hemman. MARS consults districts on creating regional agreements between towns.
An ad hoc committee, comprised of representatives from all the towns involved, not just School Committee members, collaborated on revising the 2008 document.
The revised document incorporates updated language and includes information to meet the requirements of the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The original agreement was created in 1958 but was amended a number of times and was approved locally but never by the state Department of Education, which is required.
This updated agreement that went up to vote for the seven towns but failed was preliminarily approved by DESE, and the commissioner would have sign off after the towns' approval
The draft more clearly describes the budget and apportionment process and the agreement amendment process.
It also includes two pathways for towns to withdraw from the district if they ever choose to do so.
The proposed draft also included "required provisions regarding Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB) and pension liabilities."
These provisions make it so all "member towns carry their fair share of these costs in the event that a town is added or if a town withdraws."
There is also a provision for the agreement to be reviewed every five years in case there is a need for future changes.
Hinsdale voted against the updated draft, citing concerns with how the district votes on incurring debt.
The concerns stem from the School Committee's 2019 decision to vote by popular vote for the approximately $72 million Wahconah Regional High School building project.
Prior to the Peru town meeting, Peters said he was "pretty confident that we're going to pass this at Peru and Cummington because it should not be controversial. You know, Hinsdale made it controversial because they're holding a grudge."
This turned out not to be the case, as Peru followed in Hinsdale's footsteps during the June 1 town meeting.
In 2019, the Wahconah Regional High School building project was approved with just more than 51 percent of the vote — 1,785 of the 3,483 voters districtwide (51.2 percent.) Of that, 1,748 voters turned out in Dalton alone.
Voters in Becket and Washington voted in favor of the project by sizable margins. In Becket, 176 of 253 voters (69.6 percent) voted yes. In Washington, the margin was 112-54 (67.5 percent yes).
The project failed in Cummington, Hinsdale, Peru, and Windsor. Only 8.8 percent voted in favor in Cummington (194-450). In Hinsdale, the district's second-largest town, only 42.3 percent voted in favor (334-246). In Peru, only 38.6 percent voted in favor (162-102), and in Windsor, only 40.1 percent voted in favor (139-93). More on the votes here.
Hinsdale voters wanted to prevent this from happening in the future and urged for the School Committee's decision on the voting method for incurring debt to be unanimous and not a two-thirds vote.
This is not possible because it is state law that the vote be a two-thirds vote, Peters said.
"Two-thirds is in Mass General law, so we can't change it. … So basically, within our agreement, which unfortunately didn't really come out at that meeting, is in the absence of they're not signing it, they can still not sign it, we would still follow Mass General Law," Blake-Davis said during the School Committee meeting last month.
"The difference in the agreement is there's the default clause. So the default says we will try to go town by town by default. We'll go town by town, which we did when we move forward with the track component of [the Wahconah Regional High School building project.] But in the absence of signing it, it's still two-thirds because that's in Mass General law."
School Committee member David Stuart said voters at the Hinsdale town meeting also made it clear that they did not trust that the district wouldn't change the process of voting to push through what they want it.
Stuart said the district has been telling the town for two years now that it takes three-quarters of the town to ratify.
The ad hoc committee and district consultant have also worked with that understanding, and this has been said during town meetings.
After the meeting, Stuart said he was surprised to see an email from Blake-Davis stating that MARS consultant Jay Barry was going to go back to DESE to see if the district could round down to pass the regional agreement. If you do the math, three-quarters is 5.25 towns.
"We've never been able to do that in any of the parliamentary procedures we'd use. If you do the math the other way, five-sevenths is 71.4 percent; clearly, it is not 75 percent. You can't just meet the threshold; you have to exceed it," Stuart said.
"So, to go back to DESE to see if we could pass this, in a fact, do exactly what Hinsdale was worried about us doing, we pretty much just proved their point that given the opportunity, we're gonna try and push something through."
Hinsdale does not trust that the two-third vote of the school committee is sufficient to prevent the committee from changing the voting methods, Stuart said.
"Hinsdale Select Board had recommended voting it down specifically for that reason, specifically because they do not trust us," he said.
"So, for two years, saying six of seven towns to ratify, but then within two hours of the vote, we get an email that says that we're going to try and round down the number of rounds to 5 of 7 in order to get this passed, really just proves Hinsdale's point."
Blake-Davis clarified that in her email, she did not say the district was going to try to go in that direction; she was being transparent with the School Committee as it is something Barry wanted to double-check on.
"I didn't say that we were trying to push something through. I just wanted to be transparent with the School Committee, but that's what he said to me," Blake Davis said.
Blake-Davis said she went to confirm that six out of seven towns need to vote in favor of the agreement to pass.
It is too early to report the next steps. The School Committee chair will open the topic up for discussion and summarize the next steps during the School Committee meeting on June 27 at Kittredge School at 7 p.m., Blake-Davis told iBerkshires in a follow-up.
Tags: CBRSD, regional agreement,
