Girard & Sullivan Skip Out on Alderman Meeting OKing School Board Tax Cap Override Autonomy
OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — That the Board of Mayor and Aldermen (BMA) intended to take up the proposed City Charter amendments dealing with School Board autonomy during its Tuesday, July 6th meeting only became known late Monday afternoon when the City Clerk’s office published the BMA agenda and supporting materials on the city’s website.
Apparently, this was the first public revelation of Ward 3 Alderman Pat Long’s revision of the School Charter Commission’s amendment dealing with the tax cap. Months ago, Long attempted to address the four amendments proposed by the School Charter Commission, but he responded to the exigencies of the political current rippling across the BMA by tabling his first proposal.
Sources say that Long informed interested parties that he intended to take the issue off of the table at this past Tuesday’s meeting.
A School Charter for the Queen City
Pat Long decided to keep three of the proposed amendments unchanged and presented a revised amendment dealing with the School Board and the tax cap. The School Charter Commission had proposed an amendment granting the School Board autonomy over the Manchester School District budgeting process and finances, with one exception: Any override of the city’s tax cap would have to be approved by the BMA by a supermajority.
Pat Long excised this and gave the tax cap override authority to an independent School Board, if Queen City voters approve the amendments. Like the BMA, the new School Board could only override the tax cap (also known as the “revenue cap”) by the vote of a supermajority.
Long’s proposed amendments are subject to review and approval by the State Attorney General. The former Attorney General, who know sits on the New Hampshire Supreme Court as its Chief Justice, rejected the four amendments as Manchester lacked the ability to amend its City Charter, as regards the schools.
Unlike Concord, which has a fully autonomous School Board and a School Charter separate and distinct from the Concord City Charter, the municipal regulation of the Manchester Board of the School Committee and the Manchester School District it oversees are contained in the Manchester City Charter, proper. Those regulations take up about 1/3rd of a page.
By contrast, Nashua — the Nashua School District is NOT autonomous — devotes a page and a bit of another page in its City Charter to its Board of Education and the running of the NSD.
The New Hampshire General Court strictly controls the educational process. There is little autonomy for School Boards in the “Live Free or Die” state. All city and town boards of education must conform to state law, and there are a considerable number of those laws. This is one reason why a city like Manchester felt it could go “light”
Despite having only 24 hours to read Alderman Long’s proposals (all Inside Queen City Politics Cognozetti check the City Clerk’s site on Monday afternoon to get a copy of the BMA packet), prominent proponents of the tax cap managed to make their opposition to Long’s revised amendment known directly to the BMA and the public.
During the public participation session that precedes all BMA meetings, Will Infantine — a former City Republican Party Chair and state representative who had been an elected member of the School Charter Commission —and former City GOP Chair/ex-State Rep Tammy Simmons spoke out against Long’s amendment.
The head of Victoria Sullivan’s 2019 mayoral campaign, Infantine was there to express his belief that the hard work and taxpayers’ money spent on the School Charter Commission would be wasted if Pat Long’s proposed amendment was put on the municipal ballot.
Infantine expressed dismay over Long dropping the School Charter Commission’s proposal that the Board of Mayor and Aldermen retain the power to accept or veto a proposed tax cap override by the School Board.
He mentioned a letter sent to the BMA members by School Charter Commission Chair Mike Lopez, in which Lopez urged the BMA to put the amendments on the ballot. Infantine thought that Lopez, a former BMA Chairman, wasn’t aware of the change proposed by Alderman Long.
The School Charter Committee’s proposals, he said, were the result of the long, hard work undertaken by a bipartisan body that engaged in give and take. Acts of compromise achieved a consensus embodied in the original four amendments. One of the proposed amendments, the one revised by Pat Long, denied an autonomous School Board the right to override the tax cap.
He was followed by Tammy Simmons, the tireless activist for smaller government and tax relief. Simmons made an impassioned speech that essentially was a defense of the tax cap. Her fear, forcefully expressed, was that a fully autonomous School Board would recklessly override the tax cap and burden property owners with higher taxes.
An email from former Ward Alderman Elizabeth Moreau, read by City Clerk Matt Normand into the record, also registered opposition to giving the School Board full autonomy. In essence, Moreau’s speech was a campaign pitch: She is running for alderman-at-large this year.
If her words are a true indicator of her political intentions, defending the tax cap — which a fully autonomous School Board would threaten in her reckoning — will be one of the main talking points of her campaign,
Not Present: Girard & Sullivan
Incredibly, neither Rich Girard or Victoria Sullivan showed up at the meeting, though they must have known for the better part of 24 hours what was transpiring. Nor did either of them send a message opposing the proposed amendment that could be read into the record during the public participation period.
Both these Republicans have doffed their thinking caps in order to throw them into bullring of the biannual battle that is the “I Wanna B Mayor” sweepstakes . For Sullivan, her desire to be mayor seems to have been a major focus of the last two years, since her humiliating defeat by Joyce Craig.
Rich Girard, who seems impervious to public humiliation, has been nursing a desire to be mayor for decades. His last outing in 2001 ended in defeat, a landslide brought down on him by incumbent Mayor Bob Baines.
It is unlikely Girard will be elected, as most Manchester pundits say he is handicapped by a high unlikeability factor that puts off voters. (In contrast, his “nemesis” Joe Kelly Levasseur — the Queen City’s numero uno politico-media celebrity who popularized the nickname “Stinky” for Girard — is loathed by many but unquestioningly adored by a good chunk of the hoi polloi, despite his brashness and uncouth antics.)
Girard’s dream of occupying the Mayor’s Office (a predilection that — back when he was Mayor Ray Wiczoreck’s chief of staff — got his ass kicked out of City Hall and into the proverbial unemployment line, sources say) will go unsatisfied. Aside from letting little boys dream of big things, running for mayor likely serves as an ego-soothing balm to the humiliation of having to work packing delivery trucks on the “Sunshine Shift” down at UPS.
No one has ever denied that Rich Girard is a hard worker, a very hard worker, or that he is extremely intelligent and has a great knowledge of the inner-workings of government. The rap on Girard is he’s unlikable. Aside from right-wing ideologues, many people just don’t like him.
Getting elected to the School Board is one thing; up until recently, nobody much gave a damn about it… It is the “Little Table” set off from the adult’s “Big Table” that is the Board of Mayor and Aldermen — the Main Event and the Place to Be for those supping at the eternal Thanksgiving that is municipal politics — to riff on Joe Kelly Levasseur’s description of the Board of the School Committee.
Rich Girard did two terms on the School Board. In his first crack at the office, he won, taking out incumbent Kathy Staub in the process, a progressive who reportedly had asked her supporters to give fellow Democrat Nancy Tessier a bullet so she could win.
Each voter is given the chance to vote for two candidates in the at-large alderman and School Board races. Thousands and thousands don’t cast a second vote. Casting a “bullet” is to strategically vote for one candidate and not cast a second vote for another candidate.
In a four-person race with two winners, bullet voters seek to help their preferred candidate rack up votes that will place them first or second. Not voting for a second candidate denies that candidate votes that might outnumber the bullet voter’s favorite
Kathy Staub and her supporters believed that she would repeat her pattern of being the top vote-getter in the at-large School Board race. They didn’t expect her to lose, but they did fear Rich Girard beating Nancy Tessier.
Staub’s unforeseen loss to Girard, who a year earlier had been embroiled in the Little Sexting Scandal, was the second greatest shock of the November 2015 election. (The biggest was Joyce Craig losing to Ted Gatsas by 64 votes.)
In 2017, Girard was “reelected” when the Democrats couldn’t put up a second candidate to run with Nancy Tessier (nor a second candidate to run with alderman-at-large Danny O’Neil), so Girard automatically was miracled back into the seat. (O’Neil and Joe Levasseur, with no opponents, similarly were declared the winners of their contests, though both would have won against all comers. That cannot be said of Girard, whom Staub likely would have beaten in a “rematch”.)
Two candidates seeking to put their pointing finger through the Big Brass Ring on the Manchester Merry-Go-Round that is Queen City municipal politics — and neither showed up at the Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting, or sent in a message. The lack of their presence was a shock, in kind if not degree of the 2015 Joyce Craig-Kathy Staub defeats.
This is not how to run a campaign for Mayor of Manchester.
In my opinion, neither of these self-proposed candidates — both of whom lost in landslides when they previously ran for mayor — has what it takes to be mayor. They are incredibly weak candidates.
Among the heavyweight politicians of the Queen City — now that Ted Gatsas is out of the running, the only potential opponent of Joyce Craig with a chance of beating her in November is Joe Kelly Levasseur.
It’s a slim chance, but for the Republicans opposing Craig, slim is better than the NO CHANCE AT ALL represented by Rich Girard or Victoria Sullivan in the municipal election come November.
