Update on Funding for the Community Newsletter
Yesterday’s article on the defunding of the Nottingham Community Newsletter received some important comments and caused one Budget Committee member to email me. Here are the comments.
Newsletter Volunteer Mary Crockett wrote:
Thanks for getting this out there. As a volunteer on the Newsletter I had hope that defunding would not happen. There are many people who do not have access to the newsletter online, as we have discussed this.
Also the printing of the newsletter has always been donated by the printer, saving the town a lot of money. Sad that this was not understood by the BOS. Big surprise
Budget Committee Member and Newsletter Volunteer Charlotte Fyfe wrote:
To clarify, and In the interest of accuracy, funding for the Nottingham Newsletter (as a line item In the Town’s Operating Budget) was proposed to be reduced, not eliminated. There was a general consensus amongst the Select Board and the Budget Committee that the Newsletter was valued and should remain supported.
With a very tight 4% budget cap, however, it has been necessary to economize in every way possible, on every line item possible.
The good news is that the Nottingham Newsletter WILL continue on, bringing information to all community members.
Budget Committee Member Owen Friend-Gray wrote:
I am disappointed in the way this information was presented to the public and the skew you placed on this article. As someone with a fairly large audience, I am wondering if you fully watched the meetings where this has been discussed and understood what the conversation detailed.
In a tight budget year, this item was discussed in an effort to save on printing and mailing costs. The idea was to find about half of the regular costs to encourage the other half to be distributed digitally. There was never any talk of discontinuing the newsletter itself. It was recognized as having greater circulation in town likely than a newspaper like the Union Leader or Fosters.
I would encourage you to watch the entire video again and I am concerned the message was not relayed to the public in the most accurate of terms.
Commentary:
Thanks, everyone for writing and pointing out two errors: that the town doesn’t pay the cost of printing as this is donated by North River Printing, and that some money was left in this budget line, however, only enough to mail the newsletter to about half of the town. The defunding of the newsletter is to force the newsletter volunteers to figure out some way to identify households who can receive the newsletter by email and which ones must receive it by mail. Although it is unknown how this can or will achieved, the Budget Committee decided to cut the budget by an arbitrary figure, without evidence that the newsletter would be able to continue functioning on this figure.
Moreover, the fact that some money was left in the budget does not address the central issue: the voters at Town Meeting specifically voted to have a newsletter mailed to them bi-monthly. Therefore, is it appropriate for the Budget Committee to overturn that decision? Would it not have been more appropriate to put this as a warrant article and ask the voters if they wished to continue funding the newsletter?
This isn't the first time information presented here was incomplete or had a definite spin. If a blogger is going to present information it should at the very least be accurate. I'm glad Charlotte and Owen clarified this information for the town.
I'm glad you posted the additional comments you've received in response to your article on defunding the Newsletter, as I think there were a couple of important points that were made by Charlotte and Owen. To your question of whether or not the warrant article should continue indefinitely or if a new one asking if the funding should continue or not seems like a moot point to me.
When a point about something wasn't covered specifically in a military directive, we were taught to think about what the spirit and intent of that directive or regulation was or in other words, is something more likely than not to be the case being considered. That warrant article that you researched and posted, doesn't say that it's meant to be an on-going process and I don't think it was intended to be or it would be written differently, as in this warrant article will not lapse until the voters present a new warrant article asking if the town wishes to discontinue warrant article 20 passed in 1999. If that wasn't true then or isn't true now, imagine all the warrant articles that have been passed in the intervening 24 that we should still be funding because they haven't been specifically ended by a new vote! Nope--that warrant article had reached the end of its life cycle a couple decades back. IMO.