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Voters make up for selectmens $110,000 mistake

$80,000 warrant article will help town get budget back on track.

By WENDY WALSH, Telegraph Staff (NH)

GREENVILLE  Selectmen James Hartley and Russell Cook faced heat from voters at Saturdays Town Meeting for an accounting error that led to a $110,000 surprise deficit in the towns budget this year, but, ultimately, they were forgiven and admonished to do better in the future.

The town passed an $80,000 warrant article with the hope that the town can squeeze an extra $30,000 out of its budget over the next year so voters will not have to come up with any further money to correct the error next year, said Hartley, chairman of the board of selectmen.

About 75 out of the towns approximately 2,200 voters attended the Town Meeting at the Greenville Elementary School to discuss and vote on a total of 14 warrant articles mainly concerned with the deficit, proposed road repairs and proposed repairs to stone retaining walls, Hartley said.

Voters approved a $925,600 article which will authorize the town to come up with a maximum of $165,000 to repair approximately 7,600 feet of road on Main, Mill, Pleasant and Temple streets and Dunster Avenue, according to the warrant article and Keith Pratt, an engineer from Underwood Engineers, Inc. of Portsmouth, N.H., and Brunswick, Maine

Additional money for the repairs will come from the state and money the town has already approved for road and water repairs, according to the town report.

While a number of voters voiced concern that the road repairs  which will mainly be done in the center of town  are mainly cosmetic and not a necessity in a year in which the town faces a $110,000 deficit, some voters said they felt the town needs to improve its image in order to keep residents from leaving.

"We can at least look at it in the middle of the winter when were drowning our sorrows in a bottle of beer and a video from Lizottes," Maria Holbein, who lives on Main Street, said.

The town decided not to raise $76,000 to fix stone retaining walls on Main Street, but did approve a back-up article which will allow the town to raise a third of the money if the state agrees to pick up two thirds of the tab for the repairs, according to the town report.

The meeting began at 9 a.m. with a somewhat tense standoff between Frank Biron, the towns independent auditor from the Nashua accounting firm of Melanson, Heath & Co., selectmen Hartley and Cook, and a number of "enraged" voters who had questions and concerns about how the error occurred.

Theo deWinter, also a selectman when the accounting error occurred, was voted out of office in a 232 to 140 vote Tuesday and replaced with John Singelais, according to town records.

"Clearly your report is inaccurate. ... It bothers me as a citizen not to get accurate information in the report," Marshall Buttrick of Adams Hill Road said.

Hartley said the selectmen will begin consultation with representatives from Municipal Resources, Inc. of Concord next week to get the towns finances under control and make sure a similar incident never happens again.

Selectmen hope that, as a result of the meeting with MRI, the town will be able to make two delinquent educational payments and come to terms with the towns state-guaranteed $228,000 educational loan due on March 30, Hartley said.

Last spring, the Legislature agreed to give state-guaranteed loans to a handful of towns crunched by the education-funding situation in the state.

The proposed town budget of $1,140,115 shrank to approximately $1,039,035 after voters shaved off $40,000 for drainage and parking improvements at the municipal pool, $500 in cemetery repairs, $15,000 in the administrative budget, a $1,500 increase in Fourth of July expenses, and $62,500 for capital reserve funds and trust funds.

The town did approve $15,000 for improvements at the Chamberlain Free Library.

Greenville has the sixth-highest tax rate in the state at $37.96 per $1,000 of assessed property valuation.

Hartley, a selectman for 19 years, said he expects taxes will increase this year, but will not know the exact figure until the rate is set in October and said he cannot venture a guess until that time.

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), March 19, 2000