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With a surprise executive order, Council President Patricia Hilton has granted herself to power to temporarily amend the Tiverton Home Rule Charter. Even during an emergency, that isn't power the people of Tiverton should give away.
News & Commentary
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Original Reports
About Those School Budget Claims
During his initial pitch to the Budget Committee, Tiverton's new superintendent, Peter Sanchioni, suggested that people had to trust him to set our school system aright. He is correct that trust is critical, and distrust is the major hurdle facing anybody who wishes to bring Tiverton back to a place of compromise and cooperation. That is why the superintendent's final presentation to the Budget Committee before it voted on a budget for his department was so disappointing. At the highest level, the School Committee never really compromised. They asked the town for the highest budget they could possibly request by law. (Actually their request exceeded the maximum by $3,624.) On top of that, they added $311,000 in "critical" capital expenses that they'd planned to fund out of their own reserves but now want the town to cover. Two more-specific parts of the presentation, however, are where trust really takes a hit. The milder one first: Sanchioni presented the following slide, showing that the local contribution to the school department was down slightly since fiscal year 2015. One could quibble with the numbers. All of the amounts for the town contribution are the financial town referendum's (FTR's) total appropriation for the school minus the assumed state aid at that time except for the first year, which is the actual town contribution from the audit. The FY15 town contribution in this slide is therefore $25,687 too high. More important, however, is a column's worth of information that the slide leaves out: the…
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Links to documents relevant to town government that may or may not be available elsewhere.
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