Archive for the 'Lawsuits' Category

Legal challenge costs taxpayers money

Published by admin on February 21, 2008 in Lawsuits and Taxes. 0 Comments

 

The Monadnock Taxpayer’s Association’s core group of agitators is at it again, this time filing a complaint in Concord that’s racking up legal bills for the Monadnock Regional School District - and your taxes are paying for it. It seems that every time one turns around, this group is either threatening legal action for one thing or going to court for another. Will it never end?

According to a story in yesterday’s Sentinel, “Richard Bauries — of the watchdog citizens’ group The Monadnock School Taxpayers Association — said he had instigated the action because of concerns about the warrant’s wording.”

At least one taxpayer is fed up. He connected with KFM today to express his frustration.

“That’s not the way you save money for the taxpayers,” he said. “What’s going on with these people? They are causing unnecessary expense for the district, arguing about whether the word ‘evergreen’ was used one day and not the day before. It’s just absurd.”

Is this a good use of your taxpayer dollars? Decide for yourself. Read the Keene Sentinel article here. Read The Sentinel’s brief history of this mess here. We’ve also pasted both below for you.

Add your comments and let us know what you think.

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Content © 2008 SentinelSource.com. Used with permission.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Monadnock legal battle keeps going
Wording of vote is latest divisive issue

Anika Clark
Sentinel Staff

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

SWANZEY CENTER — After facing numerous lawsuits in recent months, the Monadnock Regional School District is again being eyed by state officials.

Assistant N.H. Attorney General James W. Kennedy recently began examining the warrant district residents will consider at the election in March — specifically, he said, the part that deals with the teachers’ contracts.

“We’re conducting an inquiry regarding a complaint that came in last week regarding whether or not the correct process was followed concerning the notice of the warrant article,” said Kennedy, who covers all election-enforcement issues in the state.

The N.H. Attorney General’s Office did not disclose who filed the complaint against the district. But in a voicemail message to The Sentinel Tuesday night, Richard Bauries — of the watchdog citizens’ group The Monadnock School Taxpayers Association — said he had instigated the action because of concerns about the warrant’s wording.

his latest dispute is about an “evergreen” clause included in the proposed teachers’ contract. It ensures that after the contract expires in 2012, annual pay raises would continue while a new agreement is negotiated.

An evergreen clause is a provision that extends the term of a contract beyond its primary expiration date.

The school board supported this proposed contract in November and, at a meeting on Jan. 8, approved the wording of the article that will appear on this year’s ballot.

But school board member James I. Carnie of Richmond recently cried foul because the words “evergreen clause” weren’t included in the warrant language at that time.

These words did not appear in the warrant article until the public budget hearing on Jan. 10, according to school board Chairman Colline Dreyfuss and the district’s attorney, Paul L. Apple.

At a Feb. 5 school board meeting, Carnie questioned how the change occurred, asked who was answerable to it, and said it could be grounds for resignation, according to meeting minutes.

However, before board members approved the warrant language on Jan. 8, Dreyfuss told them the evergreen clause was part of the proposed contract, according to meeting minutes.

Regardless, the school board attempted to nip the issue in the bud Tuesday night by re-approving the article for the teachers’ contract — evergreen clause and all.

Carnie, who was not present at Tuesday’s meeting, drew suspicion as the driving force behind Kennedy’s inquiry because he had recently threatened to contact the Attorney General’s Office on the matter.

However, in a voicemail message to The Sentinel Tuesday night, Bauries, referring to himself in the third-person, said, “It was Mr. Bauries who took Mr. Carnie with me to the Attorney General’s Office.”

The trip to the Attorney General’s Office, Bauries said, was part of a multi-stop trip to Concord that included stops at the Department of Revenue Administration, the N.H. Retirement System, the state Supreme Court library and the Secretary of State’s Office.

Bauries charged that school board members had approved the contract with only an overview of what it entailed.

His wife, Patricia Bauries, added that while the public was told at the Jan. 10 public hearing that the board supported the contract warrant article, the board had actually voted to support something different.

“They approved one thing — what they believed to be one thing — and it was another,” she said.

School board member Douglas Lyman of Troy called the glitch a “clerical oversight” and said Tuesday’s re-approval would allow the board to get back to the business of education.

Still, at Tuesday night’s meeting school board member Jonathan Kenyon of Swanzey lamented the lingering negative effects repeated litigation could have on voters’ trust in their elected officials.

In e-mails to The Sentinel, school board members such as Karen Cota of Roxbury and Eugene White of Swanzey, have also charged members of the Taxpayers Association with trying to sabotage the contract.

But Bauries showed no sign of letting up.

Despite Apple’s belief the school board’s re-approval would appease the Attorney General’s Office, Bauries said the matter could wind up in Cheshire County Superior Court.

In the meantime, Apple said, legal fees are piling up, with this latest action alone costing the district thousands of dollars.

“You guys are getting to a point where … you might want to consider hiring an on-staff lawyer,” he told board members. “You’ve got enough to keep yourselves busy.”

Anika Clark can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1432, or aclark@keenesentinel.com.

Evergreen clause source of dispute in past

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

SWANZEY CENTER — The latest inquiry by the Attorney General’s office isn’t the first time the evergreen clause has come into dispute in the Monadnock Regional School District.

The clause, which is a provision that extends the term of a contract beyond its primary expiration date, was originally included in the 2003-06 teachers’ contract that voters approved.

But last March, the Public Employee Labor Relations Board ruled the clause unenforceable, arguing that Monadnock residents weren’t properly notified of it in the 2003 warrant.

The meaning of that decision has became a source of confusion during this new contract cycle.

Some school board members assumed the labor relations board’s ruling axed the evergreen clause from the 2003-06 contract.

“When you have a contract and something through either litigation or through a ruling of a government entity is removed from that contract or declared unenforceable, it’s no longer in the contract,” said Troy school board representative Douglas Lyman.

But attorney Paul L. Apple said the clause never actually went away.

“It’s still a clause in the contract. It’s just unenforceable,” he said.

The importance of this distinction?

Based on this logic, if school board members assumed the clause was gone because it wasn’t listed as a “change” between the old and new contracts, they were wrong.

— Anika Clark

The Sullivan mess - and the way out

Published by rmitchell on January 26, 2008 in Editorial and Lawsuits. 2 Comments

“A house divided against itself can not stand.” –Abraham Lincoln, 1851.


Once again, Sullivan’s good name was in the Keene Sentinel with regard to the lawsuit against the Monadnock Regional School District (see School issues causing divide). That’s unfortunate because the people of Sullivan put their faith and trust in their elected officials, and in this case I believe that those officials succumbed to a contagion of misplaced anger and some pretty irrational arguments.

That anger was whipped up by a small group that included folks from the Monadnock Taxpayer’s Association, whose members apparently met with town officials. Now a group of residents has come forward to challenge the town in a lawsuit to stop the action against the district. Sullivan taxpayers will have their chance to weigh in on this sorry mess in their upcoming town meeting and when the do they should give the town’s lawsuit against the district the boot. Here’s why.

It makes no sense
I was at a public hearing on the school budget last year when Dick Bauries, of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association and then a member of the Budget Committee, demanded that the school district immediately discontinue its early retirement program, which had been approved by voters and had been in effect since 2000. The superintendent explained to Mr. Bauries - and not for the first time - that the district’s legal counsel had recommended against doing so.

There are several good reasons why this was a bad idea. The key to the argument in the suit is that voters weren’t given the “true costs” of the early retirement program before they voted on it. I suppose that means voters couldn’t be trusted to do the math themselves: They needed an in-depth report that gave all of the “what if” scenarios, including what would happen if every teacher decided to retire.

As with most of these silly little wars that keep the school board divided and distracted, there’s kernel of truth here. This backward-looking argument turns on a technicality: Whether what was posted more than seven years ago about the original warrant article was sufficient. But does this matter, really, at this point - seven years after the fact? Are we going to go back and force early retirees to return the money, put them all back in their old jobs and say, “Sorry, we changed our minds?” Of course not. And the costs of the program, despite dire predictions, have not broken the district. Nor will it in the future, for reasons that I’ll make clear shortly.

The whole idea of trying to retroactively wiggle out of a contract approved more than seven years ago seems pretty ridiculous. If you went to lease a car, signed the papers, and then several years later went back to the dealer and told him that you wanted your money back because you didn’t fully grasp the financial implications of the contract, what do you think they would say?

It will cost taxpayers a lot of money for nothing
The amount of money that would have been saved by reneging on the early retirement program in the coming year was very small relative to the overall budget. The teacher’s union would be forced to take legal action, the district’s counsel advised that we would in all likelihood lose the case, and the legal bills to defend against that case would probably use up most - perhaps all - of any savings that might accrue in the coming year.

Furthermore, the early retirement program was tied to a teacher’s contract that had expired a year earlier. The continuation of the early retirement benefit, which allows no more than five teachers per year to participate, was a key point of contract negotiations going forward. The program was likely to be either eliminated entirely, substantially changed, or phased out completely in any new contract. (In fact the agreement recently reached with the teachers, if approved in March, will phase out the program).

Despite this, Mr. Baurie’s public response was “Let them sue!” And sue they would have. First the teacher’s union would have challenged the action. Then, if they didn’t prevail, every early retiree would surely have engaged the district. Taxpayers would have paid the legal expenses every step of the way. (That was in January. Two months later, in the March elections, Mr. Bauries was defeated in his bid to be reelected to the Budget Committee).

Everyone’s a loser - especially your kids
When things didn’t go Mr. Bauries’ way, I half expected a lawsuit. But I didn’t expect it to come from the town of Sullivan. This was the Monadnock Taxpayers Association’s battle, one of a string of ongoing legal maneuvers and petitions the group has arranged over the years that in my view have caused much stress for the administration, disrupted meetings, and have successfully diverted time and energy away from the school board’s core duties: Things like helping to provide an excellent education for students in safe, well maintained buildings that meet minimum requirements for accreditation. Keeping focused can be hard to do that when you have a small cadre of angry middle aged men getting on their soapboxes, giving lectures on their latest cause du jour and making angry outbursts at board meetings. (Try going to some school board meetings. It will make you sick.)

It’s not Sullivan’s fight
In launching the lawsuit against the district, I believe that Sullivan taxpayers became a proxy, funding a battle for someone else’s war. If Sullivan’s task is to investigate whether or not to leave the district, it makes no sense to spend Sullivan citizens’ tax dollars fighting this battle, rather than forming a withdrawl study committee, as directed by voters. Even if it prevailed, would this in some way affect the decision as to whether or not to withdraw? Is this what such a decision is predicated upon?

Sullivan’s voting citizens could be excused for feeling outraged at how this has played out. They’re paying through their taxes to prosecute and defend this case. Win or lose they’re chewing off their own foot.

The lawsuit seems to be searching for issues
The Sullivan lawsuit against the district, as cited in the Sentinel story, throws in other, unrelated accusations for good measure. These appear to track closely with the Monadnock Taxpayers Association’s agenda. I won’t bore you with them all, but one is that the district is charging less than the full cost for out of district students who attend the Monadnock Community Connections School (MC2). This innovative program, one of a few bright spots in the NEASC’s evaluation of the Middle/High School (now on probation and one step away from losing its accreditation), has long been the target of the Monadnock Taxpayers Association, whose members would like nothing more than to see it shut down and the money for its operation returned to the taxpayers.

The last straw
Now a group of fed up Sullivan taxpayers, lead by resident John Hoffman, is suing the town to stop the lawsuit against its own schools. Was some of the $25,000 allocated to investigating withdrawing from the district used instead to fight this battle, as it appears from comments atribuged to Sullivan Selecman Hotchkiss in this week’s Sentinel story? Is this what Sullivan voters wanted?

Fortunately, this probably won’t play out in court. Thanks to a petition article against the lawsuit, also submitted by Hoffman, the issue will be decided by Sullivan’s voters at their town meeting, as it should be.

Hopefully, the residents of Sullivan will put aside the lawsuit, get involved, and work to make the schools a better place for all of our kids.