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State Auditor Visits Groton To Highlight Heavy Impact of Unfunded Mandates on Town Budgets

SC Member Stephanie Cronin, Representative Shelia Harrington, Auditor Suzanne Block, Superintendent Rodriguez, SC Member Alison Manugian

   State Auditor Suzanne Bump visited Groton for what turned into a town hall meeting with a small but influential audience.  Auditor Bump was here at the invitation of Groton Dunstable Superintendent Kristan Rodriguez to talk on the subject of “unfunded state mandates” which place a heavy burden on local school budgets and to a lesser extent on general town budgets.

    The auditor’s office has a separate department focused on the topic of unfunded mandates which was created as part of proposition 2.5. The Auditor’s office is supposed to produce a report every five years which lists all new laws that have been passed by the legislature that require additional expenditures at the local level for compliance, but which are not provided reimbursement funds  to offset the additional expense. 

    Because most towns are limited to property taxes as their major source of revenue, these unfunded mandates put a lot of pressure on town budgets—property tax growth rate is capped by Prop 2.5; expenses for new legal requirements are not.  Auditor Bump has used her legal mandate to study unfunded mandates to put pressure on legislators to make visible and deal with the financial impact of their new legislation on cities and towns.

    A concrete example of unfunded mandates is the state law which requires regional school districts to provide a seat on a school bus for every student in the district regardless of whether or not the student actually rides the bus.  Municipal districts are allowed to charge students a fee for bus service. Regional schools are not. When the law was passed the sponsors promised that this new requirement would be fully funded by the state but that never happened. The state’s annual budget consistently reimburses this bus service (Chapter 71 funds) at well below the actual cost to the local district.

    Although documenting unfunded mandates has been a legal requirement for decades, Auditor Bump is the first auditor in decades to actually produce the report and actively engage the legislature in this issue.  A former legislator herself and the Secretary of Labor under Gov. Deval Patrick, she clearly does not shy away from interacting with the legislative branch.  Ms. Bump currently is lobbying for her office to be an active part of the review process for new legislation so it potentially can point out the financial impact of new laws before they are passed.

    Auditor Bump believes that her office’s activities in the past five years have had a positive impact on reducing the number of new state laws passed without adequate funding.  Of equal concern however is the executive branch rulemaking, as state departments rework their implementation of an existing law with little or no external review, resulting in unanticipated additional expense at the local level. Here again the auditor is trying to have her office become a part of the review process for new state government rulemaking, particularly in high impact areas like the Department of Education (DESE).

    Towards the end of the Groton session, the presentation turned to brainstorming and the audience consisting of Local State Rep. Harrington, School Superintendent Rodriguez and two of the more financially-savvy school board members from Groton and Dunstable may have hatched a plan.   

    The state auditor’s office has begun producing special reports that focus on a particular legislative area, such as their report on the new safety regulations for private and local dams that provided no funds for repair, to raise the visibility of high impact areas where unfunded mandates are the culprit.   

    Since Ms. Bump herself lives in a small, rural school district she understands many of the budget pressures faced by small regional districts in the state. Her office is currently looking for a new report topic so she suggested to the audience that it may make sense for her team to focus on this issue of the state’s financial impact on small regional districts as the topic of their next report.

The full video of the Auditor’s talk is available on our website. If you are interested in the full report on unfunded mandates it can be found on the state’s website: https://goo.gl/RXlOyi

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