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Last week, as some of you know, the Keene voters did an odd thing. They voted in a slate of pro-education candidates, candidates that stood in opposition to the Taxpayer's Union set. And they voted down a million and a half dollar increase in the school budget and a negotiated contract with the teacher's union that took over a year to reach.
I supported the budget, not because I'm a crack accountant, but because a number of people I trust had indicated that the cost hike was, for the most part, this year's price for last year's programs. And I supported the teacher's increase, not because I blindly approve of all educational spending, but because after endless negotiation that clearly pushed as hard as was feasible, we had a settlement.
All this is really beside the point. What struck me was not that these things lost in Keene. What struck me was the majority of voters, through what I can only imagine was a misunderstanding, showed support for educational funding, while voting down a budget in such a way that some programs will have to be gutted wholesale this year -- there is even talk about whether we can continue to bus the high school students to school.
To tell you the truth, the whole thing made me think twice about the time I put into blogging about national and state politics on Blue Hampshire. To pass the budget in my town would have required ony the tiniest sliver of voters to better understand the ramifications of voting the budget down. We're talking about a decision measured in a couple hundred people, and we're talking only about getting them to understand that voting down the budget was not a vote against future programs, but was in effect a vote to gut current programs.
We're talking even about clearly posting poll locations -- I got a frantic call from someone at 6:55 on election night, asking where their ward polling was (they had gone to the fall election location).
An effective local politics site (maybe not even a partisan site) could deal with that. It would produce results you could see and measure. Ideally, it might not be just about politics, but about community life as a whole.
Which is where you all come in -- what should such a site look like? Would it be city based? County based? Partisan? Non-Partisan? Politics only? Politics mostly? Are there good models?
And for those around Keene, if I built it, would you come?