William Marvel: Featherbedding

Last month, at their annual school meeting, voters in the town of Pembroke slashed their school board’s requested budget. That’s one of the rights they retained last year, when they refused to adopt the SB 2 process that has allowed Conway’s school lobby to steamroll taxpayers for decades — including this year, despite the relatively minor cut caused by the failure of the school board’s budget.

Now that they can’t make final decisions at a single annual meeting, most Conway voters confine themselves to the ballot vote in April. The deliberative meeting is the only place where budgets can be reduced substantially, however. The deliberative turnout therefore consists mostly of school staff with a financial stake in bigger budgets, and parents who think excessive spending necessarily yields a better education.