RSU 17 financial date due State’s info crucial to consolidation

LINCOLN – The financial picture that might make or break the effort to create a Rhode Island-sized regional school unit in northern Penobscot County will be revealed Monday.

The Maine Department of Education is due to release to the RSU 17 organizing committee its report on the RSU’s tax implications for its 27 towns at the committee’s 6 p.m. meeting at the Region III Vocational School in Lincoln, RSU facilitator Sandra Bernstein said. The public is invited.

The state’s data will be crucial, Bernstein said, to whether the local, state-mandated consolidation gathers new steam or withers. If many towns involved find big savings in reorganization, it might gain clout; if not, the energy that has propelled participants through the long, complex grind might dissipate.

Bernstein wasn’t sure how it would go.

“There will be some school units that will save money, and some will incur significant costs,” she said Tuesday. “If there is significant cost shifting, then it [the effort] will lose some proponents.”

Reconciling vastly different tax-rate situations will be among the committee’s biggest challenges, said Wallace Paul, Millinocket Town Council chairman and organizing committee member.

“Our problem with our RSU is that we range from towns with large budgets and populations to towns with very small budgets,” Paul said Tuesday. “I realize that the state is broke and that consolidation is a big issue for them [state legislators], but I am afraid that the state will be cutting back what it promises [financially] to the bigger schools and forcibly raising taxes to the smaller towns with the smaller budgets. How can anybody be happy with that?”

The law requiring the statewide school reorganization stipulates that each municipality raise at least $2 million to participate in the effort. Some school units and towns in the proposed regional school unit don’t pay anything near that much right now, Bernstein said.

That’s partially why the committee hasn’t met in a month, Bernstein said. Committee members want to see whether the Legislature will amend the financial requirements before proceeding further.

SADs 30, 31 and 67; Unions 110 and 113; the communities of Greenbush, Lowell, Seboeis Plantation and Grand Falls Township in Penobscot County; Bancroft and Glenwood Plantation in Aroostook County; and Medford in Piscataquis County are part of RSU 17. Three residents from each of the 27 towns initially formed the organizational group.

Under the law creating the regional school units, each district must consist of at least 2,500 students and one publicly funded high school. Districts of at least 1,200 students are supposed to be permitted when demographics or geography make larger systems unreasonable. But efforts to create smaller districts, such as in the Katahdin region, have died from local unwillingness or state resistance.

As elsewhere in the state, the consolidation effort is dogged by a complex array of political and economic factors plus an unwillingness to risk losing schools, municipal identities or to face the possibility of busing students over long distances, although state plans call for gradual implementation.

Still, the committee has made gains. It recently created a tentative governance agreement dividing RSU 17 into four wards with Lincoln and Millinocket at about 5,000 residents each, forming two wards. All other towns will combine into two wards that have about 5,000 residents each, Paul said.

The four wards will elect a 15-member RSU school board, with one member representing each ward. The rest of the board will be at large. Representatives from the smaller towns expressed satisfaction with the plan, Paul said.

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