GUILFORD — SAD 4 directors on Tuesday rejected a request from Abbot town officials to change the date of the district budget meeting now held the same day as the June primary.

It was the third attempt by Abbot officials in three years to convince directors to move the meeting to another night to avoid a conflict with the primary elections.

“We don’t have any grand illusions that it will bring a lot of people in,” Jan Ronco, chairman of the Abbot Board of Selectmen, said Tuesday. But it will allow an opportunity for those involved in the elections, such as town officials and ballot clerks, to

attend, if they want to, she said.

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m., June 14, at the Piscataquis Community Middle School.

The state primary elections held on the second Tuesday in June cannot be changed, unlike the district budget meeting, Ronco said.

School officials, who noted that they had received no other such request from Sangerville, Guilford, Parkman, Cambridge and Wellington, the other towns in the district, refused to budge from the traditional June district budget meeting.

“The danger when the press and or the public are denied or hindered from free access to the school board and district budget meetings is that the board loses accountability to the taxpayers,” Ronco said after the meeting.

“When the majority of taxpayer dollars are spent on schools and the school is spending over $6.5 million this year, the board should be available to every taxpayer who wants to be there,” she added.