For the first time in years, New Hampshire’s Senate has approved a school aid plan that is based mostly on factors other than a town’s property wealth — regardless of Governor Lynch’s objections that rich towns shouldn’t get state help.
The Senate voted 14-10 to send the plan to the House.
Lynch is among the new plan’s biggest critics because it shifts money from property-poor towns to communities with the most students regardless of their ability to raise money through local property taxes.
Lynch also has said repeatedly the state should repeal the state property tax and that he won’t support anything that creates donor towns, which the plan does, making the plan’s fate uncertain if it reaches his desk unchanged.
He is lobbying hard for a constitutional amendment that would let the state single out the neediest towns for school aid. That would mean towns in the middle and upper end of the property wealth spectrum would get little or no money.