Second Newtown Budget Referendum Attempt Fails By 97 Votes

By John Voket

The turnout was slightly better than the first attempt, but Newtown’s second budget referendum result was the same as voters rejected the proposal, 2,291 votes to 2,194 — a difference of 97 votes. According to Registrar LeReine Frampton, 28.8 percent of qualified voters responded to the polls at Newtown Middle School Tuesday, May 18.

A total of 4,485 taxpayers cast ballots in the second referendum, including 84 absentee ballots returned earlier in the day to the town clerk. The failed spending plan would have provided a 2.4 percent tax increase to cover a bottom line of $104,184,615.

That figure represented requests of $66,994,734 for the school district, $27,895,856 for municipal operations, and $9,294,025 to cover debt service on existing bonds, which is included on the municipal side of the budget ledger.

The second local budget referendum was set after the initial attempt failed by 51 votes April 27 with around 22 percent of eligible residents participating.

First Selectman Pat Llodra said in the event the referendum failed, she had already prepared two scenarios that detailed how the town would affect further budget reductions, if such reductions were made by the council Wednesday evening. (See separate story.)

For most of referendum day Tuesday, it appeared there was more traffic at the polls generating a greater turnout. Officials contacted during the afternoon said by 3 pm, poll workers logged an increase of about 400 more voters than at the same time during the first April 27 referendum.

Legislative Council Chairman Jeff Capeci said he was disappointed in the outcome, and that the council would deliberate on a revised number at a meeting already scheduled Wednesday evening, May 19, at 7:30 in the Municipal Center.

“It was close, but we’ll have to come up with another budget to present to the voters,” Mr Capeci said.

The challenge to find a proposal that would appeal to a majority of taxpayers casting budget ballots was made more frustrating because at 97, the difference between No and Yes votes cast in round two was still too close to mandate substantial changes to the current proposal in either direction.

A vocal contingent of school supporters, many of whom showed up at most if not all public meetings to advocate on behalf of the district’s request, were bolstered by a number of elected Independent Party of Newtown (IPN) officials who have supported voting No.

Those representatives, Selectman Bill Furrier; school board members David Nanavaty, Richard Gaines, and William Hart; Police Commissioner and IPN Chairman Bruce Walczak; and Karen Pierce, who serves on the Edmond Town Hall Board of Managers, have publicly supported casting No votes in the hope of seeing more funds returned to the school district.

Councilmen Gary Davis, Kevin Fitzgerald, and James Belden have also consistently made or supported motions to preserve or add education funds back into the district’s nearly $67 million request, after the majority of the council endorsed a $2.5 million Board of Finance reduction to the district’s initial six percent increase.

Newspaper Survey Part 2

Without any legal means to add advisory questions to the local budget ballot to help determine the motivation behind particularly the No votes, The Newtown Bee attempted to discern some of the reasoning with its own second version of an online poll that requested added demographic details from participants than was asked in the newspaper’s initial poll before the first failed budget vote.

But the split between participants calling for a No vote to restore funds versus those advocating a No to further reduce the budget was roughly even. Among the 336 who responded to the opening question — an up or down endorsement of the public budget proposal — 67 percent indicated they would support a No vote and 33 percent would vote Yes.

Twenty-five percent, however, said they would vote No in the hope of influencing money being added to the school budget; and 10.1 percent said to take more from the municipal budget and return more to the schools.

Another 17 percent said they wanted to see more funds cut from the town and schools; 6 percent said they wanted to see less money spent exclusively on the schools; and 2.7 percent said they wanted to see more money spent on the municipal side and less spent on schools.

A tiny fraction, 1.2 percent, said they would vote No in the hope of seeing more money returned to the municipal side exclusively; while the exact same percentage said they would vote No to see more money added to both the town and school sides of the budget.

Among those who said they would vote Yes, 11.3 percent said they would do so because they felt the budget was appropriate for the community this year. The second highest percentage of respondents, 20.6 percent, said they were voting Yes to ensure the school district would not receive further reductions; and 2.4 percent said they would vote Yes because they were afraid a No vote would cause more money to be added to both the town and school sides of the proposal.

Polling expert and Newtown resident Paul Lundquist of The Harrison Group examined The Bee’s poll outcomes and offered the following observations:

*Within Yes voters: 50 percent more are voting Yes out of fear of more cuts than because they truly believe it is a satisfactory budget — 21 percent versus 13 percent respectively. While it is directionally interesting, however, it is not a statistically significant gap between the two opinions.

*Within No voters: Net-net, there is an equal proportion of No voters who wish to add money back as there are who wish to make cuts — 40 percent wish to add, 38 percent wish to cut.

*Among those wishing to add to the budget, 90 percent want to add to the school budget, specifically. Among those wanting to cut the budget, sentiment is split equally between cutting the school and town budgets.

*Focusing specifically on the school budget, 36 percent wish to add to the budget, 26 percent wish to cut the school budget further. Again, this difference does not represent a statistically significant difference between the two groups.

A Better Profile

Mr Lundquist said The Bee “took some positive steps in this new poll to try to collect some more in-depth profiling data about respondents so that in addition to knowing if they intended to vote Yes or No, and why, they could see whether the people filling out the survey bear close resemblance to the actual population of voters.”

Mr Lundquist said if the respondents do not represent the voting public, then neither do the results, so the information would have little use.

“The proper next step would have been to use these profiling questions to actually weight and map the resulting respondent sample to match known and validated demographics of the community at large,” he said. “But I understand that this last step is a limitation of the SurveyMonkey polling software The Bee is using.”

Mr Lundquist said another challenge is getting a handle on what the voting public looks like compared to the nonvoting public.

“With only 29 percent of qualified voters participating, the big question might be, ‘Who is this small group of people being entrusted with such important issues facing our town?’ In this case, we can really only compare to the general public.”

With the added demographic details, Mr Lundquist was able to observe that those who completed the survey seem to include a disproportionately large group of 26–50 year olds (meaning, a lower representation of the young and senior population age 65+).

“These respondents also seem to be more heavily weighted toward women who have [children] under age 18 in the Newtown school system,” he said. “Plus, close to half of these respondents report living in Sandy Hook. I’d assume that this reflects a bias in the people who took the survey rather than being a true representation of voters.

“But it offers food for thought for nonvoters — with only 29 percent of eligible voters participating, chances are they don’t represent you all that well — so get out there and vote!”

Mr Lundquist concluded that although the number of respondents has nearly doubled from the first poll to the current poll, results are generally still too close to represent statistically significant differences.

“Gaps of more than ten points are needed for two proportions to be meaningfully different,” he said “So even though there appear to be some directional differences, the most interesting takeaways are not statistically valid.”