August 7, 2008
Keene Sentinel
SWANZEY CENTER — Just as it looked like the road was clear for the Monadnock Regional School District’s Sept. 9 special meeting, the Monadnock School Taxpayers Association has thrown oil on the pavement.
The group has filed a request for an injunction in Cheshire County Superior Court against the official-ballot first session scheduled for this Saturday. It was filed Wednesday afternoon by the group’s president, Richard E. Bauries of Swanzey.
Bauries asks for a temporary or permanent restraining order to prevent the district from holding Saturday’s meeting. He also repeats allegations he’s made in previously filed court documents that the schedule for September’s special meeting to consider a new teachers contract is illegal.
“This continual compounding of errors and moving forward as if their (sic) were no problems that need to be addressed — has to be stopped — and they need to be addressed prior to further obfuscation by MRSD where they hold another meeting which does not comply with the purpose & intent of (the law),” Bauries wrote in his motion.
District attorney Paul L. Apple said unless a Superior Court judge brings district officials back to court this week, Saturday’s meeting — where voters can discuss the proposed contract — will continue as planned.
The district will answer Bauries’ latest motion, according to Apple, who added, “There’s nothing new here. … They’re wrong on the law.”
None of the school officials interviewed this morning seemed surprised by Bauries’ latest action.
“(The taxpayers association has) been doing this for years,” school board Chairman Eugene M. White 3rd of Swanzey said this morning. “It’s kind of pathetic this time.”
Superintendent Kenneth R. Dassau used similar language.
“It does read as a motion of desperation,” he said, describing the taxpayers association as desperate to prevent this latest teachers contract from coming before district voters.
“I am angry over the significant among of time and energy and legal fees this group continues to syphon from the district by their actions,” Dassau said in a written statement this morning. “They are harming the students and the taxpayers they claim to represent.”
But Bauries emphasized the taxpayers association’s opinion that the judge erred in his order to uphold the September meeting.
“The taxpayers (association) have done nothing illegal,” he said. “This is our right. We think this is wrong.”
Bauries has already mounted numerous challenges against the Sept. 9 meeting, including objecting to the special election in a June 12 Superior Court hearing at which he represented himself.
Bauries was joined at the June 12 hearing by attorneys for selectmen from Fitzwilliam and Sullivan — two of the seven towns that comprise the district — in arguing that the lack of a teachers contract didn’t constitute the emergency required by law to hold a special meeting.
But despite these objections, on July 14, Judge Brian T. Tucker ordered the meeting to go forward and scheduled it for Sept. 9 at 7:30 p.m. at Monadnock Regional High School.
Bauries took issue with the ordered time and place because it ran contrary to the district’s official-ballot form of voting, where residents cast ballots all day at polls in each of the district’s seven towns — Fitzwilliam, Gilsum, Richmond, Roxbury, Sullivan, Swanzey and Troy. Bauries also contended the time frame between the judge’s decision and the Aug. 9 official-ballot first session wasn’t long enough to legally notice and hold the first required public hearing.
In three separate motions, Bauries asked Tucker to reconsider his order for the special meeting and invalidate the public hearing the district held on July 24 — and the subsequent school board meeting at which the warrant was signed — on the grounds that they were illegal.
Bauries also filed an objection to Apple’s motion that the judge simply alter the ordered time and place of the special meeting to allow for all-day voting.
On Tuesday, Tucker granted Apple’s request, ordering that voting would take place over the course of several hours on Sept. 9. In his decision, Tucker said the district was on firm legal ground and called Bauries’ claims “unfounded.”
White said he believes Bauries’ ultimate aim in filing Wednesday’s motion is to gain fuel for a future appeal to the N.H. Supreme Court.
Bauries said association members haven’t yet decided whether they will mount such an appeal.
But, he added, this motion does lay the groundwork if the group decides to go forward.
Still, White said, “We’re not going to be threatened by these guys. They’ve been harassing this district for years. … As long as I’m around, I’m not going to bow down to it.”