Preparing for the Spring fleecing

By Kevin Tyson
1/6/2026

SAU 6 built the FY27 budget and has published a “Budget Presentation” plus operating budgets for the 3-school and 4-school configurations. Unfortunately, the district continues to publish core financial information only as PDFs. SAU 6

PDFs are fine for printing. They are terrible for analysis. When public budgeting is distributed in a format that cannot be cleanly filtered, summed, or compared without manual re-entry, it predictably blocks taxpayer review. Whether that outcome is intentional or merely habitual, personally, (I suspect the former), the effect is the same: it raises the cost of oversight and lowers the odds that anyone catches bad assumptions early. After all, that’s how they created our current deficit crisis.

So we did the obvious thing: we converted the PDFs into spreadsheets and compared the two models line by line.istributed in a format that cannot be cleanly filtered, summed, or compared without manual re-entry, it predictably blocks taxpayer review. Whether that outcome is intentional or merely habitual, personally, (I suspect the former), the effect is the same: it raises the cost of oversight and lowers the odds that anyone catches bad assumptions early. After all, that’s how they created our current deficit crisis.

So we did the obvious thing: we converted the PDFs into spreadsheets and compared the two models line by line.

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Guest Blogger: The School Budget Is Public, But the Data Still Isn’t

Guest Blogger: New Hampshire’s property-tax game has turned into legalized home seizure — and RSA 75:1 is the rulebook they’re using to do it.

By Francis Gauthier
12/11/2025
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How “market value” becomes a weapon

RSA 75:1 tells towns to tax property based on “full and true value” — which assessors and consultants now translate as speculative “market value.”

That sounds technical, but here’s what it means in real life:

• Your town looks at what the hottest house on your street just sold for
• They decide your home — even if it’s 50 years old, paid off, and on a fixed-income owner — is suddenly “worth” that much too.
• They raise your assessment to match the new “market,” and your tax bill jumps hundreds or thousands of dollars a year… even though your income hasn’t gone up by a single penny.

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