Now that the "O" word (override) has been mentioned, there is a bunch of information in these archives that may be useful to provide the historical perspective.
Long time readers may recall that Franklin Matters came to be during the 2007 override and the domain officially was born in Nov 2007.
The 2007 Override is noteworthy as it is the only successful override Franklin has passed in its history to date. It passed because there was unified support across the Town Council and School Committee. The succeeding overrides (2008 & 2010) failed because that unity did not exist. Some naysayers among the Council and School Committee created enough doubt and discord that success was unattainable.
There also was a special ballot question on the State election of 2014 to provide $1.5 million to fund road maintenance that failed significantly. As it was a Sate election, Franklin turned out at 59% (normal for State elections) and 8289 voters said No, 3583 said Yes. https://www.franklinmatters.org/2014/10/ballot-question-5-dedicated-override-to.html
Coming out of the 2008 override failure there was recognition that a long term financial plan needed to be developed. A committee was created and began work on that in early 2010. The Financial Planning Committee changed to the Long Range Planning Committee. The first report they produced is now what we see each year when the Town Administrator publishes their 5 year outlook.
The Joint Budget Committee is the current working group to help with these long range and financial planning matters. They have not met frequently enough so we find ourselves now in a position where some folks understand the situation and many do not. The Joint Budget should meet more frequently (at least quarterly, in my view) rather than the annual meeting they have had in recent years.
The archive has links to collect the information pasted for each of the elections.
There is also a spreadsheet with the specific ballot question history for both the debt exclusions (i.e. schools) and override votes.
Some of the links break as the Town and School pages were updated twice since then (and neither upgrade maintained link integrity).
If you find a link that might be valuable for your research, let me know, I might have the individual document in my own archives and can find and update the link accordingly.
Additional archive links can be found in the Key Link tab https://www.franklinmatters.org/p/important-links.html
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| Lincoln St road work during Aug 2014 |
