Where is the vote?

The elementary school's budget reaches it in ten equal monthly payments, on a schedule the Board of Finance adopts by vote every year. In July the First Selectman replaced that schedule by email. No board had voted on anything.

Start with how the elementary school is supposed to get its money, because that part is not in dispute and it is not complicated.

The voters approve the school’s budget at referendum; this year it took three of them, and the third, on June 16, settled it ^[1]. The Board of Finance then sets a levy schedule: the mechanics of how the money the voters approved actually reaches the school. For the last several years that schedule has been ten equal monthly payments, July through April ^[2]. It is not a habit and it is not a courtesy. The finance board puts it on the agenda, discusses it, and votes. In July 2024 it passed six to nothing ^[3]. In July 2025 it passed seven to nothing ^[4], and the packet for that meeting carries the arithmetic ^[5].

That is a decision of an elected board, made in public, by a recorded vote, every single year.

On July 1, 2026, the First Selectman replaced it with an email.

The email did not ask. It announced. Effective July 1, it said, the Town would be implementing a revised funding process for the elementary school’s operating budget, to strengthen cash management, maximize the investment of town funds, and eliminate reconciliation issues identified in the annual audit ^[6].

This is what the revised process was. The town had deposited $100,000 into the school’s operating account, and that sum would stand as its balance until spending drew it down. Thereafter money would arrive only as the school showed it needed it. The school’s business manager was to submit weekly check registers and payroll registers, reviewed and approved, by email, to the town treasurer, the assistant treasurer and the town administrator. On receipt, the town would transfer an amount equal to the approved disbursements shown on those registers. The business manager would also prepare a monthly reconciliation for the treasurer. And the treasurer would be responsible for ensuring that the school’s cumulative funding did not exceed its approved budget ^[6].

He sent it to the school board’s chair, copied the chair of the Board of Finance, and blind-copied the town treasurer and the town administrator: the officials who would carry it out ^[6].

And he did not write it as a plan. He wrote it in the past tense. The email does not say the town proposes to deposit $100,000, or intends to, or would like the boards’ view on whether it should. It says the town has deposited it, effective July 2, to initiate the new process ^[6].

Nor was it only written as done. It was done. July 1 was the day the first of the ten scheduled payments was due to reach the school. What the school received was the $100,000 ^[7].

Now take his reasons seriously, because they deserve it, and because they are not invented.

A town that releases a tenth of a school’s year on the first of the month is holding less of its own cash than a town that releases the money as it is spent, and cash sitting in a town’s investment account earns interest for the people who paid it. Reconciling two sets of books is genuinely easier when the transfers match the disbursements. Auditors do raise these things, and they had. None of that is a pretext, and anyone who tells you it is has not read the email.

It is not even a new thought in Andover. In July 2024 the town administrator told the Board of Selectmen the town should try to keep as much money as it could in its investment account, the school’s balance included, to maximize the interest it earned ^[8]. That idea has been in the air for two years, and it is a respectable one.

Neither did he spring it cold. On June 22 he had sent both board chairs a written proposal: the same account, the same weekly registers ^[9]. The school board’s chair turned it aside in writing the next day; her board, she wrote, was likely not interested, and she would bring it to them ^[9]. The day after that, he forwarded it to every member of the Board of Finance, so that, he wrote, we can have a discussion ^[9]. No meeting of any board ever took it up. A week later, the money moved.

So there was a good argument to be made, and there was a board to make it to.

He did not make it to a board. He made it to a bank.

The Board of Finance had adopted the ten-payment schedule by a unanimous public vote eleven months earlier ^[4], and it did not meet to reconsider it. When its chair saw the email, he answered in writing: it is very unclear to me that this is right and proper; did the selectmen vote on this? The finance board certainly didn’t ^[9]. The Board of Education, the elected body whose budget it is, had declined the idea through its chair and was overridden. And his own Board of Selectmen took no vote either: one of his selectmen wrote him that she did not agree, that the board had neither discussed nor voted on the change, and that she thought he had overstepped his role ^[9].

There was no vote anywhere. He wrote it, and it happened. He said so himself, five days later, in writing: the Board of Selectmen has not yet voted on this procedural change, and until such time, he is responsible for implementing it ^[9].

What came next is what settles whether this was a policy or a reach.

The school board did not agree, and said so: its chair objected in writing within hours, and by the end of that first day the board had reached out to its attorney ^[9]. And by the following Monday, a revised funding process that the Town would be implementing, effective July 1, had quietly become something else in the telling. It became a proposal: a thing the selectmen would have the opportunity to discuss, modify, or affirm at their July 13 meeting ^[9].

Then the attorney’s letter arrived, demanding the rest of the July payment ^[7]. And on Sunday evening, July 12, after five o’clock, the rest of the scheduled payment was transferred ^[7]. The selectmen met the next night.

And it was on the agenda anyway. “Discussion and Action on AES Operating Budget Funding Procedure.” Board of Selectmen, July 13 ^[10].

A proposal is a thing you take to a board before you do it. This one never got there. When the meeting opened, he moved to delete the item from the agenda, and it was gone ^[11]. What remained was a twelve-day-old fact, already carried out, and, the night before, partly undone.

Nine days later the town’s auditor sat down in front of the Board of Finance.

He is a partner at the firm that audits Andover, and he had come to present the year’s audit. It reports one finding serious enough to be called a material weakness, and it is about the very thing the email named: the reconciliation of the town’s general ledger with the school district’s ^[12].

Read the finding and the first thing you notice is whose problem it is. The town’s ledger is not integrated with the school’s. Journal entries are required to reconcile them. And the town’s year-end closing entries to record the school district’s balances and activities were incomplete. The cause is given as a lack of reconciliation controls ^[13].

Then read what the auditor recommends be done about it. That the town no longer record balances and activities already accounted for by the school district. That the town limit its accounting to transactions involving direct financial activity between the two: appropriations, transfers, reimbursements, shared service costs. And that the school district continue to provide the town with monthly financial reports ^[13].

Monthly reports, continued. Less town bookkeeping of the school’s detail, not more.

The town agreed with all of it. On May 6, eight weeks before the email, the town administrator filed the town’s corrective action plan with the State of Connecticut. The town concurs with the finding, it says. Then it sets out what the town will do: stop recording balances already accounted for by the school district, limit its accounting to direct financial activity between the two, reconcile interfund transactions and balances monthly, and reconcile general fund expenditures to the school’s accounting system annually. Projected completion date, June 30, 2026 ^[14].

The day before the email.

There is a second finding worth knowing about, from the year before, because it cuts against the way this has been told. The fiscal 2024 audit carried a significant deficiency that was the school’s: bank and interfund reconciliations at the school district. The school filed its own corrective action plan, moved its reconciliations into its accounting system, began reconciling its interfund accounts monthly, and looked at bringing in a consultant to help its business manager ^[15]. In this year’s audit that finding is gone ^[12].

The reconciliation problem that persisted was not the school’s. It was the town’s, and the town had already told the state, in writing, twice, how it intended to fix it.

Then the board turned to the change itself and asked the auditor what he made of it.

He did not say it was a bad idea. On the substance he said close to the opposite: he had spoken with the superintendent and the first selectman, and he had no conceptual objection to a cash management policy meant to maximize interest. What he said was that neither the state statutes nor the town charter addresses the question, so it is the town’s own to settle, and that his recommendation would be a board policy, approved by the Board of Finance, laying down the parameters within which the administration then sets its procedures ^[12]. The question, he said, is who ultimately has the authority to make those decisions, and a cash management policy could certainly include how the Board of Education gets funded ^[12].

The First Selectman was sitting at that table, and he did not distance himself from any of it. Yes, he told the board, he was driving this, and it was not because of anything nefarious; he had never once raised the school’s expenses with them beyond the budget ^[12].

Take him at his word. The auditor was not talking about motive either.

One more thing, and it is the thing to sit with.

When the school board’s chair objected, he answered at length, copying all three boards and the town staff. The Board of Education, he wrote, is responsible for managing the district within the budget it is given, and determines how those appropriated funds are spent. The Board of Finance recommends the appropriations and sets the rate. The Board of Selectmen administers town government and manages the town’s cash. His process, he wrote, was not intended to control or influence how the Board of Education spends its approved budget. The Board of Education, he wrote, will continue to have full authority over its expenditures ^[16].

Read that again, because every word of it is correct, and because he wrote it down.

He knows precisely where the line runs. He can set it out, in writing, in his own words, in July of this year.

He was standing on the wrong side of it when he typed it.

Set aside whether the school’s budget is a dollar too high or too low. The voters settled that at referendum. Set aside, if you like, whether weekly registers are a smarter way to move money than a monthly transfer. They might be. That is an argument, and it is one a person could win.

The Board of Finance adopted that schedule by a vote. Seven to nothing, in public, last July.

A schedule adopted by a vote is undone by a vote.

So where is the vote?

Where is the vote?

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