CUMMINGTON — For the third year in a row, town voters rejected the Central Berkshire Regional School District’s operating budget, still stinging after the district closed the town’s elementary school in 2015.
The 70 participating voters (of the town’s 665) unanimously amended the district’s proposed budget of $969,338 by subtracting $756,424 and reducing the approved total to $212,914.
This reduced the town’s proposed fiscal 2019 budget from $2,351,575 to $1,595,251.
According to Jill Figlozzi, a member of the Ad Hoc Education Committee, the town voted last year to leave the school district but no progress has been made in that endeavor.
“Negotiations with the district have been difficult,” Figlozzi said. “We feel like the sands are always shifting and that makes it hard to move forward. It is very complicated.”
Finance Committee Chairman Dennis Forgea said that the town will now have a special Town Meeting to vote on the budget again, after the six other towns belonging to the school district each vote on the school budget at their annual Town Meetings.
“If the other towns approve the budget, we will have no choice, we have to pay it,” he said.
Those towns include Becket, Dalton, Hinsdale, Peru, Washington and Windsor.
According to Central Berkshire Regional School District Superintendant Laurie Casna, Cummington currently has 26 students attending school in the district.
Voters also approved $26,000 to replace the town’s trash compactor, $21,000 for a steel multi-use truck body for the highway department, $8,000 for new software for the police department and $4,000 for two sets of turnout gear for the fire department.
Voters also passed, by majority vote, a non-binding resolution that calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first, ending the president’s sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack. The move would take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert. The resolution also calls for pursuit of a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.