10/17/2026
Deaglan McEachern Mayor of Portsmouth and I recently submitted this letter to the Herald on Question 2 which will be on the ballot in November. Sharing it here for those that are interested. Please feel free to reach out if you have questions.
Question 2 is an anchor, not a lifeline
For 30 years, the waters of education spending have steadily risen in New Hampshire. We’ve spent more time in court arguing over who should keep us afloat than figuring out how to turn back the tide.
Now, with the water over many homeowners’ heads, Concord has offered Question 2. It throws us an anchor and calls it a lifeline.
We need to control education spending. New Hampshire ranks among the top ten states in per-pupil spending and last in the share funded by the state. Here, cities and towns raise most education funding through property taxes. Telling them to raise less isn’t the same as helping make education more affordable.
In Portsmouth we’ve eliminated positions, frozen spending, consolidated functions and gone through budgets line by line. Over the last two budget cycles we cut more than 21 positions across city government and our schools. But there’s a limit to how much we can cut without watering down the quality of our classrooms.
Portsmouth is better positioned than most. We have a commercial tax base, infrastructure that supports growth and a bond rating higher than the state’s. Yet even here, education consumes the majority of what we raise, and some of its biggest costs are beyond any town’s control.
This year, Portsmouth faced a 40 percent increase in school employee health care costs. We cut school staffing, but none of those cuts made health care cheaper. A cap can’t cut an insurance bill. It can cut the teacher.
Right now, New Hampshire school districts buy insurance on their own or through pools regulated by the state. When the state’s largest pool exhausted its reserves on Concord’s watch, the state didn’t step in with a statewide solution. Why isn’t Concord offering better oversight, or asking whether purchasing together could deliver better coverage for less?
Communities should decide their educational priorities. That’s why we fund education locally. But what do taxpayers gain from every district negotiating health insurance separately? Local control shouldn’t mean every town solves the same statewide problem alone.
Special education raises a harder question.
New Hampshire establishes educational obligations for children with disabilities. Those obligations don’t end at town lines, and they shouldn’t. Educating every child is a shared responsibility.
Yet most of the cost falls on individual communities. State assistance concentrates on extraordinary expenses, while specialized instruction, classroom aides and therapies remain largely local obligations. The state sets the requirements. It should carry more of the bill and coordinate services across districts rather than leaving each to build its own.
Then there is the limited funding that comes from the state. Until 2011, Concord paid a third of the retirement costs for every teacher, police officer and firefighter in New Hampshire. Then it ended the support, but not the obligation. In 2022, Concord briefly restored some of that money and sent it to every community. Portsmouth put all of it toward lowering property taxes. The next year, Concord stopped paying again and expanded its school voucher program instead. Our taxes went back up.
That is the only year in the last decade Portsmouth would have exceeded Question 2’s proposed limit. Not because we spent more, but because Concord gave and then took away.
This is what gets lost in our endless arguments over who pays. The state has tools no individual town has. Concord could coordinate purchasing, organize regional services, reconsider funding responsibilities and eliminate inefficiencies that individual towns cannot.
There’s a larger contradiction. In school funding litigation that has dragged on for decades, the state now argues that local education spending counts toward its constitutional obligation. If Concord wants credit for money raised by local taxpayers, shouldn’t it help make that spending more efficient?
None of this excuses waste locally. Our job isn’t to defend institutions. It’s to defend children and their education, while making sure the people who built and paid for our schools can afford to stay in their homes.
That requires everyone to do their part. Local officials must keep finding savings. Concord must tackle the costs no individual community can solve.
Question 2 cannot lower health insurance premiums, coordinate special education or consolidate a single administrative office.
A cap doesn’t lower the water. It tells towns how fast they’re allowed to sink.
Vote no on Question 2. Then ask Concord to do the part of this job only Concord can.
Deaglan McEachern is the mayor of Portsmouth
Lisa Rapaport chairs the Portsmouth school board
