By Ryan O'Connor
Staff Writer

New Boston town officials are encouraging residents to avoid voting on Article 26 on the 2006 Town Warrant.

The original article proposed building a footbridge over the Piscataquog River to connect the Mill Pond Conservation Area to the New Boston Tavern property and asked for $30,000 to be paid by taxes, with the remaining $120,000 coming from state grant.

According to Town Administrator Burton Reynolds, the article was amended at deliberative session of Town Meeting on Feb. 6 to make it non-lapsing after the town found out it would not receive the grant for another five years.

“Between the time we posted the warrant and had the deliberative session, word came down to regional planning from the state highway people to say that they are a bit behind and although they support many of these types of projects, in essence they have no money for it,” said Reynolds. “If we should get it, it would be 2011 before it would be funded. So that’s why people said, ‘Oh, never mind.’”

Reynolds said when the article was made non-lapsing, it was made “special,” under RSA 32, the Municipal Budget Act. In other words, he explained, “special” means you can hold money over without it lapsing at the end of the year.

This essentially nullified the article, Reynolds said, because the Department of Revenue Administration ruled a town cannot post a normal article on a warrant and then amend it to make it special.

To get the word out, the town posted the following on its Web site:

Article 26. The Footbridge article was amended at the Deliberative Session to make it “non-lapsing”. As it turns out, it is not legal to amend an article in this fashion if it was not originally posted as such. Given that the Department of Revenue Administration will disallow the article even if it is passed, voters are encouraged to skip over this article rather than vote either “yes” or “no.”

Reynolds said the idea to build a footbridge is not dead and the town will most likely revisit the project in a couple of years. “It’s a long ways away,” he said. “We were going to probably have to come back and discuss this down the road anyway.”