Blame the Towns

Concord got $2.8 million less in state aid this year, cut 40 staff, and raised property taxes 12.2 percent. Now the House and Senate majority leaders say the arithmetic is Concord’s fault. It isn’t a policy argument. It’s an election-year alibi.

“The state sent more money than ever. Your property taxes still went up 20 percent. If ‘down-shifting’ were real, that would be impossible. The truth is simpler, yet harder to accept: your local government got a record check from Concord and spent even more on top of it.”

That is House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, Republican of Auburn, and Senate Majority Leader Regina Birdsell, Republican of Hampstead, writing in NH Journal on April 13. The headline on the op-ed is “What’s Driving High Property Taxes in the Granite State?” The answer, per the state’s two top legislative Republicans: your town is lying to you, your school board is lying to you, the word “downshifting” is a fiction, and Concord — capital-C, the Statehouse — is the victim here.

File it under pre-November alibi. The filing deadline is June 12. The primary is September 8. This is the opening chord of the 2026 legislative campaign cycle, and Osborne and Birdsell are the majority leaders of both chambers. Ayotte hit the same note in her inaugural address (January 9, 2025) and her State of the State (February 5, 2026): taxes are high, Concord is generous, the problem must be somewhere else. The op-ed is the three of them, in harmony.

Now the receipts.

What Actually Happened in Concord

Concord — the city whose name the majority leaders are using as a metonym for state generosity — received $2.8 million less in state education funding this year than it did the year before. The reason is mechanical. Concord’s equalized property values rose, driven by the same housing price surge that pushed the statewide median home price to $530,000. Under New Hampshire’s adequacy formula, rising local property wealth makes a city look less “needy.” The formula then sends less money. The city gets richer on paper and poorer in the classroom.

The Concord Board of Education responded in March by approving a 12.2 percent property tax increase for the coming fiscal year — more than double the board’s own stated ceiling of 5 percent — while eliminating roughly 40 staff positions. Concord High School alone lost the equivalent of 14 full-time employees, many of them teachers. Neither the tax hike nor the staff cuts were the outcome the board wanted. Neither was the outcome it chose. They were what arithmetic required.

So here is the sequence, laid out in the order it occurred: state formula withdraws $2.8 million from Concord. Concord school board loses 40 staff. Concord taxpayers absorb a 12.2 percent property tax hike to cover the damage. House and Senate majority leaders then publish an op-ed informing Concord taxpayers that their property tax hike is evidence of local overspending.

The Downshift, by City

Sources: N.H. Department of Education enrollment data (November 2025); New Hampshire Union Leader reporting on HB 550 / 2026 funding vehicles; Concord Monitor reporting on the Concord Board of Education March 2026 vote. Statewide context: no state in the country contributes less to public education than New Hampshire.

Wormald Got There First. The Numbers Back Him.

Dana Wormald, editor of the New Hampshire Bulletin and a veteran of both the Concord Monitor and the Union Leader opinion desk, answered Osborne and Birdsell on April 15. His column did the work that the op-ed didn’t: it named the dodge. Wormald pointed out what the majority leaders’ argument quietly concedes — that New Hampshire contributes less to public education than any other state in the country, and that the “record check” Osborne and Birdsell celebrate is only a record against New Hampshire’s own floor.

Wormald’s column deserves to stand on its own and I won’t rehearse it. What the Concord numbers add is the mechanism. The Osborne-Birdsell thesis requires one of two things to be true: either Concord’s school board cut 40 jobs and raised taxes 12.2 percent for sport, or the state formula withdrew real money and the district covered the gap the only way it legally could — through property tax. A school board facing a $2.8 million hole in its state revenue line has two options: cut services or raise taxes. Calling the outcome “local overspending” isn’t analysis. It’s message discipline.

Why the Rand Case Matters Here

The op-ed didn’t mention the Rand case. It didn’t have to. Rand is the engine running underneath the whole argument.

In February, the state formally asked the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn Claremont I (1993) and Claremont II (1997). The filing goes further than most observers expected: it asks the court to rule that Part II, Article 83 of the state constitution (the education clause) does not actually mandate a qualitative standard of education and does not impose a financial obligation on the state to fund it. The state is also asking the court to declare school funding a “non-justiciable political question” — meaning the legislature, not the judiciary, decides what counts as enough.

If the state wins, New Hampshire’s constitutional duty to adequately fund public education goes from a judicially enforceable obligation to a matter of legislative discretion. The same majority leaders who just blamed Concord for raising taxes would gain the legal authority to keep the state’s contribution low, forever, with no court to make them stop. And the downshifting argument — the one Osborne and Birdsell are now calling a myth — would become impossible to prove in court, because there would no longer be a legal standard for what the state owes.

The op-ed is not just an election-year talking point. It is pre-ruling positioning. If the Supreme Court overturns Claremont, Osborne and Birdsell need the public to have already accepted that rising local taxes are a local problem. That is the ground they are preparing. The April 13 op-ed is the seed. The Rand ruling, whenever it lands, is the harvest.

The Generational Math

There is a pattern here that runs wider than this one op-ed or this one lawsuit. In my book, Generational Malpractice, I argue that the defining feature of American policy over the last three decades has been the steady transfer of costs and risks downhill — from federal to state, from state to municipal, from older cohorts to younger ones, from people who own assets to people who earn wages. Every transfer looks small in isolation. In aggregate they describe a country quietly rearranging itself so that the people least able to absorb costs are the ones absorbing them.

New Hampshire runs the purest version of this system in America. The state cut $35 million in housing production funds from the current biennial budget while median home prices passed $530,000. It is asking the Supreme Court to erase the legal obligation to fund adequate schools. Then its legislative leadership writes an op-ed blaming towns for raising taxes to cover what the state stopped paying for.

The teachers cut from Concord High this year are the generational math. The tax hike falling on Concord homeowners is the generational math. The Laconia parent watching the district budget tighten while gas hits $4.14 is the generational math. None of it is accident. All of it is policy.

What Comes Next

The op-ed is the first move in a long campaign. Expect Ayotte to reprise the theme in her re-election positioning — she already has, twice. Expect the Josiah Bartlett Center to publish supporting research. Expect the state to argue before the Supreme Court that Claremont itself was a judicial overreach the legislature was never obligated to follow. The party that zeroed out $35 million in housing programs, sent Concord $2.8 million less in education aid, and is asking the Supreme Court to nullify the state’s duty to adequately fund schools now wants Granite Staters to believe the cost of living here is somebody else’s fault. It isn’t. They signed the checks. They wrote the formula. They filed the brief.

They do not get to blame the towns for doing the math they forced on them.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice, available on Amazon.