Concord Sends the Bill to the Ballot

The House version of HB 1300 put a property tax cap on every November ballot in New Hampshire. It does not touch the Claremont funding formula, the state aid distribution, or any decision the legislature controls. In the closing days of the 2026 session, the play was to transfer the political risk from the corner office to the school districts that will have to do the cutting.

Kevin Landrigan’s May 25, 2026, Union Leader story named the stakes plainly: 60 bills in dispute, three frantic days, and a final session day on June 4, the day after the reelection filing period opened. Among the bills still alive: a statewide property tax cap referendum, a children’s mental health funding bill the House killed and the Senate revived in a late-night save, and business tax credit expansions nobody plans to vote against. The pattern across all of them is the same. Concord is racing to make decisions that do not, on inspection, require Concord to choose anything.

The headliner is House Bill 1300. It started the session as a congressional redistricting bill. It will end the session, if Rep. Ross Berry (R-Weare) and House Majority Leader Jason Osborne (R-Auburn) get their way, as a statewide property tax cap referendum. Every city, town, county, and school district in New Hampshire would have a question added to its November ballot every two years until the cap is adopted by a two-thirds vote of the local electorate.

The ballot question, as drafted in the House amendment: “For the next two fiscal years, shall the total property taxes levied by this [town/city/school district/county] be limited so they may not increase faster than inflation plus new taxable property growth?”

The Senate’s competing version is gentler: a one-time question on the November 3, 2026 ballot, no biennial repetition. Same cap structure. Same supermajority threshold. Same omission of any state-level reform. The two chambers went to a committee of conference to reconcile the difference before the session’s final day, June 4.

What HB 1300 Caps

Read the bill carefully. It caps the total property taxes a local district can levy at the rate of inflation plus the value of new taxable construction. Voters must pass the cap with a two-thirds supermajority. Local voters can lift the cap with another supermajority vote at a future meeting.

Note what HB 1300 does not do.

It does not change the state’s education funding formula. The formula that the New Hampshire Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled inadequate under Claremont, and that Governor Ayotte’s administration is now challenging again at the high court, remains in place. The per-pupil base adequacy grant remains where last year’s budget set it. The mechanism by which Concord lost $2.8 million in state aid this year because its property values rose — the mechanism that produced a 12.2 percent tax hike and roughly 40 staff cuts — is untouched.

It does not address the statewide education property tax (SWEPT), the formula by which donor towns subsidize receiver towns. It does not address special education catastrophic aid, chronically underfunded relative to district need. It does not address the building aid backlog.

What HB 1300 does is something narrower and politically clarifying. It moves the cutting decision from the legislators who write the formula to the school districts that have to live with it.

This is the architecture of a downshift. The legislature retains every tool it would need to make local property taxes lower — raise the adequacy grant, change the equalization formula, fully fund special education, restore the building aid pipeline. It declines to use any of them. Instead it offers voters a chance to put their school district in a structural budget freeze and discover, two years later, which staff positions and programs have been cut to comply.

The Same Pattern in a Different Bill

Watch Senate Bill 498 for the same mechanism in a different domain. SB 498 would have required private insurers to cover the FAST Forward program, a wraparound mental health service for children, by paying assessments to a new New Hampshire Children’s Behavioral Health Association. Ayotte championed it. The Senate passed it in March. The House Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. John Hunt (R-Rindge), voted 14-4 to send it to interim study. The full House confirmed the kill on May 14 in a 188-164 vote.

Ayotte was, in her own words, “flabbergasted, disappointed and outraged.” She said elected representatives had chosen “subsidizing insurance companies over kids’ mental health care.” Hunt’s response framed it as cost-shifting: “Ratepayers, you’re not taxpayers.” Anthem responded by announcing it had paid more than $30 million in claims for behavioral health care for children under 19 over the past year.

That night the Senate revived the bill by attaching its language to an unrelated piece of legislation. According to Landrigan’s May 25 reporting, Senate leaders balked when Speaker Sherman Packard named Hunt to the committee of conference, and Hunt said he acquiesced to Packard, who replaced him with House Majority Floor Leader Keith Ammon (R-New Boston). Hunt’s comment to Landrigan: “I’m not standing in the way of this, but the legislation is just not ready for prime time.”

The Hunt position is recognizable. So is the Ayotte position. So is the Senate’s late save. What is missing from all three is a state appropriation. The bill, as written, declines to use general fund dollars to provide care for commercially insured children with the most complex behavioral health needs. The state estimates the program’s absence will leave it on the hook for roughly $2 million a year covering the gap when families exhaust private coverage. The legislature is choosing — in the closing week of a non-budget session — whether to push that $2 million onto insurers (who push it onto ratepayers) or to leave it on the state. What it is not choosing to do is raise the money itself.

The Concord Precedent

To see what HB 1300 would have produced in practice, look at Concord this spring. The Board of Education approved a 12.2 percent property tax increase — more than double its own stated 5 percent ceiling — while cutting approximately 40 staff positions, many of them teachers. Concord High School alone lost the equivalent of roughly 14 full-time staff.

The trigger was the state. Because Concord’s equalized property valuation rose — the same housing surge that has put the statewide median home at $530,000 and locked a generation out of ownership — the state calculated the city as less “needy” and cut its education aid by $2.8 million. Concord made the tax hike to cover the gap and made the staff cuts because even at 12.2 percent, the gap could not be fully closed. The cap proposed by HB 1300 would have made the cuts deeper and the tax hike legally impossible.

The choice Concord faced was not whether to spend more or less. The choice was whether to absorb the state’s aid cut through layoffs, tax increases, or both. HB 1300 removes the second option without restoring the first.

A Filing Window and a Final Session Day

Reelection filing opened June 3. The session’s final day was June 4. The committee of conference on HB 1300 had to reach agreement before the gavel fell. So did negotiators on the SB 498 language. So did conference negotiators on roughly 60 other bills, including business tax credit expansions and rate cuts that House Republicans are pushing as “affordability” messaging the state can afford because the bill goes somewhere else.

This is the calendar that Generational Malpractice argues defines the era. The state has chronic structural obligations — adequate education, mental health infrastructure, housing supply, transportation maintenance — that it has refused to fund at the level the math requires. Instead of raising the broad-based revenue that would close the gap (an option more than 70 percent of New Hampshire voters reject when polled), the legislature distributes the cost downward. To school districts. To insurance ratepayers. To property tax payers in cities whose homes appreciated. To families facing private insurance gaps.

HB 1300 is the most precise expression of this pattern to reach a floor vote in years. It does not cut property taxes. It caps a school district’s capacity to respond to costs the state refuses to absorb. If voters pass it in November, the next round of state aid cuts — particularly if Ayotte prevails at the Supreme Court in narrowing Claremont — will be absorbed not by raising taxes but by deeper cuts to schools that already cut 40 teachers to balance a single year’s budget.

The corner office gets to say it lowered taxes without raising them. The legislature gets to say it gave voters a choice. The school board gets to say the voters chose this. Nobody who decided to send the bill to the ballot has to defend a specific position cut or program eliminated.

That is the design. It is not new. It is the same architecture that produced Concord’s 12.2 percent hike and 40 layoffs, only now the architecture comes with a ballot question attached. Granite Staters should ask their House members and senators one question: did you vote to fix the formula, or did you vote to send the bill to the ballot? The two answers are not the same. Only one survives Claremont.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.

Related coverage: Your November Ballot Says the School Tax Cap Won’t Touch Classrooms. The Law Says Otherwise. and, on the bill as introduced, House Bill 1300: Redistricting Impact on New Hampshire Votes. The General Court’s HB 1300 docket lists the final votes and Chapter 324.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.