Oxbow voters support withdrawing from SAD 32
OXBOW PLANTATION, Maine — Residents in Oxbow Plantation voted overwhelmingly Nov. 21, 2014 in support of withdrawing from SAD 32.
“To withdraw from a School Administrative District, there’s 22 steps,” said Steve Sherman, chair of the board of assessors for Oxbow Plantation. “The referendum was step 2. It’s quite a process. It starts with a petition from the citizens, and the referendum vote was to file that petition for withdrawal with the Commissioner of Education and with the SAD 32 school board.
“We have a long way to go. There’s lots of negotiation and we have to vote on it a few more times, the district has to vote … there’s a lot to it,” he said. “There’s a lot of ducks to get in a row, and it may not work, but we’ve got to try.”
Residents were asked, “Do you favor filing a petition for withdrawal with the board of directors of the regional school unit SAD 32 and with the Commissioner of Education authorizing the withdrawal committee to expend $40,000 and authorizing the board of assessors to issue notes in the name of Oxbow Plantation or otherwise pledge the credit of Oxbow Plantation in an amount not to exceed $40,000 for this purpose?”
“Essentially voters were asked if they wanted to file the petition to withdraw, and if they were wiling to authorize the town to borrow or raise up to $40,000 for legal and accounting fees,” said Sherman.
The measure was approved 25-1.
Sherman said the referendum to withdraw from the school district is part of a much bigger plan.
“We’re going through the process to try to deorganize the plantation, and we would go back to being part of the unorganized territories,” he said. “Withdrawal from the school district is a major part of the deorganization process. We have to withdraw from the school district before the state will let us deorganize.
“The school budget is driving up taxes, and that has led to the whole notion that we can’t remain an organized plantation,” Sherman explained. “We’re running out of people; we have approximately 50 people living here. There are a couple of children who are home-schooled, but there are only two students that actually attend Ashland District School, yet our school budget is around $117,000. That’s a lot of money for a small community.”
Sherman said by the time the plantation gets the school bill paid, “there’s no money to keep the road.”
“It’s a lose-lose situation. We are basically a retirement community here,” he said. “A large majority of our population are fixed-income, retired people, and these taxes are just killing them.”
Should Oxbow become part of the unorganized territories, Aroostook County would “take over a lot of what we do as a town such as roads and solid waste,” Sherman said.
“If we were to deorganize, we would become lumped in with all the other unorganized towns and our costs would get blended into their costs,” said Sherman. “The two students that presently attend Ashland District School would still go there; they would just be tuitioned for much, much less than what we’re paying now.”
Sherman said if everything continues to progress smoothly, Oxbow could be out of the school district by 2016 and be deorganized by 2017.
