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BELLOWS FALLS â The Rockingham Select Board approved a town tax rate that includes a tax decrease needed to support town services in the coming year.
However, the decrease â just about two cents â will likely be offset by an eight-cent increase in the school tax rate, according to Town Manager Scott Pickup.
Pickup told the board Wednesday night that the state Agency of Education had finally released individual townsâ school tax rates, and Rockinghamâs was up 8.4 cents.
Christopher Pratt, superintendent of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, said Friday that the 8.4 cent increase actually resulted in a 4.5 percent increase in Rockingham school taxes over the current tax rate, and he said much of the increase was not a result of the stateâs education spending formula. Voters approved a $10.7 million school budget in March.
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ROCKINGHAM Historian William Hosley will present âWhere Art and History Meet â Rockingham Meeting House Burying Groundâ from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 9. This is the fourth in a series of talks sponsored by the Rockingham Historic Preservation Commission in partnership with the Rockingham Free Public Library. The free lecture will be via Zoom.
Part of the Rockingham Meeting House National Historic Landmark, the graveyard has burials going back to the time of the American Revolution and includes the original town tomb. Many of the older headstones were crafted by the Moses Wright family of stone carvers who settled on farms to the north of Rockingham Village in the 1790s. Migrating north along the Connecticut River Valley, the Wright family brought with them older Puritan style headstone motifs but with variation that led Hosley and other scholars to identify a distinctive Rockingham School, the last phase of i
ROCKINGHAM The Rockingham Meeting House will open for the 2021 season on Saturday. Visitors are welcome daily through Indigenous People’s Day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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BELLOWS FALLS â Two Vermont solar companies outlined similar but competing plans for a 2.2 megawatt solar array on the town-owned gravel pit in Bartonsville this week.
The Rockingham Select Board didnât make any decision Wednesday night, saying it might want to retain a portion of the gravel pit for unrelated highway maintenance operations, and it didnât know how much of the 44-acre parcel it would need.
The parcel is located between Route 103 and the Williams River, and adjacent to the former Vermont State Police barracks, which is now a truck-driving school.
BELLOWS FALLS â Two proposed solar projects got different receptions last week from the Rockingham Select Board.
Green Lantern Solar, which has proposed a facility at a town-owned gravel pit in Bartonsville, off Route 103, was back before the board, urging action before a state deadline for a higher electric net metering rate expires.
A second project, proposed for a town-owned field next to the historic Rockingham Meeting House by MHG Solar of Manchester Center, ran into opposition on several fronts â the facility would be located on prime agricultural land and it would be located in the historic district that surrounds the 1787 Meeting House.