First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra said the killings of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School had an impact on the vote, the first since the massacre.
“We’re very fragile as a community,” she said. “We’ve lost some of our confidence.”
Officials had put an extra $770,000 in the school and town budgets to hire extra police officers and unarmed security guards in each of Newtown’s public and private schools. The plan was spurred by the Dec. 14 shootings.
Jeff Capeci, chairman of the Legislative Council, said the higher school budget also would have expanded half-day kindergarten to full-day and allowed for the hiring of a new high school administrator and for capital spending and technology.
“I thought it was an incredibly high increase for this economy,” Capeci said. “At the end of the day, Newtown voters thought it was too much of an increase.”
Llodra called the spending increases substantial.
“It’s just beyond the ability of our community to grapple with,” she said.
In contrast, the current budget is up by a fraction of 1 percent over the previous year.
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Some may find it interesting that people would be willing to throw away the most sublime constitution ever written by man in the history of the world and sacrifice their liberty for the sake of security……yet they don’t want a local tax hike to pay for school security. Click below for the full article.