By Sarah Opdahl

“The town is clearly divided and a house divided cannot stand,” Board of Finance Chair Mr. Doug Jendras said following the Town’s third budget referendum failure on Saturday, June 8. In the Town’s past two decades there were many years when two referendums were needed and in recent years, New Fairfield has gone to three referendums. With the latest failure, the T own will now be holding a rarely seen fourth budget referendum. “I’m disappointed that the referendum failed again,” Jendras said, going on to say, “Perso nally, I attempted to drive unity by highlighting areas where we could reduce spending and limit tax increases but a future fourth referendum shows that strategy did not work.”

The heavily campaigned for No, Too Low votes held the day with:

Town Budget: 1,071 No to 970 Yes

Education Budget: 1,180 No to 852 Yes

Advisory que stions followed suit with Too Low overtaking Too High as follows:

Town Budget: 931 Low to 837 High

Education Budget: 1,012 Low to 858 High

Jendras, who had hoped to draw out any voters who may be wishing for a lower budget, lamented, “we can’t get a strong representation of registered voters to vote,” with a total of 21.9% of eligible voters visiting the polls.

Registrars Ms. Elisa Beckett-Flores and Mr. Dan McDermott are scrambling to prepare for yet another round of voting. Beckett-Flores said, “this next election will be the ninth election day since the end of March.” As a result, she explained, they are having to rotate election staff to minimize the impact. “Many of our staff are retired and do this because they enjoy working the occasional election, but now that it is consistently happening every three weeks it is putting a strain on some of the staff,” she said. Due to the meeting schedules, the supplemental budgets for the third election and the fourth election will be approved at a Board of Finance meeting on June 27. “Currently we are in the negative for some of our accounts as we move into the fourth election as we wait for the supplemental budget request to be approved for the third and fourth vote that are mandated expenses. On the operational side, the closer we get to August with the elections it starts becoming complicated with the state primary that has seven days of early voting as well as some blacko ut time for the use of the tabulators,” she said.

A special meeting of the Board of Finance to determine next steps was held on Wednesday, J une 12, 7:30 p.m.

UPDATE: Just before going to print, Doug Jendras resigned from the Board of Finance and the meeting above was canceled.