BELFAST - With all eight municipalities of Regional School Unit 20 considering plans to withdraw, simply dissolving the district might be a better idea. That’s the conclusion city attorney Kristin Collins is hoping the state’s Department of Education will reach.

Doing so would require new laws and a leap of faith by an agency that has preached the gospel of consolidation at every turn. But then, there aren’t laws today to say what would happen of all the towns in the district withdrew. Worse, Collins said, is the prospect that the district could become an arbitrary patchwork of towns or something similarly impractical.

“The fact is,” Collins said, “there’s a process [today] that would allow these eight towns to splinter off in awkward ways.” Given the constraints of the law and the contingencies of withdrawal agreements, she said, there’s almost no way to know for sure where the pieces would land.

She offered the town of Belmont as an example. Today, if all of the other towns in RSU 20 successfully withdrew, Belmont would become the entirety of RSU 20 — an educational exclave with no school building. Rather than fortifying the state’s consolidation efforts, Collins said, the laws could easily have the opposite effect.

By contrast, she said, if the DOE had a hand in creating a dissolution law, the department might see its own goals better served, and towns would benefit from having a clear roadmap.

“Then you don’t have this issue of, town by town, by town having to meet all these requirements,” she said.

RSU 20 municipalities started approving withdrawal measures last summer, not long after an unsuccessful attempt by six former SAD 34 towns to leave the district. Since then, voters in Searsport and Stockton Springs passed withdrawal measures for the first time. 

The last withdrawal campaign spanned two years, Belfast, Belmont, Morrill, Northport, Searsmont and Swanville sought to simultaneously withdraw from RSU 20 as a way to undo the state-mandated consolidation that joined their district with neighboring SAD 56 — then Searsport, Stockton Springs and Frankfort — in 2009.

The group of six found workarounds to the stringent rules governing withdrawal and came up with a set of plans, each contingent upon the rest passing, that satisfied both school district and state officials. At the final referendum last June, withdrawal was favored by a supermajority of voters in every town. However, the results were voided due to low voter turnout.

When supporters restarted the process, they vowed to leave out the all-or-nothing clause that killed the last bid.

This gave municipalities flexibility to explore other options — Northport is currently leaning toward a town-run elementary school in collaboration with Appleton, Hope and Lincolnville, while Belfast is looking at being a standalone district, among other scenarios — but as Collins told the City Council, Tuesday, having eight municipalities in flux has created uncertainty that wouldn’t exist if residents could vote to dissolve the district.

“DOE supports regionalization, and is not in favor of withdrawal,” she said. “By the same token, they don’t want to see this insanity that’s happening here.”

Collins said she got a “decent” response from department officials in initial talks about a dissolution option. There is no draft bill yet, but the current timeline could allow for one, she said, along with continued negotiations among towns and with district officials.

“Things have become more complicated,” she said. “We had a goal of getting to the June primary. That’s not going to happen, but that might be a good thing.”

Asked if a bill would be subject to a town-by-town referendum and voter turnout requirements, Collins said it was more likely that it would be subject to a districtwide referendum without a voter turnout clause. 

City officials raised other questions, real and rhetorical: wouldn’t the apparent excess of classroom space in RSU 20 today require closing facilities even if the district dissolved; would negotiations on the RSU 20 board continue to be hamstrung by old, pre-consolidation divisions; how did small towns think they could keep the same number of programs once they were part of a smaller district?

“I think it’s a big mess,” said Mayor Walter Ash.

Collins had had been mostly quiet while members of the Council vented their frustrations.

“You’re right about that,” she said.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com