Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais was about to become the city’s first incumbent mayor to run for reelection unopposed in 150 years when Board of School Committee member Jessica Spillers announced her candidacy on Thursday.
Spillers’ entry creates a campaign custom-made to test the credibility of New Hampshire’s media.
In her announcement, Spillers said she decided to run “when our school district’s budget was cut last month by Jay by $9.5 million….” That moment, she said, was when “I knew I needed to step up.”
But that cut never happened.
As we reported in April during the Manchester school budget debate, the mayor never proposed a school budget cut. His budget increased city school spending by $2 million.
The final school district budget for Fiscal Year 2026 spends $3.5 million more than the district spent in Fiscal Year 2025.
But the year-over-year budget increase is even bigger on an appropriations basis, as the initial FY 25 budget appropriation was $227.9 million, making the FY 26 appropriation budget $10 million larger.
The school district had requested $246 million, an $11.5 million increase over actual FY 25 spending and an $18 million increase over the initial FY 25 appropriation budget.
The district received less than it requested, but more than was appropriated or spent in the prior fiscal year. There’s a huge difference between cutting a school district budget and increasing spending at a slower rate than administrators wanted. Media not only fail at their jobs when they don’t make this distinction; they participate in the spread of misinformation.
Spillers sits on the Board of School Committee and presumably knows the budget numbers. If she continues to campaign on the false claim that Mayor Ruais cut the school budget, the media will have an obligation to correct this, based on basic journalistic standards as well as the standards they set for themselves during their coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The Boston Globe, WMUR and the Union Leader have all used the phrase “without evidence” or the word “unsubstantiated” to identify claims by Trump or other Republicans that couldn’t be verified or that were demonstrably untrue. With a candidate for Manchester mayor claiming to base her entire campaign on a political event that never happened, will they apply that same standard in this race?
