A petition for Durham to withdraw from Regional School Unit 5 had 154 signatures on Monday morning, 60 shy of the 214 signatures needed to bring the matter to the Board of Selectmen for consideration.

The petition has surfaced less than a year after Freeport residents chose in a close vote not to withdraw from RSU 5, and less than three years after Durham residents themselves decided that withdrawal was too costly.

The petition has been hanging for the past few weeks at the checkout counter at the Durham Get & Go. Store owner Donna Church said that she did not start the petition, and declined to say who brought it into her store.

Town office employees, members of the Board of Selectmen, school board members from Durham and members of the town’s Budget Committee contacted by the Tri-Town Weekly all had the same answer to the question as to who started the petition – they didn’t know.

Administrator Ruth Glaeser said Monday that people who circulate such petitions don’t have to go through the town office. In this case, the petition could have been printed from the Maine Department of Education website.

“And we don’t have to certify who did the petition – just the signatures,” Glaeser said.

Michelle Ritcheson of Durham, vice chairwoman of the RSU 5 Board of Directors, said Friday that she was in hopes that RSU 5 had come together since Freeport rejected withdrawal. Ritcheson and the other Durham and Pownal members of the school board had formed the committee called the Working Group, which went through sometimes difficult negotiations with the Freeport Withdrawal Committee.

“My initial reaction to the petition is that I’m disappointed,” Ritcheson said. “We moved through the withdrawal discussion with Freeport, and the school year was starting so well.”

Durham, which has supported the RSU 5 budget once since RSU 5 was formed in 2009, went through an abbreviated withdrawal process in 2012. Milt Simon, chairman of the town’s Budget Committee, circulated the 2012 petition. But by an 828-287 vote, residents decided that the cost of withdrawal, estimated at around $1.1 million, was prohibitive. So the withdrawal process ended there.

Simon said he is not behind this year’s petition drive, but still has issues with RSU 5 spending. Last fall, Durham and Pownal voters rejected the 2015-2016 budget, but Freeport voters outmuscled them and got a budget with a 7.8 overall spending increased passed. The $29.4 million budget meant an 8.71 percent tax increase for education in Durham, and added $1.45 per $1,000 to the tax rate.

Moreover, in the town meeting-style budget meeting that preceded the referendum vote, Freeport residents added $150,000 to the budget figure that had been approved by the school board.

“We are never going to have a say in the spending for this RSU,” Simon said. “This is two years in a row someone at the budget meeting from Freeport proposed a higher budget.”

Simon said that the new RSU 5 budget is part of a 12 percent tax increase in town.

“How many years in a row can someone be budgeting a 12 percent increase from their property taxes?”

he asked. “People are upset that Freeport rules.”

John Ricker of Durham, a former school board member, served on the 2012 Education Exploration Committee that studied the withdrawal proposal back then. Durham Community School had been built two years earlier.

“People were not happy with how their taxes were going up, and in the very beginning people were feeling snubbed, because of a perceived loss of control of the school,” Ricker said. “The town had footed the bill for extras at the school.”

The law requires that the number of petition signers equals 10 percent of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election – in this case, 214 signatures.

According to the state Department of Education, the next step in the withdrawal process is for the petition to be presented to the municipal officers, who would then call a special election to vote on whether to officially start the withdrawal process. The article must specify a dollar amount to be raised to support legal and other withdrawal process costs. If the article is approved, both the RSU board and the education commissioner would be notified and a withdrawal committee and a working group of school board members from the other towns of the RSU would be formed to negotiate the terms of the withdrawal. Residents of the town proposing the withdrawal would then vote on the proposal.