SUNAPEE, N.H. (AP) – Claiming their tax burden is disproportionate to the services they receive, town officials want to secede from Sullivan County and join neighboring Merrimack County.

Town Manager Donna Nashawaty said officials and their lawyer met privately Monday to discuss Sunapee’s options in handling what it calls an excessive and unreasonable tax burden.

Officials say they use just 2 percent of the county’s services while footing roughly 25 percent of the taxes. Furthermore, they say the town only accounts for 8 percent of Sullivan County’s population.

“When you take the disparity between the population and the total amount that it pays and you put every other town on the same grid, Sunapee is the No. 1 town in the state of New Hampshire for that disparity,” Nashawaty said Tuesday.

That burden has made it difficult for the community to raise tax money for local improvements, she said. The board now plans to ask the Legislature to consider a bill that will let Sunapee join Merrimack County.

The town’s gripe isn’t with the county, Nashawaty said. Rather, they take issue with the way by which all county’s must assess taxes. She said Sunapee residents believe they would do better when grouped with different communities.

Several years ago voters in Sunapee, which has 3,166 residents, approved setting aside $20,000 to pursue this plan.

Ed Gil de Rubio, Sullivan County manager, acknowledges that Sunapee is in a difficult position, but questions the reliability of the town’s calculations that show it would do better in Merrimack County.

Sunapee has been wrangling with this issue for some time and Gil de Rubio said that if he was the town manager he would recommend hiring a consultant to come up with options – or drop it.

Officials in Merrimack County have yet to give the matter much consideration, but J D. Colcord, chairman of that county’s Board of Commissioners, said Sunapee is welcome to try moving.

“I’m not sure Merrimack County is the one they ought to join, but we would take them, I’m sure,” he said.

Colcord said Sunapee should be aware that like Sullivan County, Merrimack County has a substantial tax burden. He said property-rich communities similar to Sunapee find themselves paying the largest portion of the taxes.

“I would hope that they have done some homework, but they might be better off with Grafton County,” he said. “I haven’t spent too much time worrying about this because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

John Andrews, executive director of the Local Government Center, said he knows of no community in the state ever having changed counties, though some towns in Maine considered it several years ago.

Otisfield, for example, switched from Cumberland County to Oxford County after residents balked at costs related to construction of the Cumberland County Civic Center.

The last time a New Hampshire community attempted to redraw boundaries of any kind was when the Weirs Beach section of Laconia tried to become a separate town during the 1990s, he said. The effort eventually was called off.

The last successful move to change a community’s boundary was during the 1960s, when what is now the town of Sugar Hill broke away from Lisbon, Andrews said.

Sunapee’s efforts could prompt other communities to try following suit, but Andrews doubts they will get far.

“If people start changing counties for reasons that it would be less expensive in terms of county taxes, then everybody’s going to be saying, Gee, maybe we should shuffle our county,”‘ he said. “Those things are a pretty tough road for anybody to actually get it done.”

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