POLAND — Selectmen on Tuesday threatened to refuse to sign this year’s tax commitment because RSU 16 officials have given them a bill based on a budget that townspeople voted down.

Selectman Wendy Sanborn said the administration’s actions amount to voter disenfranchisement. Not only have voters spoken twice, rejecting an $18.1 million budget in May and a reduced $17.8 million budget in June, but following the second vote, school officials decided to send the towns a bill now and wait until September for another vote.

“They have no intent to tackle this until September and that’s just not timely,” Sanborn said.

“It’s interesting that this tax commitment the school is looking for comes to us the day after Independence Day,” Selectman Larry Moreau said.

“They expect us to do something that the voters said ‘no’ to. I will not sign it,” Selectman Lester Stevens said.

Selectman Erland Torrey noted that officials in RSU 16 towns of Mechanic Falls, Minot and Poland had made the tough decisions in handling their personal budgets and suggested the schools do likewise.

“I don’t understand why the wait until September,” Torrey said.

Selectman Steve Robinson said the school consolidation law had simply gotten it wrong in the way it handles voter rejection in the budget validation vote.

The new law governing how school budgets work dictates that the school committee presents a budget for a given amount at a districtwide meeting. District meeting voters approve the budget at whatever level it chooses.

The amount the district meeting approves then goes to a validation vote. If the vote fails to ratify the district meeting vote, the process is supposed to start over and continue until a budget is approved by both votes.

Problems arise when the new fiscal year starts July 1 and the district doesn’t have an approved budget.

The law says the school can begin the new year using the last budget that received some kind of approval.

For RSU 16 that would be the $17.8 million budget voters soundly rejected.

“That is utterly ridiculous,” Robinson said, noting that the districtwide budget meeting had been attended by fewer than 200 voters — and more than 1,000 voted in the validation referendum.

Robinson suggested the more rational solution to the problem of starting the school year without an approved budget would be to revert to the last fully approved budget — the budget the schools had used for the year just ended.

Robinson suggested that board members speak with members of the Mechanic Falls Town council and the Minot Board of Selectmen to gauge their reaction to the situation.

State Sen. Lois Snowe-Mello, who represents Poland, and state Sen. Garrett Mason, who represents Mechanic Falls and Minot, listened as the selectmen aired their grievances.

“I never believed an RSU board would act this way, the sheer arrogance,” Snowe-Mello said.

Mason, who is on the Legislature’s Education Committee, agreed that the school consolidation law definitely has some problems — and promised that it would be worked on in the next session.