By GARRY RAYNO, InDepthNH.org
Sometimes what appears to be one thing is something else.
For example, the blind men and the elephant story most every child hears at a young age, feeling only one area of an elephant can give you the wrong impression of an elephant’s shape.
If you touch the trunk, you would think an elephant is a large snake, or if you touch the ear, it feels like a silk cloth or touch its leg and you think it is built like a tree.
Similarly, on one of the first days I began covering the State House back in the last century, I met with the Speaker of the House, Doug Scamman.
At one point in our conversation, he said, “Garry the one thing you have to remember is there are two reasons for everything: the one we tell you and the real one.”
And that is perhaps even more apparent today than it was then, when the real one was “that Representative told me he would vote for my bill, but he spoke against it so I voted against his.”
And today things are a little less transparent.
Let’s take the Education Freedom Account program which stands but a governor’s signature away from becoming “universal” meaning grants are open to any New Hampshire student regardless of what his or her parents earn, even if they are billionaires or millionaires.
Not bad for a program initially sold as a path for low-income parents to seek alternative education programs for their child who does not adapt well to the public school environment.
In a few short years the program will grow from about $5 million the first year — not the $300,000 outgoing Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut told lawmakers it would cost — to tens of millions of dollars if not approaching $100 million a year mostly for subsidies for the wealthy who already were sending their children to private and religious schools and not taking them out of the public school environment, because they never were there.
The money to pay for the EFA program comes from the Education Trust Fund, which is also the source of most real state aid to traditional public schools and to charter schools.
Stop and think what that means. The EFA program competes with public and charter schools for state aid to education.
The Education Trust Fund had a significant surplus not long ago but will need general fund money in the next biennium to cover all of its obligations.
If you have read headlines, you know general fund money is too scarce to properly fund all the things being funded this year including the University System of New Hampshire, payments to healthcare providers in the Medicaid program, developmentally disabled and mental health services, and the court system which will have to close some courthouses, etc.
In the next few years, the real reason for the rapid expansion of the EFA program may become more apparent as the education dollars become more precious: to end public schools as we know them.
Libertarians have long envisioned public schools as providers of special education services or environments for the developmentally disabled while “normal and gifted students” receive the best private or religious education their parents can afford. Likewise with college.
And doing away with those pesky public schools as we know them also takes care of another libertarian priority, ending labor unions as public education is one of the last strongholds of organized labor.
As is often the case, it is not so much about the students as it is about the pocketbook.
The oligarchical money flowing into New Hampshire from out-of-state interests to convince lawmakers to pass universal EFAs makes apparent who is driving the voucher movement.
Operating under the radar is characteristic of the libertarian movement since its early days in Virginia and the south when they tried to find ways around paying for black kids’ education through segregation academies that are coming back to life with the voucher movement today.
People were not fond of what the oligarchs wanted when they pushed their agenda in the past because it is frankly not in the best interest of the vast majority of the people, only their’s.
And now the libertarians led by their Free State counterparts have set their sights on land use planning and zoning ordinances to solve the state’s housing crisis which has been brewing for decades with little attention.
The attack on zoning and planning did not occur until the Free State’s architect, Jason Sorens of Amherst, wrote a paper laying the blame at the feet of “snob zoning” while little mention of developing town master plans using communities’ experiences over years of growth and compromise to arrive at what they envision for themselves.
The push to decide zoning and land use at the state level and tell towns too bad for all that work you did, has snared more than the Free Staters and libertarians in the New Hampshire legislature, it has also been touted by the majority of Democrats in the legislature in the guise of affordable housing.
The state does have an affordable housing problem, but let’s be honest, housing could be a lot more affordable if people were not so greedy, wanting to wring every last nickel out of their property when they sell it or buy it and turn it into short term rentals.
The Free Staters have another reason to do away with zoning in the state: to increase their numbers here as after over 20 years of trying, they are well short of their goal of more than 20,000 libertarians relocating to the Granite State.
Friday night the organization held a webinar with the title “Accelerating Free State Migration” with Dennis Pratt who is a New Hampshire Free State resident and suggests the need to be civil and non-confrontational as was not the case when the first group of libertarians moved into Grafton under the “Free Town Project,” built shacks and left their garbage out to feed the bears, who in turn became used to people and eventually one attacked a women in a nearby house trying to get to her food.
See the book “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)” by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.
According to the blurb for the “digital dialogue,” 7,000 of the Free Staters who moved here remain in New Hampshire, far short of the 28,000 or 2 percent Sorens touted would be needed to affect change and turn the state libertarian.
To speed up the movement, Pratt suggests employing the “Second Free Town Project” to put 50 Free Staters in a small community with a population between 1,000 and 2,000 people.
“By integrating respectfully (‘Be a Good Neighbor’) and gaining planning board influence, this group can achieve targeted zoning reform in a small area,” Pratt writes. “The objective is enabling affordable starter homes, directly addressing the FSP’s primary recruitment/retention bottleneck. This requires strong leadership, a committed team, careful town selection, and disciplined, low-profile execution, learning from past failures, to provide a replicable model for accelerating liberty.”
So all those changes to the zoning Democrats and Republicans have been passing is really a marketing tool to bring more Free Staters to New Hampshire.
At their liberty feast in Concord several weeks ago there was open talk about purchasing large tracts of land and putting all the mobile homes they could on the property with no zoning limitations to provide places for the new immigrant Free Staters to live cheaply.
Be careful what you wish for. The talk from legislative leadership about affordable housing is really about accelerating the Free State movement in the Granite State by destroying local zoning.
Is that what you want?
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.