By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome
New Hampshire’s motto has long been “Live Free or Die,” which caused New Hampshire native and legendary folk-singer Tom Rush to quip, “They don’t cut you much slack in New Hampshire.”
For many years, the state’s motto more accurately was “live and let live,” which is a little less harsh than live free or die.
But in recent years, the New Hampshire legislature has been attempting what was once the unthinkable in our Granite State, trying to upend once precious “local control.”
In the past two sessions local zoning ordinances have come under attack in the legislature after the founder of the Free State Project, Jason Sorens, published a study blaming restrictive zoning for the state’s housing crisis which has been long brewing but became almost unmanageable after the COVID-induced influx of out-of-staters from urban areas buying up any property they could find at what appeared to them to be reasonable prices.
When a studio apartment in New York City costs over $1million, paying $2 million for a large house on the water looks like a bargain.
Property once was cheap in the North Country, but that has not been true for some time as Eversource found out when they proposed the Northern Pass transmission line for Hydro-Quebec to move relatively cheap hydro power to Massachusetts to satisfy its greenhouse gas reduction goals.
People moved to the North Country from places like New York and New Jersey for beautiful views and peace and quiet and had the money to fight the project.
Communities have spent years refining their zoning and planning ordinances and did not want a transmission line or a Yale-educated Free Stater messing around with their good work.
For years communities did the best they could to minimize the opportunities for young families to move in, especially in large numbers like apartment buildings that would encourage that. The issue was and is the cost of educating those children and instead communities encouraged senior citizens with no children to move in instead exacerbating the housing problem for young people.
The real culprit here is not so much the zoning ordinances which reflect what residents want their different communities to be, but the state’s education funding system or lack of any meaningful state aid to education that would make it less of an monetary issue to communities.
Last week the voters of the Kearsarge Regional School District overwhelmingly voted down a cap on the school district’s budget that would have chopped $10 million dollars from the proposed $55 million budget, a cut of nearly 20 percent.
The budget cap proposal drew one of if not the largest turnout of district voters in its 55-year history with a 1,435-113 vote against the cap.
The vote was kind of an “up yours” to all the anti-public school libertarians and Free Staters who want to destroy public education and privatize it who have pushed the Education Freedom Account program, which mostly serves as a taxpayer-paid subsidy for parents with children already in private and religious schools or homeschooled before the program began. Those students account for 77 percent of the more than 5,000 students enrolled in the program this school year.
The EFA advocates talked about the district being heavily Democratic with only one town voting for Trump over Harris. State School Board Chair Drew Cline, who also is the president of Koch Foundation affiliated Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, noted in the NH Journal the district had increased teacher salaries and spending significantly while the number of students declined.
That was not all.
House Majority Leader and Free Stater Jason Osborne couldn’t help himself in the Journal saying he has an idea to address the problem.
“Perhaps, if they are unwilling to cap themselves, the state will step in and cap local taxes for them,” Osborne said.
It is interesting that those who advocate for their own personal freedom want to dictate what others should do and are willing to use the power of the legislature to overrule local control and local decisions.
Another example of this overreach is the law passed in the same budget as the EFA program, because neither could stand on their own due to their unpopularity, is the prohibition against teaching divisive concepts, which is another of the cultural war issue imposed on New Hampshire from national organizations but has little to do with what goes on here.
There is no evidence that critical race theory is taught in any public school in the state, but the law was passed and has been used to go after some teachers whose lessons some parents might find objectionable.
But a recent US Federal Court decision has found the law overly vague and has prohibited its enforcement.
More and more legislation the past few years has targeted public schools and what can and cannot be done, despite the fact that the state law leaves local curriculum decisions in the hands of school boards, not state surveillance agents from the Department of Education.
One representative introduced a bill last year “requiring high schools to include instruction on the nature and history of communism,” and is a co-sponsor of a similar bill this year.
Rep. Mike Belcher, R-Wakefield, also has a bill this session calling for the removal of SAU 67 superintendent Marcy Kelley for having several parents removed and banned from attending the girls soccer games for openly protesting an opposing team’s trans student.
Belcher also wants Superior Court Judge David Ruoff impeached for issuing his two education funding decisions declaring the state’s administration of the Statewide Education Property Tax unconstitutional and that the state is unconstitutionally underfunding its obligation to pay for an adequate education.
One case was brought by a number of school districts and the other by residential and commercial property taxpayers.
And one of the more insidious bills that will come before the House this year sounds simple enough until you step back and look at what actually goes on at the local level every year at annual school and town meetings.
House Bill 407 reads “Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary, no warrant article relative to the adoption of town or school spending items shall pass unless such measure receives votes from at least 15 percent of the registered voters in the town and a majority of those voting.”
The bill is sponsored by many in House Republican leadership including prime sponsor, Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare; and Reps. Joe Alexander, R-Goffstown, Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, and Samuel Farrington, R-Rochester.
The bill applies to town or school budgets and other individual spending warrant articles at what are known as SB 2 towns where there is a deliberative session and the vote on articles is by paper ballot on local election day.
Most communities never get to the 15 percent casting votes threshold, so essentially it would bring a halt to most spending in towns and school districts.
At the Kearsarge vote on the budget cap, 1,556 votes were cast, nearly or the largest in the district’s history.
According to the latest information from the Secretary of State’s office, there are 13,477 voters in the seven-town district that includes Bradford, New London, Newbury, Sutton, Warner, Wilmot and Springfield.
The 1,556 voters amount to 11.5 percent of all the district’s voters.
There could be no budget passed with the bill’s requirement for the Kearsarge District.
Why are lawmakers — sitting in Concord — trying to dictate what local towns and school districts can do when they are facing a budget crisis not seen in two decades?
Cities, towns and school districts can take care of their business quite well without interference from lawmakers in Concord.
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
