Chairman's Corner

House Bills 1 and 2 – The State Budget

 egotiating the state budget is a complex procedure. I have included links below to the docket of both bills that comprise our state budget to date. By the length of the docket alone, one can better understand the complexities of negotiation, compromise, and commitment that our state representatives and state senators engage in for their $100 per year remuneration. Highlights are my own.

With the stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Sununu unwound all of the negotiation and compromise that went into HB 1 and 2. A budget approved by the governor after even more negotiation and compromise will not be as beneficial to people as it will be to business interests. Our representatives, Wuelper and Harrington, and State Senator Reagan, voted to defeat both budget bills.

HB 1-A, making appropriations for the expenses of certain departments of the state for fiscal years ending June 30, 2020 and June 30, 2021. The committee of conference produced a balanced and fiscally responsible budget investing in the priorities of the people of New Hampshire. The budget makes investments in our citizens, communities, and state.
  • The budget supports our communities and local property tax payers with $40 million in unrestricted municipal aid to our cities and towns that was guaranteed to our communities in 1969 when creating the business profits tax.
  • This budget combats the opioid and mental health crisis facing our State.
  • HB 1 has the greatest increase in homelessness programming and rapid re-housing in the state’s history to address our housing and homelessness crisis.
  • HB 1 also supports the state’s law enforcement and builds a safer New Hampshire.
  • This budget incorporates Senate Bill 6 and finally fully funds the child protection staff necessary to protect our children, consistent with the DCYF audit released in December of 2016. Supports other child protection staffing as well as the office of Child Advocate.
  • It advances cost effective prevention services, such as voluntary services for at-risk children and family, parental assistance, home visiting, and family resource centers.
  • Increases funding above the Governor for Domestic violence crisis centers, for our regional drug task forces, and for Granite Shield, all critical to public safety.
  • Supports the effort to attract and retain our state police/troopers.
  • Funds an additional detective and attorney for the cold case unit with
  • the more than 125 unsolved murders.
           - Rep. Mary Jane Wallner

HB 2-FN-A-L, relative to state fees, funds, revenues, and expenditures. HB 2 includes the largest public education investment in almost two decades, with approximately $138 million in new state funding for local public schools, the greatest increase in funding for local public schools in twenty years. For the first time in New Hampshire history, kindergarten students are treated the same as every other student, i.e., full adequacy for full-day kindergarten. Full stabilization payments to help those communities left out and left behind and a new fiscal disparity aid formula that sends targeted resources back to the communities who need it most. Commission to study long-term funding of education, including the funding of pre-K (New Hampshire was one of only 6 states that does not provide state funding for pre-K). Freezes in state-tuition at our community colleges and our university system, helping retain graduating high school seniors and advancing our workforce.

The bill also:
  • Combats the Opioid and Mental Health Crisis.
  • Protects Medicaid expansion by ensuring the Medicaid expansion trust fund is solvent, protecting access to health care for thousands who need it in these crises.
  • Creates a new 25 bed Secure Psychiatric Unit, finally stopping the criminalization of the mentally ill at the state prison.
  • Incorporates many of the provisions of Senate Bill 11 to address the ER boarding crisis.
  • Moves the children out of New Hampshire Hospital to a better setting with several safeguards, renovates the remaining space to add capacity to help solve the ER boarding crisis.
  • Incorporates Senate Bill 14, creating a first ever statewide children’s mobile crisis and intervention unit, children’s health and reducing costs down the road, including special education.
  • Helps support Safe Stations in Manchester and Nashua.
  • Supports emergency shelters for individuals with substance use disorders.
  • This budget promotes New Hampshire jobs and New Hampshire small businesses. HB 2 incorporates Granite State Jobs Act (Senate Bill 2) which attracts and retains workers, skill workers up, and places them in available jobs. Each month there are close to 15,000 job openings in New Hampshire. Our businesses need a skilled workforce.
  • It supports New Hampshire’s small business and entrepreneur incubator programs, as well as the NH Small Business Development Center. It increases our tourism marketing budget helping drive more business here.
  • It adds a student loan repayment program for advanced regenerative manufacturing and our health care workforce.
  • Reforms business taxes ensuring small businesses in NH do not get double taxed by other states, while ensuring large out of state corporations pay their fair share.
  • It also protects the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, ensuring energy efficiency investments across the board, which lowers rates for everyone.
          - Rep. Mary Jane Wallner

For more information on the budget bills, follow these links:
Published here July 31, 2019

Lights for Liberty Vigil

PictureA vigil in Dover calling for humane treatment of refugees.
Approximately 50 area inhabitants gathered at the steps of Dover City Hall Friday, July 12, to share concerns for the welfare of those desperate souls who seek safety in America, but who are, instead, being met with mistreatment.
 
Despite a fast-moving thunderstorm with heavy rain, we gathered, not to resolve the difficult issue of immigration reform, but instead to join with others in 750 locations around the world to condemn the inhumane treatment of those who seek refuge in America, however temporary that refuge may become. 

We gathered to demonstrate to the world America's true core values related to those who arrive at our borders as refugees seeking compassion.  Our values and laws prohibit verbal and sexual abuse of refugees, and deprivation of food or water.  Our values prohibit incarceration of infants and children in filthy, overcrowded cages, or require them to go days and weeks without a change of diapers, clothes or a cleansing shower.  America's family values do not include the separation of families or requiring detainees to work in a private detention camp for $1 per day, or border patrol rejection of offerings of basic hygiene products, food and water, from concerned citizens.  Our collective values allow none of it. 

We must end the cruelty of those at our border, and treat them with human respect and dignity.   They flee danger and death at the hands of vicious gangs and corrupt governments.  

Though outside access by the public and even members of congress to these facilities is restricted, the photos and videos that have been released confirm conditions of squalor.  

How can we help?  We must call our members of congress and use social media to voice our disgust with the current humanitarian crisis at the border.  Stay connected with LightsforLiberty.org, and seek out other organizations fighting for the humane treatment of infants, children, women and men.  Contribute to organizations,  such as the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and the Southern Poverty Law Center, that fight for the rights of the oppressed in the courts.

REPEAL OF THE NH DEATH PENALTY (​May 2019)

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Since 1998, Robert “Renny” Cushing, current state representative from Hampton, has advocated for repeal of the state’s death penalty, even after his father and another member of his family were murdered. Cushing has traveled to other countries with the same message. Sponsors of the bill include Democrats and Republicans. Core to the intent of the bill is the analysis set forth within the bill’s framework below:

ANALYSIS
 
This bill (House Bill 455) changes the penalty for capital murder to life imprisonment without the possibility for parole. On Tuesday, May 21, the NH House of Representatives, by a single vote, overrode Gov. Sununu’s veto. A 2/3 vote was required to override. On Thursday, May 30, the NH Senate voted 16 – 8 to override the governor’s veto, making NH the 21 st state to eliminate capital punishment. A 2/3 vote was required to override. With the advent of DNA evidence, together with barbaric executions via botched lethal injection, public support for the death penalty has plummeted. Below is brief background justifying life imprisonment versus execution:

Illinois placed a moratorium on the death penalty, and later repealed it, after the courts dismissed the cases of 13 men placed on death row. Before leaving office in 2003, doubting the criminal justice system’s ability to prevent wrongful executions, Republican Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 inmates to life in prison. Among the many defendants sentenced to death or extended prison described at The Innocence Project, Kirk Bloodsworth, wrongly convicted multiple times of rape and murder of a 9-year old girl in 1985, and sentenced to die in Maryland’s gas chamber, was the first to be exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 8 years on death row. Before being exonerated, an Innocence Project case study reports that Malcolm Alexander holds the record for having served the most time in prison, 38 years, for a crime he did not commit. The most common reasons for wrongful convictions are witness misidentification, government misconduct, incompetent legal counsel, and faulty forensic evidence.

The Innocence Project has concluded that among other Texas executions, Cameron Todd Willingham was likely put to death wrongfully. Willingham was convicted of intentionally setting fire to his home with the intent to kill his 3 daughters. The opinions of forensic experts regarding how the fire started was questioned before and after the execution. NPTV Frontline documentary on the Willingham investigation: https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-death-by-fire/

Many more examples of wrongful death or imprisonment: https://www.innocenceproject.org/all-cases/

Due to the number of appeals advanced on behalf of those convicted, sometimes spanning decades, it is less expensive to sentence a person to a lifetime of imprisonment than to sentence to death. The fiscal note attached to HB 455 recognizes the statement above as factual.

View In Depth NH’s video coverage of the history-making senate session, including the views of senators pro and con on death penalty repeal, as presented by Chair of the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affiairs Committee, Rep. Melanie Levesque (D-Brookline); and Sen. Lou D’Allesandro (D-Manchester): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0V8khVppfY&feature=youtu.bewww.youtube.com/watch?v=O0V8khVppfY&feature=youtu.be

The three sentencing goals of long standing established by our judicial system to establish justice are punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. Vengeance and political gain are not among them. Death is final. Once executed, the result is the same, and no amount of post-death exculpatory evidence collection will ever matter.

How did Strafford’s representatives and senator vote on whether to support the governor’s veto?
     Sen. John Reagan – supported the governor’s veto
     Rep. Michael Harrington – supported the governor’s veto
     Rep. Kurt Wuelper – supported the governor’s veto

“And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.”  - George Bernard Shaw

Open Democracy Action   (March 2019)

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This photo was taken March 29, 2019, from the NH senate gallery as members of the public and Open Democracy Action (ODA) awaited the vote of the full senate on SB 106, a bill ODA submitted through prime sponsor, Sen. Dan Feltes (D-Concord). The bill is one of several that ODA has prioritized, as it focuses on eliminating loopholes in current law related to registering with the state and reporting of campaign contributions.  Currently, a sizable percentage of expenditures that influence our elections go unreported.  If the House also supports the bill and it becomes law (with or without the governor's signature), it will plug the loophole and, if enforced, provide a much greater degree of public access related to who is influencing our elections.
​ 
The senate vote was unanimous at  24 - 0, Strafford's senator, John Reagan, was among the bill's supporters.  

Strafford Town Democratic Committee Chair Bob Perry submitted the following testimony:

     SB 106 – relative to the definition of political advocacy organization and expenditure.
     Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 10:30 A.M.
     Rm. 102, LOB
     Time:  Mts. 3:10
 
Madam Chair and members of the committee,
 
I speak in support of SB 106.  I first note an error in the bill at Line 1, which references RSA 644:2, IX.  The reference should be to RSA 664:2, IX.
 
In 2015, the NH Attorney General’s office concluded that a flaw existed in law meant to require the registration and reporting of campaign contributions made by a political advocacy organization.   It is the intent of this bill to remove the interpretation of language that is required by current law.
 
The language reflected in this bill is simple.  It requires that upon making $5000 in political expenditures, together with the timing of the communication and it being directed to a relevant audience, registering and reporting is required, regardless of whether the communication expressly advocates a vote for or against a candidate.
 
While Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United consisted of 57 pages, the blistering opinion of dissent by Republican justice, John Paul Stevens, consisted of 90 pages.
 
Justice Stevens’ parting comment:  “At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.  It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.  While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
 
The majority court opinion in Citizens United ultimately held 8 – 1, disclosure to be constitutional, unless ruled otherwise in a specific case.  The court held, in part, that “disclaimer and disclosure requirements may burden the ability to speak, but they impose no ceiling on campaign-related activities,” citing Buckley, 424 U. S., at 64, or “ ‘ “prevent anyone from speaking,” ’ ” McConnell, supra, at 201. The Buckley Court explained that disclosure can be justified by a governmental interest in providing “the electorate with information” about election-related spending sources.
 
When I last spoke in support of disclosure in January of 2017, investigations were being conducted into whether campaign contributions could be traced to China.  As recently as days ago, unrelated investigations are being conducted into whether campaign contributions can be traced to China.  Federal law prohibits campaign contributions from foreign sources.  The only way we can know who is influencing our elections and to what extent is through rigorous reporting requirements.
 
New Hampshire has strong disclosure requirements for candidates for elected office.  They must report the name, address, date of receipt of contributions exceeding $25, aggregate contributions to date, and if in the aggregate more than $100, the occupation and place of business of those donors.  The same demands need to be made of political advocacy organizations, whose political influence is on a much grander scale than is reflected in the reporting requirements of candidates for state representative. 
 
Bob Perry, Strafford, NH
Working for Open Democracy (November 2018)
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Committee Chair Bob Perry attends a Democracy in Action breakout session at the New Hampshire Technical Institute in November 2018. This workshop focused on Using the Power of Social Media to Engage, Educate, and Move to Action.  The day of training was sponsored, in part, by the Coalition for Open Democracy in Concord. Bob has been a board member since January 2010.

​Learn more about the Coalition for Open Democracy.