Ray
Burton was our Executive Councilor in District One for 35 years. District One
is the largest district, from Claremont to Pittsburg and down to Milton. It’s a
big, big area to cover. Ray started covering it in 1977. He had the unique
opportunity to grow into the job at the same time as the population of the
north country was growing.
Ray was remarkable. He remembered everyone’s name. He was always friendly and
charming, and always listened, even if he didn’t agree. Over the years there
have been politicians who ducked my calls. Ray never did. He took his job
seriously, and that meant listening to everyone.
Ray
was never an ideologue. Ray was north country first – and Republican second. He
was never a fire breathing conservative intent on pushing a radical right
agenda. He believed that his job was to fight for the best interests of the
people in his district, and that’s what he did. The Executive Council shouldn’t
be a partisan sideshow.
A brief overview of the role of the EC: they approve state contracts for more
than $10,000, and approve the receiving and spending of federal funds. They
watch the state treasury to make sure that departments don’t spend more than
they were allotted. They also approve judges, commissioners, notaries public,
justices of the peace, commissioners of deeds, and they hear pardon requests. NH
is the only state that has an Executive Council, just as we are the only state
that has a 424 member volunteer legislature. The EC does not pass or repeal
laws on the state or national level.
The
special election to fill Ray’s seat from now till November is coming up on
March 11. There are two candidates: Joe Kenney from Wakefield and Mike Cryans
from Littleton.
Joe Kenney served 4 terms in the NH House and 3 in the state Senate. He ran for
governor in 2008, and garnered approximately 30% of the vote. Mike Cryans has
been a Grafton County Commissioner for 17 years – 16 of them working on that
commission with Ray Burton.
Mike
Cryans has worked in NH as a teacher, a banker, and worked at a transitional
facility for substance abusers. Joe Kenney hasn’t had a job in the private
sector since he left college. He
spent 30 years in the military. His service is certainly laudable, but it
doesn’t make him any more (or less) qualified for the EC. Joe Kenney hasn’t had
an actual paying job in NH since he worked for his parents as a teenager.
Both
Kenney and Cryans did interviews with the Concord Monitor. Both men talked
about the infrastructure needs of the north country. Kenney also talked a lot about his political beliefs, and he
was honest about his intention to use the EC as an ideological platform.
Legislative
experience is a wonderful thing, but it does leave a trail. All of the roll
call votes from 1999 on are available on the NH General Court website. Looking
back over Kenney’s voting record I was struck by how often he voted on the
wrong side of history. He voted against Martin Luther King Day in 1999. He
voted for a law so punitive that it not only refused to recognize out of state
civil unions, it also refused to recognize gay couples. He also voted for SB
110, the 2003 bill that gave health insurance companies the right to
discriminate against customers on the basis of geography – a move that caused
health insurance rates in the north country to increase by as much as 500%.
The month before Ray died, he joined 3 of his colleagues on the EC to support
Governor Hassan’s call for a special session on expanded Medicaid. As Ray knew
quite well, his district has the largest population of uninsured adults. As Ray
also knew, there are plenty of working poor in Carroll, Coos, and Grafton
Counties. Service jobs don’t pay enough for most people to live on. Coos County
has the highest concentration of families on food stamps. There are no jobs.
And there won’t be until something is done about the infrastructure up there.
That
takes money. We’ve all seen how loath some of our elected officials are to
allow any of our federal tax dollars to return home to us. NH is unwilling to
raise sufficient revenue to fund the state properly and rebuild our
infrastructure. That infrastructure is costing us on so many levels. Companies
won’t locate here because of it, and the longer we put off the work, the more
it will cost. NH is the seventh wealthiest state (per capita) yet we have the
11th worst infrastructure in the nation. We’re not a poor state.
We’re a cheap state. The oft-repeated canard that there is all kinds of pork in
the NH budget is mendacity that hurts our state. As long as people buy into
that lie, we’ll continue to avoid doing the work, which serves to perpetuate
the cycle, and further increase the eventual cost.
The
future isn’t popular. The radicals of the far right have no vision for the
future, only a longing to return to an imaginary past. NH is a state that
desperately needs a vision for the future and elected officials who are going
to work toward that vision. The north country, more than any other part of the
state, needs a fierce advocate, someone who will fight for all of us.
On
Tuesday, we’ll all decide who that advocate will be. I urge voters to read up
on the candidates, read the Concord Monitor interviews (in the March 5
edition), and take a look at each of their endorsers.
Tuesday
is also town meeting day for many of us. It is our chance to participate in the
budgeting and decision making in our towns. It’s an opportunity that is envied
by people in other parts of the country. Madison Moderator George Epstein once described
town meeting to me as “pure Aristotelian democracy.”
Get
your Aristotle on, go forth, and participate.
© sbruce 2014 Published as an op/ed in the March 7, 2014 Conway Daily Sun newspaper.
