"Free Grafton" Frees Itself

The Free State Project was thrilled about this NPR story that aired on Weekend Edition on March 9. A small sampling:

Free Staters say Grafton should withdraw from the school district, cut the $1 million budget by 30 percent over three years, and carve Grafton out as a "U.N.-free zone."

Tony Stelick, a Free Stater who lived in Poland under the boot of Stalinism, remembers a government that slowly gained more and more power. He says locals who oppose Free Staters are unwittingly voting themselves towards fascism.

"They don't know where they going," Stelick says. "I been there. I know where they going."

Even though Grafton has always had a Libertarian streak, Free Staters are a minority and locals have mostly blocked their agenda. Still, Free Stater Jeremy Olson is confident they could shift the balance if they reach out to locals.

"I think most of the people in town are actually supportive of small government," he says.

It's funny - back at the very beginning of the FSP, one of the things they always talked about that they loved about NH - a reason for moving here - was our custom of town meeting. 

Who can blame them? Town meeting is that day where once a year we gather in our towns and hammer out our budget for the year. We discuss the nuts and bolts; streetlights, plow trucks, and software for the library. Should we start a capital fund to replace the fire truck in about 10 years? The big ticket items are discussed by everyone present. When seen on the warrant folks can get grumbly: "72,000 for that, are they nuts?" But then the fire chief or the road agent comes along to explain the why behind the ask. That's the thing. I've been to many town meetings, in many different towns. I've never been to a town that spent money frivolously. 

 LAST year in Grafton  the Free Staters cut the budget by 10%.  

After last year's success at town meeting, how did they do in the Free town of Grafton this year? 

The town operating budget of $993,500, up more than $53,000 from last year, passed on a vote of 381-111.

The default budget, which would have been adopted if the proposed budget failed, was more than the proposed budget, at just over $1 million.

Voters also rejected a tax cap, which would have prevented the Budget Committee from recommending an increase in property taxes of more than 1 percent over previous year’s spending.

And:

Jim Dugan will sit on the Planning Board after winning 368 votes to 134 for Robert Hull. Jeffrey Weiss will be the supervisor of the checklist as he won over 313 voters compared with Jeremy Olson’s 157.

Robert Hull was one of the first Free State movers to Grafton. He's held that Planning Board seat for a long time.  As for Jeremy Olson? That confidence he was boasting of seems to have been misplaced. 

The good people of Grafton had a colorful deliberative session in February. 

Get Your Aristotle On

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 11^th 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.

h/t to Kathleen Ronayne at  the Concord Monitor

© sbruce 2014   Published as an op/ed in the March 7, 2014 Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

Making Friends and Keenely Influencing Politics

It's that time of year in New Hampshire - the time when we move toward town meeting, and the cities and towns that adopted SB 2 have their deliberative sessions. 

One such session took place in Keene yesterday - the deliberative session for the school budget. 

From the Keene Sentinel 

A majority of Keene voters had a clear message Saturday for a small group that sought to slash the budget and reduce some of the school board’s powers:

No, thank you.

Most voters showed their disdain for the ideas, amending each of seven warrant articles and describing most of them as a waste of time or irresponsible. 

Who was this small group?  It was future POTUS  Darryl W. Perry  Conan Salada, and Ian Freeman of the Keene branch of the Free State Project. 

Freeman tried to reduce the budget by $5 million, saying that rising taxes are driving people from Keene. His motion failed 75-15.

And

Some wondered aloud why, if taxes in Keene are so high, they haven’t driven out Freeman or Perry. Others groaned at their proposals or laughed at some defeated amendments.

When the Free Staters started moving to NH, they waxed on  about how much they loved town meeting as a form of government. It's listed as one of their 101 reasons to move to NH. I'm sure that from a theoretical standpoint, it seemed like the bestest thing ever. 

Town meeting is the bestest thing ever. Most of the time ridiculousness gets a sound thrashing, as Messrs. Perry, Salada, and Freeman experienced on Saturday.

Rindge Warrant Article