Contact: 603-448-4769, susan.almy@comcast.net, 266 Poverty Lane, #4B, Lebanon NH 03766

I try my best to help Lebanon constituents and others who call or email me with crises.

Legislative history:

• First elected as a state representative in 1996, and re-elected 13 times to date. I spent my first term on Election Law, then Finance Committee (combined budget and revenue), and now 12 terms on the Ways and Means (revenue) Committee.

• On the Finance Committee, I was one of 10 reps appointed to figure out how to respond to the NH Supreme Court’s new mandate for us to define and fund an adequate education. We worked 6.5 days a week for 6 weeks, then went to help do the regular budget. Our definition and funding formula has been modified almost every term since, sometimes with Ways & Means participation. But I learned a lot about taxes in NH that term, and have helped mold the current public-facing and datat-driven Revenue Administration in the years since.

• My middle sister died of a lifetime of alcoholism and tobacco in the summer of 1997, and after consulting Headrest and others, I have spent many years working locally on transitional and affordable housing, as well as 11 years working with the Republican heads of Criminal Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services in Concord, reforming the DUI laws away from imprisonment and toward treatment and prevention. Our keystone bill passed in 2011.

• In 2010 I decided to start work on helping condominiums and homeowner associations improve their governance. I run my small homeowners association, and knew that these local non-governments have no help in what they do, unless they have a good (and costly) manager. Slowly I discovered that some professional managers with influence in the senate wanted to run things without their homeowners’ approval, and fought this. Together with other reps from both parties we got regulations on governance inserted in the statute. Then we discovered that there was and is no way to enforce the laws we had inserted. We have been working for 8 years to try to get a quasi-judicial appeals board into law, and almost managed it in 2019-20 - but then there was the COVID lockdown. I do a lot of individual (and unpaid) consulting for association members who want to reform their systems, some of which have been horror stories.

• All that was a way to deal with the frustration of running or co-running with my Republican counterpart a revenue committee in a state which increasingly over the years has tried to reduce our revenues, public services, and aid to local communities. Since our two terms in 2007-10, Democrats have only had a single term twice, one after the disastrous Speaker O’Brien term and one beginning just before COVID started. Ways & Means has based itself in bipartisanship and attention to the facts as other committees have turned into battlegrounds. We have some far-right members, but they’ve learned to compromise when necessary. We rarely get far-left members, but if Democrats controlled as often as Republicans did, that could change. We have an implicit understanding among those of us that make things happen that we do not want to see the revenues decline unless the needs decline. And we are farther and farther from that point.

Click here for Susan Almy’s extended bio and her essay on the evolution of taxation in New Hampshire since 1999.