I am currently in my 14th term as a Lebanon representative. I started by chance when I returned with damaged lungs from 25 years of work in small-farmer agricultural development, mostly based in Africa and Latin America. I was only 49, had saved enough not to need to work, but needed something interesting to do that was useful to others. My parents raised me that way.

I trained as an anthropologist, which allows you to pick and choose what disciplines you need to do the work you choose. During my training and first career I learned community and institutional analysis, statistics, program evaluation, budgeting and economic analysis, and of course agricultural systems analysis and basic agronomy. It turned out to be perfect for our State House, as well as helping at home, where I became president and volunteer manager of my homeowners association 6 months after I moved in. I had a 5-year hiatus while I was learning to run Ways & Means and deal with the Great Recession, during which 3 of my neighbors took turns pitching in.

In 1994 I returned home with an illness which keeps me states-bound, after 25 years working on and then in Africa and Latin America with small farmers, first in Guatemala, then Kenya, then for 11 years all over Latin America with the Rockefeller Foundation, and then 5 years in Cameroon and 3 in Madagascar, under an international coalition funding small farmer agriculture. In late 1994 I moved to Lebanon, and in 1996 you elected me as a state representative.

In my second term I was allowed on the Finance Committee, which had merged Appropriations and Ways & Means. I was recruited onto “Division 4”, which was tasked with answering the state Supreme Court’s new mandate that we define an adequate education and find a way to fund it. After a lot of cutting, we defined an adequate education, and it costed out at $600 million – about 80% more than what we were spending on all but transportation.

Lebanon’s Clifton Below, with help from me and Liz Hager (then a Republican progressive) created an income tax bill, made more progressive by providing a universal exemption for the minimum wage for all adults, plus extra for children and single parents. The committee, mostly conservative Republicans, killed it, but on the floor we won, and it was passed to the senate, which also passed a slightly changed version, and some Democrats had cold feet and voted against it when it returned for concurrence.

Then the Finance Committee put out the mishmash of varied taxes (the largest being Business&Industry-supported increases, agreed to in order to avoid an income or sales tax) and a trick – the Statewide Property Tax we still pay at a reduced rate. It was a trick because only the wealthier towns paid more than they were already paying locally. In the following term and later a coalition of the wealthy towns managed to get it reduced to the point that it no longer affects most of them. In 2011 it was declared that the remaining wealthy towns could just use the money for an education frill, instead of sending it to the state. This is unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court is only recently trying to decide whether to say so.

But by then leadership had decided that one committee for both appropriations and revenues was unworkable – we had been working 6.5 days a week at one point – and hived off Ways & Means as a separate committee. I and a Republican friend moved over to the new committee as the only experienced people, but with a staunch Republican in charge. After a few years my friend and I were running the committee.

It was easier for us to agree, because I had learned from hard experience what happens when you have enough progressive Republicans and Democrats to pass an income tax in NH. During the next two terms a superPAC forced out 75% of the Republican progressives, replacing them with the most anti-tax people they could find, and the state’s Republican Party started to warp to what they are today.

Sometimes the relationship was a little tricky, particularly when I became Ways & Means chair in 2007-10, the first time in 150 years that Democrats had been in charge, and just in time to create a better budget only months before the Great Recession reared its ugly head. The Finance chair and I worked our committees hard, and ourselves harder, to find budget cuts and tax or other revenue increases that would not hurt the municipalities, jobs, or lower-income residents. We succeeded partly because some state agencies, especially the mammoth Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), volunteered to cut administrative positions by a quarter, laying people off with early retirements.

In 2010, as the Great Recession was starting to end in the other states, Democrats stayed home from the polls because they were discouraged it hadn’t lifted yet. A Massachusetts transplant who had spent 3 years recruiting people for state rep who only wanted an end to taxes to, and a few senate seats, took over in 2011 with a veto-proof 2/3s majority in both houses. He became Speaker, changing the rules at will and often forcing the senate to go along on his worst actions, such as cutting the embattled HHS administration in half. Anyone useful who could left HHS, the word spread, outsiders wouldn’t apply for jobs there, and it’s taking many years to recover from the damage to the efficient and public-facing administration it had been.

It also took until 2015 for New Hampshire to exit the recession and for the state’s revenues to grow again in 2016. Growth or loss in our business taxes and Interest and Dividends tax, the largest part of our revenues, only shows up in the second year. So in 2016, the Republicans took credit for our revenues coming up to the place every other state had reached three years before, saying it was due to the business tax cuts they passed that same year – before they could have an effect.

In 2017 Trump’s administration made major cuts to the taxes of the wealthiest corporations and citizens, and small ones to everyone else. In 2018 we reaped the benefits of that, as the massive tax cuts – which fueled Trump’s enormous deficit spending – were not anticipated, the recipients had to take in the largesse as profit, and we got to tax the profit (business profits tax). Since then the NH Republicans have cut business taxes – with occasionally a small cut to a consumer tax – several times, reducing our tax base.

But COVID hit in 2020, a sharp quick recession followed by enormous successive federal stimulus payments, at first to everyone. Our revenues continued to grow as the payments produced greater economic activity, but the tax base was reduced. My committee decided bipartisanly last term that we couldn’t depend on this continuing, and started to resist further cuts, so the Republicans passed them through the Finance (Appropriations) Committee instead.

This term, in the budget, they accelerated the removal of the Interest and Dividends tax, which was bringing in $160 million, to next January. That is also the only tax paid (other than the local property tax) by our wealthiest citizens, other than visits to restaurants. But this year, my committee took the leadership bill that would cost us another $350 million of tax cuts (brought in after the budget was done) and put it in interim study (purgatory) and told leadership we would vote as a committee against it if it came out. It didn’t.

During the quick COVID recession, the Democrats fulfilled a campaign promise by returning $100 million of the state’s surplus (large due to federal stimulus spending and the unplanned windfall from the first two years of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) to reduce education property taxes, sending larger amounts to the most struggling municipalities. The Republicans followed us by doing the same in 2021 and 2023 – except that they distributed it by population, leaving much less for the schools and towns that needed it most. (Lebanon occupies a middle ground that got a moderate amount each time.)

The federal stimulus spending would have done more for New Hampshire with a different governor, in my opinion. Sununu announced in February 2023 that $800 million of the ARPA money – which had been there for at least a year already – would be spent on housing and other useful initiatives. But it turned out they hadn’t yet thought through how they would disburse it to whom, and when they did, most of it went to businesspeople the governor knew.

Executive Councilor Cindy Warmington got a concession of I think 20% of the housing units to be built to be for workforce housing, but the rest went for high-income buildings. Meanwhile Joyce Craig was seeking and obtaining direct federal grants for workforce housing in her own city of Manchester. The governor’s staff has spent this year trying to figure out which recipients couldn’t fulfil federal requirements to finish building by 2026 and redirecting the money to other state needs so it won’t have to be returned to the feds. We could have done so much more with that money, but most of it will be obligated or lost by next year.

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