There’s something I’ve always found frustrating during election season. It happens quite often when someone is running for re-election. The messaging tends to involve a set of promises and pledges, things that your incumbent will do if re-elected to office. Why, I wonder (as must you), if said incumbent has all these bright, new ideas, didn’t he just take care of him the last time we elected him?
What I want to do today is explain what my top priorities are for the 2027 and why this is the year I will be working on them, assuming you give me the opportunity to do so.
In the run-up to the November 3rd election I’ve been working hard on two bills to sponsor. The first is related to Workers’ Compensation and is a fix for what we’ve heard are problems with the system. The issues are somewhat convoluted but I think we can all understand that a poorly-performing Workers’ Comp system affects everybody; from workers whose medical treatments may be degraded to employers who have to pay more for the insurance to the consumer who is ultimately paying extra for any increased costs. The second bill is a possible solution for the high and rising costs of health insurance for School District employees. This directly impacts Pembroke taxpayers, as we learned in March when our health care costs spiked just as we were preparing the current School District budget.
This past term has been quiet a bit different than my prior terms in office based upon what I focused on and how. I found myself spending a lot of time and effort on distinct, individual items as opposed to dealing with a whole lot of issues sequentially.
I’ll explain what I mean.
The members of the Legislature, each year, submit a vast number of bills for consideration. Th tally was over 1,000 in 2025 and almost 1,400 in 2026. In order to give these bills their due, they are distributed to committees who undertake the real work of analyzing them and recommending an action. As members of our respective committees, we deal with subsets of our assigned of bills, typically over a period of a few weeks. After hearing public testimony, analyzing the bills’ content for ourselves, and then holding a discussion we vote on whether or not to recommend each bill. That recommendation goes to the full House chamber – at which point we can focus on the next group of bills assigned to us.
I’ve heard many House members say that they feel their real contribution is not the voting records, which everyone talks about, but their work on their committee.
Later, when we meet for House session, we now have to consider all of the bills from each of the twenty-some committees. When preparing for a House floor session, our basis for deciding is often the work the committee has already done. We need to read their recommendation and compare that with the language bill to decide whether we want to vote with or against the committee. For most of the bills, this is a much truncated process relative to we would focus on our committee assignments. The House calendar, with the committee recommendations, typically comes out less than a week before the session. We must quickly assemble all the information available to us and take a vote within a few days. Once the session is over, those bills are gone, and we have a new set of bills to look at.
As I say, though, in this past session, I found myself working a little differently. I had several distinct, big issues that I spent a lot of my time on.
Roughly two years ago, around the time of the election, I was focused on issues regarding local control of Planning and Zoning. As the Chair of Pembroke Planning Board, I was hoping to include more of the local perspective in how the laws were changing. There’s a much longer story to this but the short version is that I ended up not being a part of either of the committees working on these subjects.
Instead, Speaker Packard assigned me to House Finance, the largest and one of the busiest of the House committees. This is a very, very different experience than what I’ve done at the State House in years past. In the first year, Finance is responsible for a two-year State budget. It is a very intense process that lasts from mid-February until the Legislature turns over a budget to the Governor for her to sign. As such, it is usually reserved for those of us who have a number of terms in the Legislature already behind us. I was assigned to Finance Division III, a subset of the full committee who focuses solely on the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. This is more than 40% of the total State budget and accounts for more than half of the allocation of General Funds.
Needless to say, this was not only some pretty intense work but it was a huge learning experience for me. I found myself asking a lot of basic questions as I struggled to understand the interaction of State and Federal Funds in the programs which we administer. If you see fit return me to the House in 2027, I plan to request to remain on Finance so that I can productively contribute what I’ve spent two years learning.
For the second year, I responded to the concerns from many of my fellow Pembroke residents who asked me to do something about the Open Enrollment bill which had been fast tracked out of the Senate. There are too many details to get into today but suffice to say I agreed with you that the version of the bill being advanced was not in the best interests of Pembroke.
I spent a lot of time understanding the bill, working with the language, and trying to convey what I learned to those who were driving this process. At least on the House sides, I met with great success. The bill language that resulted would have, as I see it, greatly benefited our school district. It would have funded transferring students entirely with State funds, removing the threat to our local budgets while increasing outside revenue. In Pembroke, I would have expected a substantial bump in revenue, all of which would have offset property taxes. Unfortunately, the Legislature as a whole did not accept our work product.
This experience was not for nothing, however. During this process I helped make sure that all of the requests from Pembroke’s administration were included in our amended version of the bill. In doing so, I developed a working relationship with our district that is much better than what I’ve been able to do in prior terms. It is on that basis that I believe we can move forward together, advancing new legislation designed to help our District do its job more effectively while easing the burden on the property tax payer. We have the germs of some good ideas that I really hope you give me the chance to work on.
Likewise, the changes that I’ve been working on with the Workers Compensation system are driven by my position as the House representative on the Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council. In the springtime, I asked the committee (and they agreed) to work on a set of issues identified during our early-2026 House hearings, Rather than address this in the legislature, I sought a view balanced with the perspective of all stakeholders. The Council believes there is a solution that will benefit everyone involved.
In fact, we’re still working on the details of that. Whether you send me back for next term or not, I will remain in office until the first week in December. The Council, myself included, continues to meet to try to get the right language together for a 2027 bill. If you return me to the House, I will submit that language on behalf of the Council.
I hope this helps explain why I am personally interested in continuing my service for Pembroke and for the State of New Hampshire. There are specific items that I believe myself to be well suited to work on and can take advantage of an environment where I can make real and significant progress.
Hopefully you will agree.