|
Bio:
|
|
My life:
|
|
I trained to work overseas in agricultural and rural development, and spent 22 years mostly in Africa and Latin America. My parents moved up here in 1967, my father to help re-start the medical school as a full program, my mother as a newly minted
psychiatrist who developed a social worker network to spread mental health services more widely, and to help abused women. I was a college student by then, and ever after came home for a month a year, developing snapshots of the Upper Valley and how it
changed. I'd been raised in a bedroom community near New York, and my father brought us up here every summer to visit and hike, so I loved the place. I came back to stay when I retired, invalided out by pneumonia that turned into permanent asthma. I
never married - wedded my career. Once I was healthier again, I fell into politics by accident, the Lebanon Democrats needed someone to fill the ballot, and you elected me to be a state representative. I have enjoyed that job through despair and
elation, wins and losses, fellowship and common causes and fights with both Republicans and Democrats in Concord. For two terms I have been Ranking Democrat on the Ways & Means Committee, and last term the Women's Policy Institute named me their
legislator of the year. I hope you let me go back a sixth time (I'm still learning). You can find the bills I sponsored on the state website: Click on GenCourt.State.NH.US and pick "Legislation" and then "Advanced Legislation", then click on the box
under "Senate Amended" and you'll get a list of legislators to select. If you don't understand why I did some of them, or why they were passed or killed, email me and we'll talk.
|
|
I run my home owners' association (we're self-managed), and have been on the Conservation Commission as long as I've been in Concord.
I was drawn into the Lebanon Airport Advisory Committee via the Conservation Commission.
I chair the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, and am on the board of the Upper Valley Housing Coalition, the steering committee of the Granite State Coalition Against the Expansion of Gambling, and part of the Reproductive Rights Caucus.
|
|
Issues:
|
New Hampshire has the lowest tax burden in the country, except for Alaska (which has oil), relative to income and population.
We have the leanest government in the country.
But we are coming closer and closer to crisis, because our tax structure achieves this by taxing the poorest people a lot, and taxing the richest people almost not at all.
(Almost two-thirds of our taxes are property tax - returned to this level after a brief relief in 2000 when the state raised money to send to local schools.
The Legislature has been cutting that aid for 6 years now.) If the richest don't pay proportionately to the rest of us, we can no longer afford government at a level any citizen would regard as adequate.
(We also now over-tax business, anything to avoid an income tax.)
The unlamented ex-Governor Benson brought us to crisis point.
We faced a $300 million deficit when we started budget work this term.
How did we get out of it? Increases in the tobacco tax and court fees and fines; a major increase in auditing for tax cheats and errors (which has brought us the surplus we have had this year);
an improving economy finally showing up in better business taxes;
some surplus from the major cuts to state services in the last part of Benson's term;
continued suspension in substance abuse (partial) and tobacco (total) prevention funding;
big cuts (relative to cost) in Health and Human Services, Corrections (relative to 4 years ago - part of the 2003 cuts were reversed), the tiny Department of Education, the Department of Resources and Economic Development and others.
New Hampshire has been building good, technically based, non-intrusive environmental protections for a decade or more.
Now we are fighting to preserve what we have and losing the battles to advance.
In 2002 we made history by becoming the first state to legislate air quality improvements on all four major pollutants; by 2004 we were rated the worst state in New England for efforts to remove toxic mercury from our air and water.
This term, with help from Governor Lynch, a bill finally passed, establishing a deadline of 2013 for 80% reduction (the Republican House having lengthened the Senate's deadline).
Three terms ago LCHIP first provided matching grants to towns to preserve green space and historic buildings; this and last term it died on the budget cutting room floor, a victim of the Senate Republicans.
Civil rights have been important to all NH citizens.
Last term for the first time in years a reproductive rights issue was lost, threatening abused teens' health and safety; at least for now, it was stopped in the courts (many who voted for it in the House believed the supporters' claim it was constitutional).
Voting and drivers' licenses became harder for some citizens and residents.
This term the Senate Republicans killed a strongly bipartisan House bill that would have denied a federal initiative with major privacy implications for time-consuming and costly barriers to drivers' licensing.
We managed to get this initiative stopped (so far) by Governor Lynch and the Executive Council.
Several national-Republican-generated bills imposing major new burdens on businesses and anyone who looks like an immigrant were defeated this term.
There were as always numerous attacks both on the courts and on parts of the state constitution, which were beaten back, often with active involvement from your incumbent Lebanon Dems.
The cost of health care is skyrocketing, and last term's Republican-led legislature made it worse for all but the healthiest by passing SB110, which allowed the insurance companies to charge much higher rates for small firms and non-profits with
staff in poor health, and for the North Country.
This term we repealed most of it, led by a new Democratic senator and Governor Lynch.
Insurance rates, and your county and city property tax, are also increased by lower Medicaid and other reimbursements to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, pharmacies, disability care and home-care groups;
they have to charge everyone else more to make it up.
This term the budget gave small raises for the first time in years (3% is supposed to make up for 4-8 years of medical inflation?) to most, but not all, of the human service groups; but John Stephen, the Benson-appointed Commissioner of Health and Human
Services, has continued to lower effective rates by administrative means so he can claim a budget surplus.
(Did you realize that a sitting governor, elected for 2 years, only gets to appoint new commissioners when their 4-5 year terms expire - and then only if he can get the Republican-controlled Executive Council to agree?)
For some years we have been losing substance abuse treatment centers, because both the insurance companies and our state-fixed Medicaid payments are lower than the cost of treatment.
This term Gov. Benson accelerated that trend.
Cancelling the only nationally-known long-term drug abuse treatment program we had in the state prison system to save money, as the Benson administration quietly did early in 2003, was a fantastic stupidity.
I and the Republican vice chair of Criminal Justice had pushed a bill through just a few years ago to make fourth-time DWI a felony, specifically so we could send confirmed alcoholics to that program.
Gov. Lynch got back a 28-day program this term, within the reduced Corrections budget; it is not enough to slow the revolving door of returnees to an overpopulated prison system.
Removing the tobacco and alcohol prevention money from the state budget, money that had funded countless community and school groups to talk to youth and identify and treat substance abusers before they got into worse trouble, was foolish in the extreme.
The alcohol program money is now at half-strength, but the Senate Republicans refused to allow any tobacco prevention money, after my committee in a bi-partisan revolt insisted it go in the House budget.
I brought in a bill to fund the tobacco prevention activities this year, and killed it on the floor to allow a competing bill that seemed to have more chance to go through - that one also failed.
We are going backwards on substance abuse, and all the family and societal ills that brings, in a state where our record has never been that great to start with.
We need to reverse all these trends, and we need to do it in a responsible way, keeping NH's reputation for frugality but remembering that government is there to serve people in those things that individuals and private firms cannot do well alone.
We need to do more to address the scarcity of housing, public transport, and smart growth, so our citizens will continue to have the quality of life that brought us here or kept us here.
Gov. Lynch has been working hard to do this this term, but he is limited by severely constrained revenues, his pledge to keep them that way, and an Executive Council that has been sometimes balking at changing key commissioners appointed by Gov. Benson.
|
|
My philosophy:
|
|
Any basic function of government that can be done well at a lower level (state, county, region, town, or in the neighborhood or family) should be done at lower levels; but if it requires resources that some in those lower levels do not have, the higher
level should help to even the playing field.
My basic functions include public safety (police, prisons, rehabilitation, contamination of water or food supply); the regulation of business and individuals sufficient to avoid some individuals harming others, or harming our common resources;
facilitation of transportation (roads, buses, bike paths), communication (telephone access, internet promotion), and group decision-making (local and other politics);
and assistance to those who cannot help themselves, if possible to bring them to a point where they can (many of our elderly, disabled, and those impoverished or sickened by chance).
I've probably left something off.
I believe that prevention is much cheaper and kinder to all of us than punishment after the fact. Children who drink, drug or smoke die earlier, more painfully, and cost their families and society anguish, money and the skills and love they could have
provided.
Older alcohol and drug abusers need identification, treatment, and peer support. |
|
