Where I Stand
Some of the issues that matter in Hillsborough District 37 — and what I believe about them.
I believe families should have real choices in how their children are educated. That means traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling — whatever works best for a given child and family. Towns that want to maintain strong traditional public schools should absolutely be able to do that. Choice and quality public education are not opposites.
On Education Freedom Accounts specifically: I’m not opposed to the basic concept. But the program as currently structured has a couple of related problems. It is pulling adequacy funding out of school districts for families who had already chosen and paid for private education on their own. It also appears to have been modeled on systems from other states that fund education centrally. New Hampshire is different. Grafting that approach onto our structure doesn’t just undermine how we have schools funded currently. It makes the whole system unstable.
There’s also a question the legislature hasn’t answered — and that voters deserve to have answered. What is the end goal here? Are we trying to build a richer ecosystem of educational options alongside strong public schools? Or is this a step toward dismantling the public school system that the majority of New Hampshire families still depend on? Those are very different destinations, and the pace of change in Concord suggests someone has a destination in mind. I’d like to know what it is.
Drive around New Hampshire right now and you’ll see construction everywhere. Housing is going up. And yet the people who most need a place to live — young people starting out, seniors looking to downsize, families who can’t stretch to a $500,000 house — are still shut out. What we’re building and what we need are two different things.
The reason is straightforward. High land costs, rising construction costs, and zoning rules that restrict density and small-footprint construction all push builders toward the same product: large, expensive homes. That’s what pencils out. Starter homes don’t. Smaller single-story places designed for seniors don’t. Accessible housing that lets an empty-nester stay in their community without climbing stairs doesn’t. So we don’t get them.
This creates a logjam that runs in both directions. The young family can’t find an affordable place to buy in. The empty-nester who would happily hand over their four-bedroom colonial — if only there were somewhere sensible to go — stays put instead. The house that would have been perfect for a growing family never comes to market. Everyone is stuck.
We can do better, and we can do it without sacrificing the open spaces and woods that define what New Hampshire actually feels like. Conservation development — allowing builders more density in exchange for permanently setting aside large portions of the land — is one promising path. More homes where we need them. More protected land where we want it. Those don’t have to be opposites.
The vitality of a community shows up in whether it can grow — whether young families can afford to put down roots, whether businesses can open and expand, whether the tax base can support the services people depend on. Here in HD 37, we have real barriers to all of that.
Take infrastructure. Milford has been managing the legacy of two Superfund sites for forty years, and residents still see brown water coming out of their taps. Amherst has an industrial zone along the 101-A corridor that could support real economic development — but no wastewater infrastructure to make it viable.
These limitations are holding us all back. We share a watershed, a commercial corridor, and various infrastructure constraints that are — like the towns themselves — distinctive but related. This shared stake in our future is bigger than towns can resolve on their own — particularly when relieving property taxes is weighing on every budget. The state’s role isn’t to write a check — it’s to be a genuine partner in removing the obstacles that individual towns can’t move alone.
Healthy communities attract people who want to join and contribute and nourish what we’ve created. Immigrants who start businesses at very high rates. Young families ready to take a hand in their own futures.
That’s always been the promise New Hampshire offered. Towns that clear these barriers and strengthen their economic foundation will be ready to keep it.
Under New Hampshire’s current tax structure, a town’s financial relationship with a business is almost entirely front-loaded. When a business moves in and improves a property, the assessed value goes up and the town captures that in property tax. After that, the town has almost no stake in what happens next. Whether the business grows, hires local young people, becomes a cornerstone of the community, or quietly struggles — it doesn’t much matter to the town’s bottom line. The profits flow to the state. The town got its assessment.
That’s a broken incentive. It means towns have little fiscal reason to invest in business retention, economic development, or the kinds of conditions that help local employers grow. The structure doesn’t reward them for thinking that way.
New Hampshire once understood this — and tried to fix it. In 1969, the state modernized its business tax structure by creating the Business Profits Tax, which replaced older taxes that had been collected directly by municipalities as part of their local revenue base. The state was taking something that had belonged to towns. RSA 31-A, enacted in 1970, was the remedy — a commitment to return a portion of state business tax revenue to cities and towns to replace what they’d lost.
“It seems quite doubtful to me that once this bill is passed that any legislature would go back on its pledge to return revenue to cities and towns that originally belonged to those cities and towns.” — Attorney General Warren Rudman, 1970
He was wrong. Revenue sharing was cut almost immediately, suspended entirely in 2010, and repealed outright in July 2025. Over those fifteen years of suspension alone, municipalities lost $400 million that the state had explicitly promised to return. The property tax has been filling that gap ever since — quietly, year after year, on the backs of homeowners.
I want to restore the principle behind RSA 31-A, with a structure that works fairly across the whole state. Towns that host significant business activity should receive a direct share of the business tax revenue generated within their borders. They bear the costs of the roads, the public safety, and the infrastructure that makes that activity possible. They deserve a return on that. But that share should be capped, so that remaining revenue is distributed more broadly — including to towns with little commercial base of their own — with the state retaining enough to meet its obligations.
The goal isn’t just to correct an old injustice. It’s to change what towns are incentivized to care about — so that a thriving local business feels like a win for the town, not just for Concord.
New Hampshire has always prided itself on independent thinking. Pluralism — the idea that a healthy society depends on a genuine range of voices and perspectives — isn’t a problem to be managed here. It’s foundational to who we are. New Hampshire is not a state of two rigid camps, and it never was.
But those independent voices are being deliberately excluded from the process. The nearly complete capture of our state government by the two parties is undermining everything New Hampshire claims to stand for.
This past session, members of the legislature lost their committee assignments for voting their conscience. Committee assignments aren’t a party resource — they belong to the people. Using them as leverage to enforce party discipline is the machinery of the state being turned against the act of representation itself. It happened to members of both parties.
The forced choice between two party agendas isn’t just a feature of how people vote anymore. It’s being built into the structure of the legislature itself.
I won’t just be talking about this. Political parties are private organizations — there is no good reason New Hampshire taxpayers should be funding their candidate selection processes. I will push to end public financing of partisan primaries. If the legislature won’t do that, the alternative is simple: one ballot, all candidates, every voter. Same footing for everyone.
The window for getting citizen voices back into that room is closing. Pluralism is the only way Concord actually reflects New Hampshire — all of it, not just the two camps the system is being built to serve.