NH DNCR Commissioner Sarah Stewart Resigns In Wake Of ICE Fail

By Michael Graham, NH Journal

Embattled DNCR Commissioner Sarah Stewart submitted her resignation to the Executive Council Monday morning, ending a troubled tenure and allowing her to avoid being fired in what would have been an embarrassing public process.

“Governor Ayotte requested Commissioner Stewart’s resignation and accepted it, effective today,” spokesman John Corbett said in a statement.

“At the next meeting of the Executive Council, Governor Ayotte will nominate Adam Crepeau, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Services, to serve as Acting Commissioner while the search for a new Commissioner continues.”

In her resignation letter, Stewart said serving as commissioner “has been an honor. I am grateful to the staff, volunteers, and partners who have supported this work over the past eight years.

To ensure that the important work of the department remains the primary focus, I believe it is appropriate for me to step aside at this time.”

At an emergency meeting last week, an at-times testy Executive Council pressed Stewart on why her agency never alerted the governor’s office or councilors that ICE reached out in early January seeking a routine historic-preservation review of a large warehouse property on Robert Milligan Parkway in Merrimack — one of the sites under consideration for a new detention and processing center.

Instead of informing Ayotte, it appears from the timeline that Stewart or someone in her office held the information and tipped off the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire. The left-wing organization then requested and released the documents, feeding Democratic accusations that Ayotte was keeping voters in the dark about DHS’s plans.

Gov. Ayotte said she learned of the correspondence only after it became public. Stewart confirmed that Ayotte was never informed, but she blamed her staff — going to far as to drag Benjamin Wilson, director and state historic preservation officer, to offer the council an apology, something she declined to do.

“This was an internal communication breakdown,” she told the council, insisting there was no intent to conceal information and that the federal inquiry was treated as a routine Section 106 historic-review matter, not a policy-level decision.

Republican Councilors Dave Wheeler, Joe Kenney, and John Stephen sharply rebuked Stewart, saying the ICE proposal was too sensitive and high-profile for DNCR to treat as routine bureaucracy.

“Something of this magnitude — ICE, detention, Merrimack — you can’t sit on that,” Wheeler said, adding he had “lost confidence” in Stewart’s leadership and urged her to resign.

Stewart flatly denied any suggestion that she or her staff coordinated with outside advocacy groups, calling the idea “categorically false.”

Her explanation did little to ease council criticism or allay suspicions that Stewart — who is vocally anti-Trump in her social media and whose staff has close ties to progressive organizations — may have had a hand in the “hide-and-seek” strategy.

Stewart’s mishandling of the ICE matter is just the latest in a series of embarrassing stumbles.

“She was already gone; she was just the last to know it,” one state house insider told NHJournal on background.

“I’d like to thank Governor Ayotte for ensuring strong accountability within state government. This is what our citizens deserve,” Stephen said in a statement.

“I’d also like to thank the Governor for bringing forward Deputy Commissioner Adam Crepeau to serve in the interim. I look forward to voting to confirm him as Acting Commissioner on Wednesday and to working with him to ensure the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources operates with the transparency and oversight the people of New Hampshire expect.”

In a joint statement, the five members of the Executive Council said the investigation into Stewart and the events in her office will continue.

“Attorney General John Formella’s office is conducting an ongoing investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Department’s handling of federal communications and related administrative matters. The Executive Council looks forward to the results of that investigation and any recommendations that may follow.

“The Executive Council will continue to demand accountability and transparency from all executive agencies and departments on behalf of the people of New Hampshire. The public has a right to expect that state government operates with the highest standards and that matters of significant policy importance are communicated promptly and appropriately.”

Stewart has a background in GOP politics, including working on the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jon Huntsman. However, her social media accounts feature anti-Trump messaging, and she’s made her disdain for Ayotte an open secret in Concord circles.

One potential Ayotte challenger, Portsmouth’s Democrat Mayor Deaglan McEachern, responded to the Stewart news on social media.

“It’s easy to call for a resignation. Harder, and more important, is actually standing up for the residents of Merrimack and people of NH to stop this ICE warehouse.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.