1st District Congressional Democrat Candidates Talk Housing, Immigration, Healthcare, And AI At Forum

By ZACH LAIRD, InDepth NH

Listening to the candidates, the crowd is pictured at the Barrington Middle School Wednesday evening. ZACH LAIRD photo

BARRINGTON, NH — Dozens of community members gathered at Barrington Middle School on Wednesday evening to hear CD-1 Democratic candidates discuss their approach to issues like housing, health care, immigration, and artificial intelligence.

The event was hosted by the Strafford County Democratic Committee in conjunction with the Barrington Democrats, and featured candidates Carleigh Beriont, Sarah Chadzynski, Heath Howard, Maura Sullivan, and Christian Urrutia. Another candidate, Stefany Shaheen, did not attend due to scheduling issues.

After Chair of the Strafford County Democratic Committee Walter King who moderated the event welcomed the audience, Sullivan was the first to introduce herself to the crowd. She described herself as a working mom of three, an Iraq War veteran, and proud to be appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve as the assistant secretary of Veterans Affairs. She later served as a senior Pentagon official in the Obama Administration.

Urrutia, of Manchester, is an Army National Guard officer, who also defends service members through the military’s Trial Defense Services. He has served as a senior national security leader at the Pentagon and is now an advocate for responsible technology policies that address anti-discrimination efforts, human rights, and privacy.

Beriont lives on the New Hampshire Seacoast with her husband Eric. She is a former union organizer who helped found UAW Local 5118, organizing Harvard’s graduate student workers and winning higher wages, childcare subsidies, and anti-retaliation protections for thousands of workers. She is the Chair of the Hampton Select Board, and on the budget committee and looked for ways to save property taxpayers money.

Chadzynski is a state-certified teacher with a Masters degree in Education and a background in nonprofit leadership. She served as the U.S. Executive Director of DATTALION, where she helped document the horrific atrocities and war crimes committed following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Rep. Howard Heath explained that his journey into public service began when he was 15, after a life-altering injury almost left him paralyzed. He said this woke him up to the failures of the American healthcare system. He now serves his second term in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, where he’s won twice in one of the most competitive districts in the state.

Affordability of healthcare and housing

Urrutia said that the country needs universal childcare, and that one way to achieve it would be to tax the billionaire class in America. He added that the country also needs a National Infrastructure Bank and a “vision to be bold again.”

Beriont noted that there are a lot of choices being made by the federal government that are causing long-term harm for people who are financially “barely hanging on,” and cited the war in Iran as a key factor.

“When it comes to affordability, there are so many things our federal government could do, and the two that I would prioritize funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act… Things like that, promoting Medicare for all, so that our healthcare is provided for, so that our municipal budgets go down. Those would give us a little more spending room when we would go to the store, and it wouldn’t make it so hard for us to make ends meet,” she said.

Chadzynski said. “The number one expense for schools and our school districts is healthcare… so, that’s number one. We need to address that and move in a direction of universal healthcare. Number two is that we need to address the housing issue, which is a major issue here on the ground in New Hampshire.”

She continued, advocating for the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and US Rep. Ro Khanna. Beriont concluded by saying that it’s important to pause the interest rate on student loans.

Howard responded by saying that Democrats lost the election — not to President Donald Trump — but to the “couch” because the Democrats did not motivate voters to act or provide them with real policy plans for a vision on how to move the country forward. He added that “that’s where we need to be very clear about the policy positions that we need to be taking.”

“We need to be talking about universal healthcare, because it is one of the biggest costs that people are facing today… And that’s where we need to make sure that we are able to put a moratorium on large corporations, on private equity firms, to prevent them from being able to purchase these homes,” Howard said.

He continued, “And you have the highest in-state tuition anywhere in the nation for in-state universities… And when you have state revenues changing as drastically as they are, we need to make sure that we have a sustainable tax structure that makes sure that we are able to pay our bills.”

Sullivan started by noting the “vast income equality and the rising income equality gap in our country.” She explained that in her lifetime, CEO pay has gone up 1,428% while the worker pay has gone up 18%.

“The first thing I would do is introduce Medicare for all who want it… I plan on sitting on the committee that oversees affordable housing, or policy for the country because it is on the forefront of issues that everyone in our district is struggling with. Third, we have got to expand access to education, and I think that means expanding optional national service… And fourth, childcare. Literally, people can’t afford to go to work; it’s insane, it’s literally nuts. And so we need tax credits for childcare,” she said.

Immigration Reform

Sullivan said the values she and others risked her life for as veterans was the idea of what the country is supposed to be about and that “we have a president who fundamentally doesn’t believe in that.” She said he had American citizens murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, and that the country should not fund Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations until Trump puts vastly different policies in place.

“I’m going to work across the aisle with other veterans to get an immigration reform that works in a manner that is in concert with our American values,” she said.

Urrutia called for ICE to be dismantled. He said, “The idea that you can come to this country and get a fair shake, that also means we need an orderly immigration process. That also means we need a pathway for folks who have been here and have otherwise been abiding by the rules and laws to actually come out of the shadows. It also means that we need a secure border. We don’t need to be given false choices.”

Beriont recalled her efforts with other community members to ensure that Rockingham County would not house ICE detainees at the county jail. On the Hampton Select Board, she managed to sway other board members to publicly change their vote, which ended up being a unanimous rejection to have ICE in their town. She also referred attendees to check out her paper on what the country can do after it abolishes ICE, which can be found at carleighberiont.com.

“We need to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Our country was built on immigrants like my family, like my grandmother who was stateless and a naturalized citizen, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor. So, when this administration talks about taking away naturalized citizenship, that’s my 97-year-old grandmother,” Chadzynski said.

She also called for ICE to be abolished, and said she’s been in contact with officials in Washington, D.C. to pass legislation to “outlaw gestapo-styled tactics.”

Howard said while ICE needs to be abolished, the ICE agents that committed crimes against American citizens also need to be prosecuted. He decried how ICE agents detain people with no criminal history “because the only thing they’ve done wrong is not have the proper paperwork.”

“We need to make sure that we provide them the opportunity to get that paperwork. Since we’ve changed from Immigration and Naturalization Service to Department of Homeland Security handling immigration services, we’ve seen a huge shift in how immigration has been handled,” he said.

Artificial Intelligence

Beriont said the most important part of the issue is how technology is now outpacing our ability to regulate it. She said tech companies are hemorrhaging employees and are concerned about their influence in our political system is not going to be the same as it’s been up to this point, because “there are people like me running for Congress who are going to hold big tech accountable.”

“When it comes to the future of our workforce, we need to make sure that workers have a seat at the table… The only way that we have workers’ rights in this country is to have workers as part of that conversation,” she said.

Chadzynski said guardrails need to be put in place to oversee what’s happening in terms of tech development.

“They (tech companies) have been running rampant, and now have played a significant role in the current administration… I look forward to holding them accountable for what has already happened,” she said.

Howard explained that when looking at the local impact of these AI data centers, “we are seeing increased energy costs time and time again.” He called for serious guardrails to limit how these data centers can be built and where they can be proposed. He said while AI may never replace an electrical socket, it is able to code for a software engineer.

“That’s where we need to make sure that we are putting our resources in education, to make sure that the next generation of students and leaders are learning about trades and making sure that they have available options to go into, so that they’re not necessarily just looking at one option or the other,” he said.

Sullivan warned that while AI will be able to assist things like cancer research, it can also destroy up to 20% of the workforce. She continued that the scary part is that the pace of development just in the last several months is more rapid than people predicted in the first place.

“We need serious thinkers in Washington who are going to wrestle with these problems and figure out what this means across national security and our economy, medicine, research, and investment, because there’s so much at stake across the board,” she said. “What we absolutely have to be certain of is that we judicially regulate this, and that we are being manically focused on what this means for our workers,” she said.

Urrutia said, “We need a Washington that actually has a vision, thoughtfulness, to regulate AI, not to make it better for the Corporate Political Action Committees that are giving money to folks, but to protect the constituents, the regular folks that are trying to make ends meet day to day… And I come back to this: tax the billionaire class. That is how we make sure that everyone in this country gets a fair shake. We give pathways for people to go to trade schools, to actually pursue the American Dream.”

ZACH LAIRD can be reached at zachlaird201@gmail.com

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.