Strafford Co. Reps Decry 'April Foolishness Budgeting'

(Dover - March 30th, 2015) Let’s say you wanted to reduce your household spending. After eliminating “wasteful” spending such as the coffees on the way to work, restaurant meals and Friday night movies, you decide you must cut further. So, you package a bunch of your bills and send them to your neighbor, who, by the way, is obligated by law to pay your bills. Oh, and it’s not that you don’t have the money to pay these bills, you have simply decided you don’t want to pay them.

If all of that sounds silly beyond belief then consider this, it is precisely what the Republican majority of the New Hampshire House is doing. They have, indeed, cut spending at the state level as they promised voters they would. What they didn’t tell voters along the way, and what they are still not telling voters, is that these cuts are all coming back to us on our property tax bills.

When the state chooses to eliminate or reduce funding for educating our children, maintaining our roads and bridges, or keeping our water and air clean, we cannot simply say we won’t pay for them either. By law our municipalities have certain obligations that must be paid for and when those costs are not shared with the state, each of us pays higher property taxes. Some of you may recall the budget cutting done by the 2011-2012 legislature, approximately 9.8% of the overall budget. It took a while, but it all filtered down to those whopping property tax increases many of us saw this past year.

The budget now being crafted by the Republican majority and the manner in which it is being done are a travesty. The latest in this shameful saga was the Finance Committee’s Republican majority’s rewrite of the budget behind closed doors in the dead of night barring any participation from Democrats. This was done after the embarrassing defeat of a bill that would have destroyed the Department of Transportation’s budget, laying off half of our highway and bridge maintenance staff and sending back to our communities 2,500 miles of roads and 1,000 bridges, by a vote of 364 – 5. Even their own members could not support something so draconian.

None of this is necessary. The Finance Committee had a working foundation in Gov. Hassan’s budget, but chose, entirely along party lines, to completely ignore it. The bipartisan work that was such a hallmark of the last legislature has evaporated.

The governor’s budget was a reasonable one. It projected moderate growth in the economy and therefore revenues, included some marginal fee increases to generate additional revenue. Her budget envisioned a spending plan that honored our commitments to settling law suits, provided funds to fulfill our collective bargaining agreements with State employees, maintained the enormously successful NH Patient Protection Healthcare Plan enacted last year, increased funding modestly to our higher education institutions, made more progress to righting the skewed adequacy funding that has so harmed Dover and many other communities, increased funding to charter schools, and fully funded the Department of Transportation to continue our work to repair roads and bridges.

Unfortunately, the majority of the current Republicans in the House are committed to honoring campaign pledges that there would be no new taxes or fees and no increases in current ones. In addition to that, the Republican majority in the Senate is invested in reducing certain business taxes. That combination is lethal in a State that already has a tough time funding the most elementary services for the even the most vulnerable of our citizens, let alone investing in infrastructure and education that will assure us a bright future.

Here is just a partial list of what the Finance Committee has done as it completed its work on Thursday, March 26:

• Reduced funding to the University System of New Hampshire by $27 million, about 9% below current levels, eliminating all possibility of a continuing tuition freeze.
• Cut $1.9 million to delay creating a crisis stabilization unit at New Hampshire Hospital despite that on any given day as many as 40 people in mental health crises are waiting in local emergency rooms.
• Slashed $29 million required to fulfill our obligations to hospitals as a result of the suit regarding uncompensated care (a law suit that resulted from the monies illegally taken from our hospitals by the 2011-2012 legislature).
• Cut funding for Meals on Wheels in half.
• Cut Development Disability services funding below current levels. That will re-create the enormous waitlist that was rectified in the current budget, impacting thousands of families.
• Swept $27 million of state funding for K-12 education.
• Took $50 million from the dedicated renewable energy fund, breaking another promise to stop raiding dedicated funds for general fund expenditures.
• Eliminated Medicaid Expansion as of 12/31/16, leaving 37,000+ citizens without health insurance
• Eliminated funding for Service Link (resource office for seniors and the disabled)
• Downshifted at least $5.7 million to the counties to pay for long-term care. Again, proposal is to budget less than currently spending and shift that to property taxpayers.

This budget doesn’t cut taxes – it simply shifts them onto your property taxes (or rent if you don’t own your home). The full NH House will vote on this cost-shifting budget on Wednesday, April 1. You have time to let your representatives know that you don’t want any more costs transferred to your property taxes and that you want them to go back to Gov. Hassan’s responsible, reasonable budget.

Signed,

Rep. Deanna Rollo, Rollinsford

Rep. James Verschueren, Dover

Rep. Len DiSesa, Dover

Rep. Dale Sprague, Somersworth

Rep. Timothy Horrigan, Durham

Rep. Jackie Cilley, Barrington

Rep. Susan Treleaven, Dover/Somersworth

Rep. Thomas Southworth, Dover

Rep. Bill Baber, Dover