My votes in the NH House session
of March 26, 2025

HB 198-FN

This bill raises the legal possession limit of cannabis to 2 ounces. The House passed it, but (not surprisingly) the Senate tabled it.

HB 226-FN

This harm-reduction bill legalizes drug checking equipment that determines whether a street drug contains an undisclosed dangerous substance. Tabled by the Senate.

HB 466-FN

This bill would have doubled the length of a suspension for a first offense of refusing to comply with a chemical test for impaired driving, going from a suspension of 6 months to a full year. I voted against my caucus’s recommendation of ITL. The caucus position was that a year-long suspension is overly harsh, especially for drivers in rural areas without public transit. My opinion: do not drive impaired—you’re liable to kill somebody, or even yourself.

CACR 2

Would you want district boundaries drawn to be impartial to political parties and candidates? I do. Republicans do not.

HB 600

This bill would have enabled municipalities to use ranked-choice voting in their municipal elections. As “enabling legislation,” it would not have required ranked-choice voting, but just would have provided the option. I think that we should give RCV a try. It tends to reward candidates with less extreme positions.

HB 520

This bill allows hearing officers of the Department of Education to issue subpoenas. It enables witch hunts against teachers when we’re having a hard enough time finding qualified teachers.

HB 487

This bill would have required employers to provide their employees with at least 7-day advance notice of their work schedule. Imagine being told that you need to be at work within an hour when you’re in the midst of something that you cannot just put aside, or when you’re over an hour away. The bill had an exception for when circumstances beyond the employer’s control dictate a schedule change. Yet, the bill failed.

HB 147

This bill would have allowed a religious institution to purchase a large property, such as a mall, use one part of it for charitable, religious, or educational purposes, yet qualify the entire property as tax exempt. Fortunately, this bill was tabled.

HB 674-FN, HB 692, HB 755-FN, HB 759-FN, HB 760-FN, HB 761-FN

These six were Democratic-sponsored bills in my committee, Science, Technology and Energy. Our ranking member, Rep. Kat McGhee, and the committee chair, Rep. Michael Vose, agreed to table all six of these bills and have full debates on the remaining three bills from our committee, two of which were sponsored by Democrats, the next day. It didn’t quite work out that way, as all six of these bills were tabled, as were the two Democratic-sponsored bills the next day.

Of these six bills, the most significant one is HB 760-FN. (The fact that I am the prime sponsor has no bearing on how important I think it is. Nope, none.) Here in Lebanon, our electric utility is Liberty Utilities. Residential customers can choose their electric supply from Lebanon Community Power (but only if they do not net meter), a third-party supplier, or the default service provided by Liberty. Now suppose that during one rate period of six months, Liberty does not recover enough from ratepayers to cover their cost of providing default energy service. As things currently stand, Liberty can charge all of its customers to make up the shortfall. That is, customers not on default service would have to pay to subsidize customers who are on default service. There’s nothing special about Liberty here; the two other regulated electric utilities in the state, Eversource and Unitil, are in the same boat. This system is unfair to non-default-service ratepayers, and this bill would fix that. We were hoping that the Senate might tack it onto some other bill, but it appears that I will have to reintroduce it for the 2026 session to get it through. (Actually, because I have solar panels and therefore I net meter, I have to be on default service. So this bill certainly does not help me personally.)

HB 249

This bill would have allowed bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs. We were told that data backs up the wisdom of this idea. But I thought about a bicyclist who comes to a 4-way intersection with two lanes going in each direction plus left-turn lanes, where the speed limit is, say 40 mph or greater. It would be easy to misjudge the closing speed of cars approaching the intersection, and the bicyclist ends up as someone’s hood ornament.

HB 191-FN

This bill creates civil and criminal penalties for recruiting, harboring, or transporting an unemancipated minor to obtain a surgical procedure without parental permission. It is targeted at abortions. An older sibling would not be able to drive their younger sister to receive medical care without the permission of their parents. Most of time, there’s no problem. But you can imagine circumstances where the parents would react very badly to finding out that their daughter was receiving an abortion. Because I support full reproductive rights, I voted against this bill which, unfortunately, passed. The bill is being held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee. So there’s that.

HB 380-FN

Suppose a user of theraputic cannabis sells to someone who is not a theraputic cannabis user or caregiver. That’s a felony under current law, and there’s a second felony that applies only to theraputic cannabis patients, with a fine of up to $300,000 and registry card revocation. This bill removes the second felony charge and the fine, leaving the revocation intact.

HB 549-FN

Ahh, EFAs: Education Freedom Accounts, a.k.a. vouchers. This bill would have prohibited EFAs from being used for religious schools or religious training. Like the New Hampshire Constitution says in Part I, Article 6: “But no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination.” Republicans want EFAs everywhere for everyone, and this bill was Indefinitely Postponed so that it cannot come back in any guise until the 2027 session.

HB 324-FN

Yet another book-banning bill. ’Nuff said.