My votes in the NH House session
of March 27, 2025

HB 361

This bill prohibits mandatory mask policies in public schools. Because why would we want to protect kids during a pandemic?

HB 741-FN

This bill allows parents to send their children to any school district they want, as long as the receiving district has space. As a school board member of a community neighboring Lebanon told me, it would eventually kill small rural schools, as parents send their children to larger schools with wider curricula. For now, this bill is stuck in the Senate.

HB 749-FN

This bill would require high schools to include instruction on the nature and history of communism. I voted against it, but in retrospect, perhaps I should have voted for it. I say that based on comments I see online, where people call anyone to their left a communist. Maybe it would be better if people knew what communism really is, and that it’s not just anyone to your left. The Senate killed the bill.

HB 768

This bill allows public schools to send students to private schools and have the public school pay the private-school tuition. Not only is it a bad idea, but it allows for the public to pay tuition to religious schools, violating the New Hampshire Constitution. As I write this, it has passed in the Senate with a minor amendment; I expect the House to concur with the Senate’s amendment and send the bill to Governor Ayotte.

HB 141

This bill would have eliminated the “LLC loophole” in campaign funding. Each LLC (limited liability corporation) has a limit for how much it can contribute to a candidate. But there is no limit on how much an individual can contribute to multiple LLCs. Therefore, someone can set up several LLCs, fund all of them, and have each one contribute to a candidate, which clearly goes against the intent of limiting an individual’s campaign contributions. Needless to say, this common-sense bill failed.

HB 217

The Senate killed this bill, which would have required proof of citizenship when requesting an absentee ballot.

HB 356

Because we don’t have enough partisan division in the country already, this bill allows school districts to have partisan school board elections. The Senate passed it, and as I write this, it awaits the governor’s signature.

HB 363

This bill would have set stricter criteria for redistricting. Of course it didn’t pass.

HB 357

Who knows more about vaccines than New Hampshire state legislators? According to the House Republicans, no one. This bill moves the authority for vaccine mandates from the Department of Health and Human Services—where they actually know things—to the legislature—where they don’t. Fortunately, the Senate killed the bill.

HB 377-FN

This bill prohibits all use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. Of course, the decision of whether to use such means is not to be taken lightly. And it is not. They are prescribed only after thorough evaluation by medical professionals and counselors, and they usually follow a non-medical stretch of social transition. The bill infringes on the rights of parents to participate in medical decisions for their children. It passed, and is currently in the hands of the Senate.

HB 679

Republicans who clearly have no idea what vaccines do introduced this bill, which would prohibit any childhood vaccines that have not been proven through clinical trials to prevent all transmission of the targeted disease. Guess what? No vaccine prevents all transmission. Vaccines mimic the infection and spur the body’s immune system into action, lessening the severity and prevalence of the disease. But they do not prevent transmission. Fortunately, the Senate killed the bill.

HB 712

The bill would prohibit breast surgeries for minors. See HB 377-FN, above. The Senate might amend it to prohibit all gender reassignment surgeries for minors; stay tuned.

HB 200

This bill requires a 3/5 majority to override a multi-district school tax cap. That makes it hard to reverse flawed policies and handle unexpected expenses. It passed with a slight amendment in the Senate.

HB 460-FN and HB 537

These are the two Democratic-sponsored bills from my committee (Science, Technology and Energy) that we agreed would have debate in exchange for tabling six bills on the previous day. Instead, the Republicans went back on their word and tabled both of them.

I try to not take political setbacks personally. The Republicans have the numbers to roll over us, and they do. We would do the same to them. Some of the bills they pass are terrible. If we could, we would pass bills that they think are terrible.

But this was different. We had a deal, and they reneged. I was pissed off, to the point that I was seriously considering leaving the Granite Bridge Legislative Alliance. We don’t have to agree on policy, but we should be honest with each other. As I write this (May 18, 2025), I have not left the GBLA, but I have one foot out the door.

Back to the bills. HB 460-FN would have simply clarified the attributes that the Public Utilities Commission should consider when reviewing rates and projects.

HB 537 was sponsored by Rep. Zoe Manos (D-Stratham), and I was a cosponsor. It would solve a problem for a handful of condo owners who have shared electric meters for their shared wells and septic systems. Even though these uses are entirely residential, they are billed at the higher commerical rates. Moreover, the costs for these shared meters are spread among all the condo owners in an HOA, not just those with shared meters. This bill would have solved both problems. On the bright side, because the bill was tabled rather than killed, we can bring it back for 2026. Because Eversource and Unitil had some issues with the bill, Rep. Manos and I will work with the utilities to try to fashion a bill that solves the problems and that the utilities can live with.

HB 690-FN

This was the one bill from my committee that was allowed to have debate and a vote. Of course, it was a Republican-sponsored bill. And a ridiculous one at that. It creates a study within the Department of Energy to investigate whether New Hampshire should withdraw from ISO-NE, the regional electric grid operator. Doing so would be crazy. We would have to create our own infrastructure, duplicating what already exists at ISO-NE, though on a smaller scale. And we would be subject to the perils that ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, faced in 2021 when the Texas grid failed.

Don Kreis, our excellent Consumer Advocate, testified in support of this bill. This is one case when I disagree with him, though his reasons were sound: he says that ISO-NE is controlled by the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL), which he describes as a private, closed group with voting rules designed to ensure that major transmission and generation companies maintain control over key decisions. He would like to see some reform in how ISO-NE is governed. My opinion: this bill would not accomplish what Don Kreis is looking for, it will be a waste of money ($200,000), and it will conclude what Maine and Connecticut concluded when they studied leaving ISO-NE, which is that it’s a bad idea.

And one other fun fact: New Hampshire cannot leave ISO-NE. That is because, as several members of my committee learned on a field trip to ISO-NE in Holyoke, MA on May 6, New Hampshire is not a member of ISO-NE. States are not members. Utilities and power generators are members. But not states. So we’d first have to somehow join ISO-NE and then leave it.