Teachers wanted: What a N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute analysis reveals about educator retention in New Hampshire

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Teachers are essential to our school system, but what happens if there aren’t enough of them?  A new study from the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute sounds the alarm about the difficulty some New Hampshire schools already have in finding qualified teachers. According to the study, that difficulty will only get worse in the coming years. Discussing the report and its findings are its author, Ben Reynolds, a senior policy analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute, and Michael Whaland, superintendent of schools in Moultonborough.

Melanie Plenda:

Ben, what was the reason for the study? 

Ben Reynolds:

New Hampshire is in the midst of many conversations about the future of public education, especially with this upcoming state budget. We really want to make sure that when we're having these conversations that part of them is talking about how to attract and retain the educators who really make our schools work and help our kids learn. 

Melanie Plenda:

What kind of data did the fiscal policy institute look at? 

Ben Reynolds:

We used a variety of national and state sources, specifically from the N.H. Department of Education, N.H. Employment Security, the U.S. Census Bureau and some federal higher education data as well. It's important to note though that we know we have a lot of quantitative data, but Mike can really speak about the qualitative portion of how teachers are actually feeling in the classroom. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you sum up the key findings?

Ben Reynolds:

New Hampshire schools may face growing challenges for recruiting and retaining teachers in the year ahead. Despite the declining enrollment, New Hampshire schools will still need about a little bit over 1,000 teachers per year over the next decade.

About 95% of that drive is both from exiting labor force, such as retirements, but also from teachers leaving the teaching occupation and switching to other careers. At the same time, we're seeing that the teacher pipeline in New Hampshire is dwindling, with fewer New Hampshire college graduates getting less education degrees.

There are other challenges too for New Hampshire to attract educators. In terms of pay, New Hampshire ranks 42nd nationally for average starting teacher salary, with starting pay below comparable salaries in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. At the same time, high housing costs as well as child care costs are not also helping as well. 

Melanie Plenda:

Michael, I would imagine none of this is shocking to you, as you see what’s going on in your own district as well as others. What are you seeing? 

Michael Whaland

These findings align directly with what we're seeing as school leaders on the ground daily. Rural school districts are facing a double squeeze with geographic isolation as well as tighter budgets that make it harder to compete with other school districts that may have more resources and a larger tax base. We're seeing smaller applicant pools for just our general roles in particular and as well as our higher need fields, such as science, mathematics, special education, etc. 

Additionally, young teachers brought into rural communities often struggle to find affordable housing that leads to turnover and teacher churn. So it's that in combination with less students going into higher ed that also compounds as there's less teachers coming into universities and colleges as graduates.

Melanie Plenda:

Michael, you also wrote your dissertation on teacher attrition and retention in New Hampshire rural schools. Can you briefly tell us more about that? 

Michael Whaland:

My dissertation was on teacher retention and attrition in New Hampshire rural schools. When I initially began my curiosity on this subject, I started as an administrator in the North Country and started wondering why all my colleagues were leaving me. I wanted to dig deeper into this subject matter, and really, what the question that folks often ask is why are our teachers leaving? I wanted to flip that narrative and talk about why our teachers are staying. 

I looked at three different areas: working conditions, which focused more on salary and benefits; job satisfaction, which focused on climate and culture; and engagement with the community. What my study yielded, essentially, is that our educators will forego salary increases as long as you're competitive within your region. But the things that mattered most to our teachers were that they were valued, that they had a sense of autonomy and a sense of engagement with their community.

Melanie Plenda:

So why are fewer people interested in becoming teachers? What’s at play here?

Michael Whaland:

I think the perception of the profession has shifted significantly as we've identified potential educators looking at the high cost of stress and higher education costs. We've seen that the average starting teacher salary is around $44,000. That has not kept up with the costs of higher education and the housing costs. I think that the school climate — the expanding non-instructional workloads, and public education becoming more politicized has dissuaded our teachers from entering the field. I think in rural areas specifically, our potential teachers worry about geographic isolation and limited career advancement pathways. So, if you're a beginning educator and you would like to be an administrator, those jobs are few and far between. 

Ben Reynolds:

Following Mike's analysis, we found that half your teachers earn about a third less for each week worked than comparable college graduates in other professions. That's a pretty big pay gap, especially in an expensive state. When someone in college or university is looking for “what do I want to major in?” that's obviously going to take into account, and they're going to say, “I am doing all of this work, but my peers who are doing the same amount of work are going to be making a lot more money" — that makes that decision to get into education a little bit more difficult.

Melanie Plenda:

Ben and Michael, what would you say is the most immediate problem when it comes to addressing the attrition and retention of teachers? How can it be addressed?

Ben Reynolds:

One of the immediate challenges that we identified in New Hampshire is affordability. Even when schools can recruit qualified educators, high housing costs and child care costs can make it difficult for them to afford to live and work there, particularly early in their careers.

New Hampshire's median single-family house sale price increased more than 71% between 2019 and 2025, and center-based child care for an infant and four-year-old increased 33% between 2017 and 2025, to about $30,000 annually. At the same time, as Mike mentioned, teacher salaries aren't rising anywhere close to those rates, and addressing these key affordability issues will not only help to recruit teachers but ensure that they can stay there for the long term. 

Michael Whaland:

I think the immediate problem we're looking at is burnout, isolation and having supportive leadership and culture. I believe salary is what gets our teachers in the door, but working conditions and job satisfaction dictate whether they stay or not. I think that we can address this problem through a multifaceted approach, looking at administrative and peer support, building strong mentorship programs for our new teachers, finding ways for our teachers to cultivate positive school cultures based on trust, looking at their ability to have autonomy in the classroom, and community integration helps educators feel anchored in their community. 

One of the most intangible items I find in hiring in schools is fit. What I mean by that is that if you're hiring an individual that's never worked in a rural area, that's going to be a culture shock to them. So if they're exposed — whether it's through vacation, sports, recreation — they’re more apt to stay if they have some of that, as I call it, fit. 

Melanie Plenda:

What happens if these issues aren’t addressed? What will our schools look like? 

Michael Whaland:

I fear that if these issues are not addressed, that we could be looking at communities that do not have, especially in our rural areas of the state, their local schools. The elementary school is the heartbeat of their community. It's where social events happen, basketball games, voting happens — a sense of community that happens there. Without having that, I fear that that will erode the sense of community, that once was a vibrant area could in fact just be tumbleweeds. I hate to put it bluntly like that, but that's a fear. 

Ben Reynolds:

In the report, we really wanted to make it a point about explaining why teachers matter. The research shows the impact that teachers have both in student success inside and outside the classroom, and we've also highlighted the impact of having experienced teachers, not only on students but also on newer teachers in terms of staying longer, in terms of being able to professional development and teaching. That's really why these recruitment and retention challenges are so important to address.

If a school struggles to fill positions, this may increase class sizes. They may have to offer fewer courses or rely more heavily on less experienced teachers. When positions go unfilled, remaining teachers often have to take on more work and additional responsibilities. That can make an already challenging job even harder and potentially push more teachers to leave, and make it even more difficult for schools to retain the educators they need. 

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you both for joining us. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

I didn’t just read this article – I’ve lived it

By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative

I read an article today, and I had to sit with it for a minute.

It was titled “Police Social Work: Building a Different Crisis Response in New Hampshire”, by Carlota de Almeida of the N.H. Center for Justice & Equity.

When I read the sentence that begins, “When someone calls 911 because a loved one is experiencing a mental health crisis, has nowhere to sleep, is struggling with substance use, or is living alone with dementia…” they weren't just words. I saw my life.

I’ve been the person making the calls. I’ve been the person advocating, supporting, sitting beside families while they’re trying to figure out what the hell happens next. I’ve worked with people experiencing domestic violence, mental health struggles, housing instability, substance use and crisis.

And then life decided to put me on the other side of the table. I lost my husband. Now I’m a single parent, living on one income with a hell of a lot of bills, trying to keep a household moving while carrying grief that doesn’t give a damn about the due date on the electric bill.

So when I read this article, I realized: I am all of the above. I am the woman who has needed help. I am the woman who has advocated for others. I am the woman who has sat in rooms making sure somebody’s voice was actually heard. And I am the woman who now understands what it feels like to navigate systems while your own life is falling apart.

That’s why this conversation about police social work and crisis response matters to me. Because not every crisis needs a badge – sometimes somebody needs a social worker. Sometimes they need a mental health professional. Sometimes they need a peer. Sometimes they need an advocate. And sometimes they just need another human being who knows how to sit down, listen and not make them feel like a problem that needs to be removed.

Who is at the table?

But there’s another part of this conversation I’m not willing to leave out: Representation matters.

As a Black woman, I want to see more people of color in these positions, not because being Black automatically makes somebody an expert. But lived experience matters. Culture matters. Trust matters. Perspective matters.

When you’ve had to navigate systems that weren’t always built with people who look like you in mind, you bring a perspective that cannot be learned from a textbook.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying every person of color understands every other person of color. I’m saying we deserve to be in the room helping build the solutions, because I know what it means to advocate for somebody else while fighting battles in my own damn life.

I know what it means to support people through crisis and then go home and have your own crisis waiting at the door. I know what it means to grieve and still have responsibilities. Bills still need to be paid. Kids still need you. Life still expects you to get your ass up in the morning.

This work isn’t theoretical to me. I’ve lived it and advocated through it and supported people through it. Now I’m experiencing pieces of it personally that I never expected.

So yes, let’s build a different crisis response. But while we’re building it, let’s ask: Who is at the table? Whose voice is being heard? Whose experience is being valued?

Because sometimes the person who understands the crisis best is the person who has had to survive one themselves. Maybe lived experience isn’t something we should hide behind our résumé. Maybe it belongs on it.

And maybe it’s time somebody asks, “Who is Shamecca?” Because I’ve got a hell of a lot more to say.

Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

New Hampshire Housing study dispels long-held myths about affordable housing

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

More affordable housing in New Hampshire would solve many problems for Granite Staters, so why are some communities reluctant to allow developments to come to fruition? They might be operating under some misconceptions, according to a new study from New Hampshire Housing that may go a long way to dispel those myths. Here to discuss that study is Alexsandra Galanis, New Hampshire Housing’s manager for research and data analytics. 

Judi Currie:

For people who aren’t familiar with it, can you explain what New Hampshire Housing is? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

New Hampshire Housing is a self-supporting public corporation that promotes, finances and supports housing solutions for people across the state. We work in a number of areas, including home ownership, rental assistance, financing affordable multifamily housing, and research and data. We were established by the state in 1981, but we do not receive any operating funds from the state government. 

Judi Currie:

Why did New Hampshire Housing decide to commission this study? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

One of the concerns we hear repeatedly when affordable housing is proposed in a community is that it will lower the value of nearby homes. That is an understandable concern because for many households, their home is their largest financial asset. But while that concern comes up frequently in local discussions, it had never really been tested using statewide New Hampshire data. We really wanted to move the conversation from assumptions to evidence. 

A second point worth emphasizing is that there was already research for parts of the country, but New Hampshire, as you know, is very different, and our market is very different compared to metropolitan markets like New York City, L.A. etc. We wanted a planning board to have an actual evidence-based report that is New Hampshire-specific. We wanted to know what actually happened here and make sure that the data that's being shown from other studies is actually being held true in New Hampshire communities. 

Judi Currie:

Did the results match your expectations? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

We went to the study wanting to answer four major research questions, and we knew that the existing literature showed that adding affordable housing either had no measurable impact or had, in some cases, a modest positive effect. So the overall result was consistent with the broader research, but what was important to us was seeing whether that held true in New Hampshire. 

What I found particularly interesting was how consistent the main result was when Community Scale, the consultant we hired to do the study,  tested it in different ways. We wanted to have a research firm that designed a quasi-experimental design — what I mean by that is having a study that is completely unbiased and making sure that they're using evidence-based methods to show the causal effect, not just a correlational study. 

Judi Currie:

What were the key findings? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

A little bit about the context of what the data is. The study looked at 93 affordable housing developments containing 3,124 units. These connected those developments with more than 68,000 open market home sales from 2008 through 2025. They were able to compare the results with 136 market-rate multifamily developments. 

We had four major questions. The first question was: Does affordable housing lower nearby property values? This was our biggest finding of the study, and we found no measurable average decline in nearby home values associated with affordable housing development in New Hampshire. 

The second question was: Does affordable housing have a different effect than comparable market-rate multifamily housing? Again, we found no reliable evidence of a property value penalty specific to affordable housing. 

Third was: Does the result change depending on how close you are to the development or how much time has passed? Community Scale tested different distances and different periods before and after completion, and did not find any opening shock, a construction period decline or delayed decline. 

Lastly: Does the result differ depending on the community or project type? Most of the analysis found no measurable effect. So what was striking was the consistency of the finding across a number of different ways looking at the data. 

Judi Currie:

How do myths get perpetuated and start to feel like facts?

Alexsandra Galanis:

We know housing is very personal. I think people care deeply about their homes, their neighborhoods and their communities. So when something new is proposed, there are naturally questions and concerns, and I think the belief can become accepted as fact when they hear it repeated often enough, particularly when there has not been local data available to test it.

Anecdotes can also be very powerful. Someone may point to one property or one neighborhood and just generalize that experience to every affordable housing development. That is why research like this is so useful. It lets us take a claim that people have heard for years and ask, “What does the evidence actually show when we look across the entire state?”

I just want to reiterate that New Hampshire Housing wants to build more housing, so it was important that we hire a consultant who really has no stake. They're just using the data and they are really applying all of the statistical models and applying the actual experiments and making sure that the data is robust and testing it to ensure that the results are replicable. It's important that we also want to make sure that we're putting evidence-based data that's unbiased out there, and then we're able to have Community Scale do the analysis. 

Judi Currie:

What other kinds of housing myths would fall into this category? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

Another good example is the concern that building more housing, particularly multifamily or workforce housing, will overwhelm local schools and significantly increase education costs. New Hampshire Housing actually has studied that question several times over the past two decades, but most recently, we commissioned Urbanomics to conduct a study called, "From Homes to Classrooms.” I definitely recommend checking that report on our website. They did a great analysis, and they looked at the relationship between new housing development and public school enrollment in New Hampshire. What the study found was pretty interesting. 

Statewide, the number of public schools to students per housing unit has actually declined over time, from about 39 students per housing unit in 1990 to 29 today. When they look specifically at housing built between 2014 and 2023, new housing generated about zero to 16 public school students per unit statewide. I think that, on average, housing built between 2014 and 2023 generated an estimated net fiscal benefit of about $1,700 per unit for local school districts. I won't go into much more detail, however, I think this type of study also really helps to debunk some myths about what it can mean to add more multifamily housing and the impacts on school districts and communities.

This type of study is very similar to the property values question because these are understandable concerns. People are thinking about their schools, their property taxes and their communities, but sometimes an assumption gets repeated for years until it becomes accepted as fact. What studies like these allow us to do is actually look up the New Hampshire data and see where the assumptions hold up. That doesn't mean new housing never brings additional students. Of course, some new households have children. The point is that the data does not support the assumption that every new housing unit equals a new student, or that multifamily housing automatically overwhelms the school system. 

Judi Currie:

What else would you like our audience to know about the state of New Hampshire’s housing stock?

Alexsandra Galanis:

The bigger overall picture is that New Hampshire still does not have enough housing that people can afford at different stages. Even myself — I mean, I'm still a renter. I'd love to be able to buy a home. I just unfortunately cannot afford it given my income levels. I really recommend looking at our recent 2026 housing report publication that we put out last month. The median single-family home price reached $575,000, and only about 15% of New Hampshire households can actually earn enough to afford that priced home. 

Housing availability is also increasingly connected to our workforce and economy, because employers need workers. They need to be able to find housing within a reasonable distance of their jobs. If you're a nurse, you may need to be on call. You don't want to be living an hour away from the hospital. You need to be at least 30 minutes and be able to come in at an appropriate time rather than having to live further away because that may be more affordable. 

When we talk about needing more housing, we're not talking about one type of housing. We need starter homes, apartments, workforce housing, affordable housing, housing for older adults, and opportunities for people who want to downsize. A healthy housing market has choices, and I think that right now we're still in a seller's market. Right now, we're at like 2.3 months supply. Anything under six months is considered a seller’s market, so I think the connection back to the study is that if we're going to address that shortage, communities need good information when they are considering new housing, and we want those conversations to be based on what the evidence tells us rather than assumptions that may prevent needed housing from being built. 

Judi Currie:

So interesting! Thank you. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Sexual therapist’s assault trial – pending since 2021 – delayed for third time

Judge cancels November trial date over competency concerns even though defendant has already been found competent

By Kelly Burch- Granite State News Collaborative

The sexual assault trial of a former North Conway therapist – previously convicted of manslaughter in the drunk-driving death of a child – has been delayed for a third time, a blow that the alleged victim in the case says is excruciating.

“I have to say, I’m very angry at the state,” said Bonnie Sitomer, a former counseling client of Peter Stone, who was charged with five accounts of felonious sexual assault in 2021. “I know the judge has to protect [Stone’s] rights, but …  where is my right?”

The charges stem from alleged abuse against Sitomer on five occasions in 2016. Stone was arraigned on the charges in August 2021, and has had three final pretrial hearings set: in August 2025, March 2026 and, most recently, on Thursday, Oct. 8. Jury selection for Stone’s trial was set to being in Carroll County Superior Court in Ossipee on Nov. 2. 

But the trial date was canceled after Stone filed a motion to determine competency, which Judge Mark T. Attorri granted. Stone was previously found competent to stand trial in the case in 2024. 

“There is something really wrong with the system where … this case has languished for six years,” said Sitomer, who now lives in Somersworth. “I would like to know what this is costing the taxpayer.”

The 2025 trial was canceled when Stone indicated his intention to plead guilty. Plea hearings  were set for December 2025 and January 2026, but did not ultimately result in a plea. 

Following that, a trial was set for March, but canceled due to concerns over how to transport Stone to court. 

The most recent cancellation leaves Sitomer extremely frustrated. 

“I had hoped that finally my voice would be heard, “because I’ve been silenced for six years.” she said, 

Emotional toll of trial delays

Delayed cases are a "hugely significant issue for victims in New Hampshire,” said Amanda Grady Sexton, director of public affairs for the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. While defendants have constitutional rights to a speedy trial, alleged victims don’t have the same rights, Grady Sexton noted. 

For victims like Sitomer, having a case stretch out for dozens of hearings over many years takes an emotional toll, said Grady Sexton.

“Each scheduled hearing or trial date requires a victim to prepare to relive the trauma, arrange time away from work or school, and reorganize their life, only to learn that the case has been postponed again,” Grady Sexton said. 

She added, “Delay can also be used strategically” by defendants.

Sitomer feels that has occurred in this case.

“Every move the state has made, they’ve just been manipulated by this person,” Sitomer said.

Stone has an extensive history with the criminal justice system. In 1989, he crashed into a motorcycle in Nashua while driving drunk, killing 10-year-old Lacey Packer, the Associated Press has previously reported. Stone was convicted of manslaughter in that case and incarcerated until 2002.

While in jail, he changed his name from Peter Dushame to Peter Stone. As Dushame, the alleged perpetrator had five drunk driving convictions and two additional fatal vehicle accidents  not involving alcohol  before he killed the child, the AP reported.

The sexual assault case has been delayed so long that Sitomer is now a senior – an age group that is entitled to a speedy trial under New Hampshire law. The statute – RSA 632-A:9 – calls on the court to “consider any adverse impact the delay or continuance may have on the well-being of the victim” in cases involving victims who are 16 or younger, or 65 and older.

Sitomer turned 65 in April. In June, her attorney wrote a letter to Carroll County Attorney Keith Blair requesting that the case move forward without further delay, and that Blair oppose any further requests for continuances. Blair’s office did not respond to a request for comment following Thursday's hearing.

Sitomer said she’s determined to see this case to trial, no matter how long it takes. But her experience has also made her understand why so few victims come forward. 

“The system abuses you as much as the criminal,” she said.

These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

The ongoing fight to defend the First Amendment’s five freedoms

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

What freedoms does the First Amendment grant us? It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” As great, and as revolutionary, as those words are, we have been fighting about what they mean — and protect — almost as long as they have been around. Here to discuss the First Amendment, the White House journalist ban and its impact is attorney Gregory V. Sullivan, the President of the New England First Amendment Coalition and Malloy and Sullivan.

Melanie Plenda:

What were your thoughts when you learned about the White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

Oh, thoughts went to places like Red China, Russia, and Iran. That's where the government controls the media and what the people get to see and hear. I called it at the time a disgrace, and I certainly don't shy away from using that word again. 

I obviously am someone who believes deeply in the importance of the First Amendment. I often say it's the cornerstone of our democracy, our rights to five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, as you recited them, are sacred and should be held sacrosanct by every government official as well as every citizen, but particularly those with a responsibility to administer the government. 

Under the current administration, this is not something new. They've been attacking our five freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and press, on an ongoing basis throughout both terms of President Trump, but particularly during this second term. It's not just the press corps that's being abused by the government — colleges, libraries, law firms, across the board.

The rule of law, and particularly with respect to the First Amendment, is just ignored and abused by this administration. I said the other day, either they're ignorant of what the First Amendment means, or they're willfully choosing to disrespect it, and that costs all of us. 

Melanie Plenda:

As you mentioned, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. What happened with former CNN reporter Jim Acosta?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

The difference between that case and this case is Acosta was an individual reporter, and Trump didn't like the way he posed his questions. So he revoked his credentials, but not CNN as a whole, and not CNN and other reputable media organizations. 

What happened with Acosta and what's happening now is viewpoint discrimination, which is prohibited by the First Amendment. When the government designates a forum, such as the press room, such as Air Force One, when they invite members of the public — and when I say public, I mean press when I say press, I mean public, I don't make a distinction there. But when they open up an area for public discussion or public listening, they cannot discriminate based upon who they like to deal with. They’ve got to open it up to everyone. 

Melanie Plenda:

Have other presidents tried to ban media outlets?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

I don’t believe any president — at least since 1914, when the White House Correspondents Association was cared — no. No president has tried to ban an organization. Richard Nixon tried to ban the Washington Post from parts of the White House during the Watergate investigations, but aside from that, from my knowledge, this is unprecedented in terms of what the current administration is doing and trying to do.

Melanie Plenda:

You mentioned viewpoint discrimination, let’s talk about that.

Gregory V. Sullivan:

In the law, we have a concept called forums — public forums and non-public forums. The traditional, quintessential public forum are our parks. Boston has the Boston Common. Virtually every city and town in the country has their park or their common. Speakers at those locations are only subject to restrictions that relate to time, place and manner. In other words, you can't use a loud amplifier at 2 o'clock in the morning in a residential area. The government can employ time, place and manner restrictions if they're reasonable, but viewpoint discrimination in a public forum, no. 

Then there's what's called a limited, or a designated, public forum, and that's what we have in the White House. They've designated an area, the press room, in the White House, for members of the press who are credentialed, as opposed to Joe Citizen walking in, armed or unarmed.

But once you let organizations in, you can limit them based on space availability. For example, a reasonable place and manner restriction, but not because of the way they report the news. That's just totally violative of the First Amendment. We, the people, have a right to hear various views and opinions. We see in the news coverage that not every organization plays a story or reports a story the same way, and that's fine. That's what we call the marketplace of ideas, but for the government to say, "I like this organization, I like the way they report what I'm doing, but I don't like this one, so keep them out”. That's just not allowed under our Bill of Rights, i.e. the First Amendment. 

Melanie Plenda:

How does a case like this affect media access to government officials? What does it mean for local journalists or the average citizen?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

We all rely on certain news outlets because not every news outlet, not every local publisher, has access to mass media. Reliable wire services, reliable press organizations are where we get our news, whether we are local reporters or we are the average citizen.

Local publishers cannot cover worldwide and national stories the way organizations such as the AP can. So the news filters down, and fortunately, because of the internet, it filters down with rapidity these days, and we rely on it. Whether you're watching Fox News or whether you're watching CNN, you're at least getting some perspective on current events, and that's critical. 

Melanie Plenda:

Do journalists and citizens have protection at the state level for access to public officials?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

Absolutely. It's the same concept that we've been talking about. I say often that the rights to free speech and free press are eviscerated, absent the corresponding right to know what the government is up to. Here in New Hampshire, because of our constitution and because of our right-to-know law, we are able to know what the government is up to. And when government officials don't respect that we have people who want to know what the government is up to, we have the courts. And I've been obviously impressed with the Supreme Court of New Hampshire in the past 20 years versus in previous years. We've really expanded the sunlight that is shown on governmental action because of the decisions of the N.H. Supreme Court. 

Melanie Plenda:

Is there a better solution to protecting access to public officials? Besides duking it out in court, is there a legislative solution or something else that would make this issue easier to resolve?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and by the constitutions of the various 50 states — but particularly New Hampshire, which has very strong constitutional provisions — should be enough. Government officials need to understand what the role of the press is and what the role of the First Amendment is with respect to their conduct, and we're just not seeing it from the current federal administration. Unfortunately, yes, it takes court orders these days to guarantee those rights. 

There's a judge in Boston named William Young, who the New England First Amendment Coalition recently recognized for his work in ordering the president of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the government agencies to abide by the law. It's a decision where, unfortunately, the young woman who was a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., was detained by ICE for months wrongfully, and ultimately she chose to leave the United States. 

She's a bright young woman who wanted to flourish in her career here, but because of the actions of the federal government, she's now back in Turkey. And Judge Young wrote a tremendous decision, just pointing out the fact that the government in that case acted terribly with respect to that woman's civil rights, her right to free speech. Citizens and non-citizens alike, if they're here in the country lawfully — which she was — enjoy the same free speech rights, he ruled. That case has been appealed by the government.  

MelaniePlenda:

So interesting, thank you Greg.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Transparent NH: How communities respond to receiving right-to-know requests

The Granite State News Collaborative, the Concord Monitor, Muck Rock and Sunlight Research teamed up for a project to see how accessible New Hampshire’s public records are. The series is called Transparent NH. Across 23 communities, and 46 agencies, 280 public records requests were submitted. What were the results? Here to talk about that are two local journalists spearheading the project, the Concord Monitor’s Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Van Fleet and reporter Sruthi Gopalakrishnan.

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, tell us about the series. How did it start? How long did it take? What did it involve?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

Well, it started when you, Melanie, came to me and said, "I have an idea for a project,” and I said, "I'm happy to help.” Where it began was an idea to get a comparative understanding of how different towns deal with our right-to-know law, and we started having a few meetings with the Sunlight Research Group, who then, throughout the course of the project, became MuckRock, and it started more than a year ago. I think we first had our conversations in June or July of 2025, and we first had to figure out what we wanted to ask, then we had to figure out who we're asking, and then we had to figure out how this could be of use to the news organizations in New Hampshire, and especially the people of New Hampshire. That's the groundwork that got us from beginning to then the real legwork of getting the requests sent out, answered, and then reporting on them. 

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, why test public records accessibility? Can you explain to the audience why this is important and not just for journalists?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

The story mentioned this, but really, if you boil it down, the government exists to serve the people. Everything that the government does is at the behest of the people. The power of the government comes from the people. So when you really boil it down, the government should have very, very few secrets. When people want to know what their government is up to, which they are funding, and which is existing to serve, then there should be as few barriers as possible, which is why the state's right-to-know law says the greatest possible access to the actions and records of government. We can't underscore those words enough “greatest possible.” 

So when you actually carry that out and you ask government agencies for these records and they put up all these barriers, you find yourself asking, is this the greatest possible access that they can give the public? And in a lot of cases, it's not. So that's what we found through the project, and we'll get to some of that. But the state Constitution, even before the right-to-know law was passed, which was initially passed in New Hampshire I think it was 1967, but the right to open government was enshrined in the state Constitution, so this isn't a new concept. This is fundamental to the state of New Hampshire and how the government serves the people. 

Melanie Plenda:

Sruthi, what was it like working on this series? I imagine you had to juggle other stories as well while working on all this.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

This was a yearlong project, and we did break this up into bite-sized pieces. Jon and I met with the team at MuckRock every week, figuring out what needs to be done that week. So it was better for us to just break it up into small pieces, and that actually gave me time to work on my other stories as well. If you ask me, what jumped out at me at first is how each town or community responds differently to every single request. We would file the same request with each town, and they would respond completely differently. 

Melanie Plenda:

As you both were working on this series, did anything surprise you about the results, or in some cases, the lack thereof? 

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

One thing that was very evident is a lot of the communities did not know if they should be responding to a request that came from out of state, and since MuckRock is not really based in New Hampshire, we had a lot of calls and emails. Sometimes some of the communities that I knew felt that email was not used in the right way. So we had to have a lot of conversations with them about that as well. Some were willing to give us the request if we just email them, but some wanted us to come in person and make sure that we are a New Hampshire resident before giving us a request. So they were really confused about the law when it came to out-of-state requests. 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

There was that, as Sruthi was saying, the variety of responses to the identical requests was a little surprising. As Sruthi said, it was it was enlightening in some ways, but I guess what I would say is, for the most part, communicating with the local officials, what I learned is they are willing to help. They just needed a little nudge. They needed to know that their time was well spent and that they were doing something that wasn't just frivolous. And I think we got there.

Melanie Plenda:

Were there any creative denials? Or just different versions of the word no? Let’s start with Jon.

Jonathan Van Fleet:

A couple of my favorites were the city of Nashua. When we asked for the one month of emails for the Board of Aldermen president, who is Lori Wilshire, the city of Nashua said that a person is not a public agency, and so therefore you are not entitled to any emails. This is considered closed. We appealed, and we said obviously this is a public official, doing public business, with a city email account, but they never budged, and their score reflected that. But it was unique in the denials that we got. This is something that was handled routinely by other communities. Not everyone liked us asking for their emails, but we got them. 

The other was the Manchester School District had asked us to pay $855 for their emails, so they were going to give us the first 250 emails free, and everything else thereafter was going to be $1 per email. The law says electronic records should be provided electronically, but it also does allow for reasonable fees to be charged. We argued that those fees were unreasonable, especially because the law does not allow them to charge for staff time. But they felt that they were on solid footing, and they maintained that that was what we had to pay. But as you can see, if the regular member of the public had to pay almost $1,000 to figure out how the school district is corresponding with parents, this was about curriculum, you could see how that would be a barrier to access. 

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think those two were the weirdest ones for us. But I think when it came to evaluations, we did ask for police chief evaluations, school superintendent, as well as the city or town manager evaluations. We found that communities were more open to providing us police chief evaluations versus superintendent evaluations or the city or town manager. One reason that they kept telling us was that these are personnel records, and we felt that they were kind of unwilling to do the balancing test. So some communities, if we did talk to them and push a little, they were willing to give us. But some just rejected us when it came to those.

Melanie Plenda:

And Jon, what about the agencies that sent records? Were they complete?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

They were mostly complete. It's also interesting when you look at that. So when we asked for our school district emails, some of the communities just said, "Here's everything,” emails, and the back and forth between parents. It's very candid. There's kids' names in there. Other communities were like, "Oh, we have to black out, redact, everyone's email address, everyone's name,” and so the records become a little more obscure, you can kind of follow along.

But the level at which some of the communities just said, "Here you go.” The level at which they considered once it's a public record. So if I email my town, I expect that email and my email address to be public. It's part of the public record. The town does not need to redact my email address because I am generating a public record by communicating with my town. So they, in many cases, put on a different level of redaction. Student names, little different. I think they could argue that student names should be eliminated. But again, if the parent is the one who's generating the public record by emailing the school district, I think the folks that gave us the unredacted records were right. Obviously, I'm a staunch advocate for transparency, so I want as little redaction as possible. 

In other cases, we got some records and some inconsistent redactions, but overall, I feel like mostly we got what we asked for, and in some cases, communities said what we asked for they didn't have. That was also a bit of a head scratcher. Like some communities said, we don't have a police chief evaluation. So it's like, really, no one's ever evaluated the police chief. That's interesting, but for most of the project, we got what we asked for.

Melanie Plenda:

What did the two of you learn from working on this project so far? Let’s start with Sruthi, then to Jon.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think my biggest takeaway is that a lot of communities are willing to work with you when you file a right-to-know request, and sometimes they don't even want you to file a right to know request — just walk in, ask us if you want a particular record, which is easier for us. We are here in the customer service business, so I feel like most communities, especially the town administrators, are very open to providing requests, which was a big surprise for me. 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

Yeah, I mean there was a lot to learn. What I learned is just that the variations of the way people looked at the law was surprising to me. And as Sruthi was saying, being able to communicate with folks directly made a really big difference. When you're responding to an email, you can be a little terse. You can, as a person getting that email, you can read tone into it, and when you actually talk to a lot of these folks on the phone and explain what we're looking for, and I did that in Portsmouth, they were kind of asking themselves, why shouldn't we do this? And when I explained it to them, they said, “OK.” I also learned that when the communities found out they were being compared to other communities, they kind of perked up a little bit because no one wanted to be the worst.

Melanie Plenda:

What do you hope the public takes away, or learns from the series? 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

I hope that they learn. It's easy to say the government should do this, the government should do that, but the relationship between government and the people is inclined. So that's what I really want the public to understand is that the government doesn't exist to rule over them. It's the other way around. If you think about town meetings, the people are why the government exists, and that fundamental relationship that they have a right to know. That's what I hope the public understands.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think I would just echo what Jon said, the resident public should feel like they can reach out to their town officials and find whatever information they need, and also feel comfortable filing right-to-know requests because they pay for the town officials, they pay for the government.

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, where are we in the series? What’s coming next and when? 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

What we didn't do is a great job of writing about what's in the records. What we actually wrote about is what we asked for and why, and then the responses. So you got a real surface-level view of the project and how it worked, but we didn't dive into what we actually got. That's the next phase of this reporting, which should be happening over the next six months. Sruthi will be writing about how towns are using AI policies. Catherine McLaughlin will be writing about the disparity of who is answering the superintendent, police chief, town manager evaluation questions. Why is it so different in these communities? We're going to look at those school emails; there's a lot of stuff in there. So I think people will be interested to see what's in some of these.

Melanie Plenda:

Well, congratulations on the series. Great work! Looking forward to seeing more. 

The State We’re in a weekly digital public affairs show is produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.

As New Hampshire loses local journalists, community newspapers remain ‘so vitally important’

‘What matters is that people have all the information … and can make their own decision with that information’

By: Annmarie Timmins

Deb and Chris Paul have grown the Londonderry newsletter they started 26 years ago into the Londonderry Times, a free weekly newspaper that’s mailed to every home and published online.

It doesn’t have the resources of The New York Times, but publisher Deb Paul would argue its tenacious reporting on town spending and policy decisions impacts more people in her town.

“You can change how your town looks, how it feels, how it behaves, and what it costs to live there,” she said. “And people don't understand that. And so that's why I think the state’s little, little community papers are so vitally important.”

There are fewer and fewer local news outlets scrutinizing town halls, school boards and elected officials, and those that remain have had to scale back to cut costs. That loss has not gone unnoticed, and in communities like Wolfeboro, Rye and Amherst, local residents are attempting to fill the void with local newsletters and websites largely with volunteers.

According to a new report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack, the United States has lost 81% of its local journalists since 2002, from 40 per 100,000 people in 2002 to 7.8 today. In New Hampshire, there are about seven local journalists per 100,000 people, the report said. And the local journalists who remain are covering crime and sports far more than education, health and the environment.

The consequences of news deserts to a community's civic health can be far-ranging. Researchers have linked a decline in local news reporting to lower voter turnout, increased corruption, greater loneliness, the spread of misinformation, and higher costs to local governments and taxpayers

“When you don't have accountability journalism, I hate to say it, but people will take advantage when they think no one's looking,” said Matt Baker, director of research at Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit coalition of organizations that works to promote public policies aimed at strengthening the nation’s community infrastructure.

‘Educate, inform, and connect the community’

There was no local news source in Londonderry when Deb and Chris Paul relocated from Massachusetts nearly 30 years ago. Deb decided to create one, despite having no journalism experience. Her free monthly newsletter, which she sustained with ads, launched in 2000.

“I really didn't know what I was doing. I just knew that this was something that was missing,” Deb said.

Her readers — and advertisers — did too.

After about a year, she secured enough advertising revenue to publish every other week, and then weekly. The Pauls expanded, launching the Nutfield News, which covered Derry and Auburn, and the Tri-Town Times, with a focus on Hampstead, Sandown and Chester.

“My whole plan was to try to expand this into as many towns as possible that didn't have a news outlet,” Deb said. Financial struggles, COVID and Deb’s cancer diagnosis forced the Pauls to scale back, ultimately closing down the Nutfield News and Tri-Town Times in 2022 to sustain the Londonderry Times.

Recent issues included letters to the editor, a list of Londonderry High School’s graduates, and coverage of an investigation into the town manager’s office. The paper uncovered misuse of tax revenue.

“The mission statement of the paper is to educate, inform and connect the community,” Deb said. She added, “What matters is that people have all the information, all the facts, and can make their own decision with that information.”

Filling the local news void

Anne Blodget and seven other Wolfeboro residents formed “Citizens for Wolfeboro” in 2023 to alert residents about complicated and sweeping zoning changes on the town warrant. The local newspaper had stopped covering town affairs closely.

“Those eight warrant articles were going to change our town forever,” Blodget said of the zoning changes. The group broadcast its concerns with postcards, a Facebook page and community meetings. When the warrant articles failed, Citizens for Wolfeboro was motivated to carry on and grow.

Today, almost 200 people subscribe to Citizens for Wolfeboro’s newsletter.

The group’s website focuses on local issues, including land use, water quality and financial transparency. There are links to budgets, meeting minutes and reports. A voters guide breaks down state and local voting laws. Another page navigates the town’s website to make it easier for residents to follow town boards and weigh in on issues.

“It needs to have more members and more visibility in the community because it’s serving as a common information base,” said member Howard Lowe. “When you lose news coverage, you lose that common source of information that is valuable to everyone.”

The Citizens for Wolfeboro and groups like it don't have the means to do in-depth investigative journalism. But their work is valuable, said Baker, of Rebuild Local News.

“I think they are incredibly useful just for filling in the void,” he said. “They may not do all the work. But I do think it's filling in a gap for sure.”

The Amherst Bear, which launched this past February with advertising revenue and $100,000 in donations, is taking a different approach following the closure of The Amherst Citizen in 2024.

The monthly community newspaper — which is published online and mailed to every home in town — focuses largely on community events, local people and “news you can use.” In the July issue, the police department highlighted its efforts to keep older residents safe. The town administrator published a list of events celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary. The lead story explored the history of the town’s iconic July 4th parade, which regularly draws governors and other elected officials.

Stacey Morison, managing editor and cofounder, said they are not “shying away” from the more contentious news either, from local elections to a vote on a controversial school renovation that has narrowly failed several times. Morrison said she wants The Bear to provide a factual alternative to Facebook.

“We should be covering [issues] in a non-biased, apolitical, fact-based way in order to provide as much information as we can so that people do feel more informed when they go to vote,” Morrison said. “And hopefully, that will lead to greater voter turnout in local elections if people feel more connected to the issues and the ballot initiatives.”

The Rye Civic League launched in 1968, well before the decline in local news, to inform residents about local issues. It disbanded in 1993 and stayed dormant until Alex Herlihy revived it in 2009 when he realized residents were learning about significant issues after they’d been decided by local officials.

“People have turned away from their local communities as they've become obsessed with national political ideologies,” Herlihy said. “I think that's the major problem. People are not paying attention to the $30 million school and town budget. They don't care how their tax dollars are being spent.”

Today, Rye Civic News publishes a monthly newsletter on its website and emails the issue to nearly 1,600 subscribers.

The June issue previewed an upcoming special town meeting and updated readers on the selectboard’s decision to remove 90 parking spaces from Ocean Boulevard, a popular scenic route along the ocean. There were links to town financial and planning documents. The issue included a list of community events and openings on town board.

The league also recaps the monthly newsletter in videos on its Facebook page and holds monthly meetings to give locals multiple ways to stay informed.

“You just never know what impact you have because it is hard to get a quantitative sense of who reads what,” Herlihy said. “But I think you also have to have faith that you are having an impact.”

These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. Don’t just read this. Share it with one person who doesn’t usually follow local news — that’s how we make an impact. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Invisible Walls: The collaborative look at the Seacoast

Today, Portsmouth is a haven for expensive homes, luxury condos and high-class hotels. Go back a few decades, and the city looked very different. It was more diverse, more affordable and perhaps more rough around the edges. What happened?
The Granite State News Collaborative, in conjunction with Seacoast Online and the Portsmouth Herald, is in the midst of a series of stories called “Invisible Walls: Seacoast.” It explores how exclusionary zoning laws, urban renewal, and gentrification have created systemic, unseen barriers to affordable housing and socioeconomic diversity in Portsmouth. Here to talk about the series and its findings is one of the primary editors, Jeff Feingold, who works with the Granite State News Collaborative. 

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda:

Jeff, tell us a bit about the series. For those who aren’t familiar, this all started with a similar project in Manchester. What are the highlights in that series? 

Jeff Feingold:

The original Invisible Walls series took a really long, comprehensive look at how Manchester's exclusionary zoning laws have reinforced poverty and impacted so many aspects of life in the city. It focused on one area in the city in particular; they call it the center city. It's where there's a lot of multifamily buildings, a lot of which I would say are not exactly in the best shape. Some of them are in poor condition. They're owned by negligent or absentee landlords, but they do have 4-5-6 apartments in each building. 

It turns out that, because of the city's zoning — and it also goes back before they even had zoning to the 19th century — created this area where housing options were more affordable. That's where historically, since the 19th century, that's where the newest residents of the city reside. Going back to the Irish, French Canadians, and Greeks in the ’20s, zoning in particular was created to actually restrict people to those areas because of a process called redlining. Manchester was the only city in northern New England to go through redlining, and it just made this place where the poorest people are living. 

Melanie Plenda:

Tell us about the Portsmouth project, what did that entail? 

Jeff Feingold:

The series is not just about Portsmouth. It's also about the other cities on the Seacoast as well — Dover, Rochester and Somersworth. But we're kicking off the series with Portsmouth because that is by far the most expensive city to live on the Seacoast, and probably is statewide. 

Portsmouth is such an important economic engine for the entire area. It's home to hundreds of employers, some of them very very large, as well as two major industries — hospitality and retail — that employ a lot of people. So we've discovered that over the years the city has become far less affordable than it was, let's say 20 or even 10 years ago. As property values rise, lower and middle-class people who have lived there for generations can no longer live there.

The result has been they have to move farther away, which is why we're looking at Dover, Rochester, Somersworth, and other communities in between, because they want to look for affordable housing, and there's very little in Portsmouth. The thing is that we found also that, because of the housing costs up in Portsmouth, they've gone up across the whole Seacoast. So there are people who maybe move from Portsmouth to Dover, then they move from Dover to Rochester or whatever. The problem of affordable housing has many ramifications that people don't always think about. 

Melanie Plenda:

For those who aren’t familiar, what do you mean by zoning? What is that?

Jeff Feingold:

Zoning are rules developed by city officials, the City Council or Selectmen, who vote on these things. They want to control what kind of buildings, housing, or businesses can be in certain areas. So you see that in any larger community in the state. 

There's a lot of times that what they've done is they've built an area where there's just retail, or industrial parks, or only single-family housing, which is pretty dominant in most communities in New Hampshire. What they have done over the years is say they don't want multifamily built housing in many parts of our city or its community, and that’s because they think that means they'll bring more people in. People believe in the myth that, because you have more people, you'll have more families, you'll have more kids going to school, and it raises property tax, but that's been proved to be completely untrue. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you give us an overview? What are some of the key findings of the project? 

Jeff Feingold:

We talked about the zoning. We've also found that what's happened is that we've seen really interesting changes in commuting patterns. How people have moved, because we actually specifically look at the Seacoast bus line, because Seacoast does has one of the better public transportation systems in the state. Not saying that much, but it is one of the better ones. 

We found people who work in Portsmouth, especially in the retail and hospitality industries, which are among the lowest-paid jobs there are. They can't afford to live in Portsmouth, so they're moving farther and farther away, and we found people who are commuting from Rochester and Somersworth who go down to Portsmouth for their jobs. They can't afford to live in the city, and some people we found have moved from Portsmouth.

Melanie Plenda:

So what about Portsmouth and the surrounding area today? Should people just accept it becoming a wealthy enclave? Are there solutions to making it more affordable again?

Jeff Feingold:

I think that they are really working on solutions. They're trying to change the zoning. They're trying to allow more multifamily housing in the city. But the problem is so difficult that it's going to take a long time. They have taken some good first steps, but advocates are saying you need to do more. We need to allow residential areas where right now they're restricted to lots; you could allow much more housing on one acre than one single-family house, and you should really be opening up those areas to multifamily housing as well. 

Melanie Plenda:

Where are we at in the series as of this Friday and what happens next?

Jeff Feingold:

We've done the stories on urban renewal and on just the overview of what's going on the Seacoast. The next story is going to be about these city workers who can't afford to live in the city, and what that means. We have the police chief saying it's hard for him to recruit police officers. Coming up will be the look at zoning, and then we have the look at the commuting patterns. That story is coming out pretty soon. 

One of the other aspects of this that we found is really interesting is manufactured housing and mobile homes. They're very expensive, and that's a place where people historically could go to get cheaper housing. They're being priced out because of various factors, including private equity companies owning mobile home parks.

Melanie Plenda:

Interesting as always! Thanks, Jeff.

The State We’re In, a weekly digital public affairs show, is produced by NH PBS and the Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.

The primary election is over, so what’s next?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

In New Hampshire’s Sept. 8 primary election, there were some surprises, perhaps, though not many. So what do the results mean, and what’s next for voters? Here to talk about the results are Anna Brown, executive director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process, and John Lappie, associate professor of political science at Plymouth State University. 

Melanie Plenda:

The New Hampshire primary results: Were there any surprises there?

Anna Brown: 

We really did see the moderates, the well-known names, prevail in New Hampshire — and this was true up and down the ballot. So, for example, if we're looking at State House races, there were some moderates who were facing challenges from the right, and there were some that were facing challenges from the left, and generally the moderates came out on top.

When you're looking at the top of the ticket, we didn't see what we've seen in other states in terms of progressive or socialist candidates beating incumbents, or certainly more moderate, well-known candidates.

John Lappie:

We saw the more well-known candidates, the more moderate candidates, winning this election. Anybody who's been watching YouTube recently and seen all their videos interrupted by Chris Pappas or John Sununu ads knows they moved on to the general election like a month ago. They knew they had won their primaries. The only real closely contested ones were the 1st C.D. primaries. Those were more closely contested, but there was a big late shift to Anthony DiLorenzo. The polling had that race pretty close with a large number of undecided, and he wound up winning by a fairly large margin.  But that's not really all that uncommon in Congressional primaries that are usually pretty-low profile, compared to a Senate or gubernatorial primary. Voters often don't know much and don't make decisions until the last week of the campaign when they learn more about the candidates.

Melanie Plenda:

People are closely watching races across the country for the U.S. House as well as the Senate. How are things looking nationally as we head to November? Will we see the so-called blue wave?

John Lappie:

There's certainly potential for a blue wave. There is a lot of uncertainty right now over how effective Republican gerrymandering efforts were over the course of this year to try to limit Democratic gains.

It'll be very hard for the Republicans to maintain the House because they only have a three-seat majority. You don't need that much of a swing towards the Democrats, even with the gerrymandering, to result in a Democratic majority. The question is going to be: If there is a Democratic majority, how big is it going to be, and can they flip the Senate? There's a lot of seemingly winnable states this cycle, but in those states, it’s very easy to get close to winning and very hard to get that last 2 to 3% over to actually winning. Democrats have been plagued by that before. So I think that's going to be the big question: Can they get over the hump in the Senate?

Anna Brown:

I think that yes, economically, it's going to swing in Democrats' favor. Because if people are angry at what they're paying at the pump and they're angry about what they're paying for groceries, they may associate that with the Republicans that they voted in two years ago.

That being said, I think it's going to be important for Democrats to not just sort of run on how much people are angry with Republicans, because the approval rating for the Democratic candidates is also very low at the national level. As I said, I think if you talk to anyone from either party, I don't think most people in the United States are giving a thumbs up to anything happening in Washington D.C. right now, so I would agree with John. Polls are hard. Maybe there will be a blue wave, but I think it's going to be more of a squeaker than people might expect.

Melanie Plenda:

Do you have any sense about the issues that matter to voters, and what they may be thinking for the general election? First to Anna, then John.

Anna Brown:

The pocketbook — what you're seeing at the pump, what you're seeing at the grocery with your grocery bills. Also potentially, what people are seeing with their healthcare bills. I think that that is maybe something Democrats could see some movement on. I feel like health insurance is one of those issues where - I don't know if it gets people to the polls, but certainly Stefany Shaheen seems to be really making that the focus of her campaign in New Hampshire. So we're going to find out if that resonates with voters.

John Lappie:

The economy is definitely the number one issue, just like it was two years ago, three years ago or four years ago. It's the cost of living, and neither party is necessarily popular right now, but the Republicans have the disadvantage of being the incumbents, and I think with the president's tariff policies and the war in Iran and gas prices, it essentially made the president own the state of the economy in the minds of a lot of voters. Not necessarily that they think better of Democrats now, — polling definitely doesn't bear that out. But it is much harder for Republicans. When you make major changes to economic policy, and you have a war in the Middle East that everybody knows will lead to higher gasoline prices, then it's a lot harder to avoid blame for the state of the economy.

Melanie Plenda:

What other predictions or thoughts do you have about the election heading into November?

John Lappie:

This is going to be, again, a close race, and we'll have to wind up seeing what happens. For me, the big question is the polling. It has gotten very hard. Response rates are so low that I could easily see that the polls are missing Republicans again, and they're actually doing better than we think. But pollsters maybe have overcorrected to try and pick up Republican voters, and now they're underestimating Democrats, and the Democrats are going to win by even more than we expect. So, to borrow from meteorology, the cone of uncertainty has just gotten so much larger in our elections the last decade or so. 

Anna Brown:

I hate being wrong, so if you don't predict who's going to win, then you're never wrong.

I will say what I'm most politically nerdy about is actually seeing what happens on the ballot vote that's going to come up just in New Hampshire. Every town is going to vote on whether there should be a tax cap for your local school district. This is typically something that would happen in local elections in the spring, but Republicans passed the bill, and Governor Ayotte signed it. So it's going to be on the ballot this November.

This has sort of been the Republican response to voters lamenting their high property taxes. They've said, "OK, then you have to change it at the local level because we don't want more state funding funneling down. We don't want to raise your tax rates overall.”

Thus far, attempts to impose those caps at the local level have not really been successful. We've seen voters say, "No, we want to give our schools the full budget. We don't want to have a cap.” So I think that that's kind of the political nerd question for me: What is that going to look like? Because that school-funding issue is huge at the state level, and will probably influence a lot of votes for state representative and state senator. 

Melanie Plenda:

Anna, what resources will Citizens Count have for voters as we head into the November election?

Anna Brown:

Please come to our website, www.citizenscount.org We offer profiles for every candidate for state rep on up. We search for websites, Facebook email addresses, survey everyone so that they can say their positions in their own words, and if they don't respond to the survey — although most do, thankfully — we will put out voting records, other public statements they have made, and so on. 

We also have information about your polling location, how to register to vote, if you need it. And I always encourage everyone: if you are ever concerned about where to vote or how to vote, call your town clerk. Local elections are where it's at in New Hampshire. That's where all the magic happens. We aren't run at the state level. It's not some nationalized process, and every local official I have encountered wants you to participate. 

Melanie Plenda:

And we’ll link to that in our show notes. Thank you, John and Anna.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

A shelter bed is not the same thing as a home

By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative 

The homelessness crisis isn’t suddenly new in New Hampshire, but I’m seeing more people experiencing homelessness.

And as somebody who lives in Concord, works here, raises a family here and pays attention to what is happening around me, I have to ask a very simple question: Where the hell are people supposed to go?

And let me be clear: Yes, there are shelters, but that’s what makes this conversation more complicated, and more important.

Concord has the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, the Edna McKenna House, the Friends Program has emergency housing and other resources. The city maintains a list of shelters and homelessness resources.

The Concord Coalition to End Homelessness also operates a resource center where people can get showers, laundry, computers, phones, help with benefits, housing applications, case management and connections to other services.  That work matters – a lot. And the people doing the work deserve recognition because they are trying to hold together a system that is dealing with a problem much bigger than a single organization.

But we need to stop patting ourselves on the back simply because the resources exist on paper. A resource center isn’t a bedroom. A shower isn’t a bed. A housing application isn’t an apartment. And a referral isn’t the same thing as having somewhere safe to sleep tonight.

The Concord Coalition’s emergency winter shelter is a low-barrier shelter for adults. It operates from Dec. 1 through March 31, from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., and has 40 beds. Forty.

During the 2025-26 winter season, that 40-bed shelter served 172 unique people, provided 4,466 bed nights, and averaged 37 guests per night over 121 nights. Thirty-seven people per night, on average, in a 40-bed shelter.  That doesn’t sound like an empty system waiting for people to show up. It sounds like a system operating pretty damn close to capacity.

But here’s another uncomfortable reality: The emergency winter shelter is seasonal, December through March. What happens from April to November?

Outside of the emergency winter shelter, the coalition says it does not provide emergency housing. People needing emergency housing are directed to call 211 for referrals.  Again, I’m not attacking the coalition. I’m asking whether the community has enough emergency housing options for the people who need them. 

Not the finish line

We need to understand that homelessness doesn’t look one particular way. It can be the person sleeping in a tent, or in their car, or surfing from one friend’s house to another. It can be a mother and her children staying somewhere temporarily because they have nowhere else to go, or somebody who lost a job, or whose rent increased, or has left an abusive relationship. Some homeless people are dealing with mental-health or substance use challenges. Or they can be someone who had a financial emergency that turned into three, and suddenly the math stopped math-ing.

And sometimes it is simply somebody who cannot find an affordable place to live.

So when I see somebody sleeping outside, I don’t automatically think: “What’s wrong with them?” I think: “What happened to them?” And then I think: “What happens next?”

An  emergency shelter is important, but it is not the finish line.

The goal should be getting somebody from outside into stable housing, and that requires more than a bed. It requires affordable housing. Permanent supportive housing. Mental health services. Substance use treatment. Employment support. Transportation. Benefits assistance. Identification documents. Case management.

And, sometimes, somebody willing to keep working with a person after they have fallen down five times.

The Concord Coalition reports that from July 2025 through June 2026, its resource center served 59 unique clients per month, had 369 case management clients, helped 135 people with housing applications, and helped 43 people get housed. Those numbers tell that people aren’t simply looking for somewhere to sleep. They’re looking for a way out.

So maybe the question  shouldn’t be: “Why are there homeless people in Concord?” Maybe it should be: “What are we doing to make sure people don’t have to remain homeless?”

The same is true for Manchester and other places around New Hampshire. Because this isn’t a Concord problem. It’s a New Hampshire problem.  And I’m not asking for  someone to magically solve homelessness. I’m asking us to stop pretending that having a list of shelters means the problem is solved. That’s the conversation we need to have before the temperature drops, not after.

Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

How Citizens Count helps prepare Granite Staters before elections

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

New Hampshire’s election season is here. Offices from U.S. senate to state representative are up for grabs. Here to talk about the primary election and where to get information about the candidates is Anna Brown, the Executive Director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process. 

Rosemary Ford:

The state primary is on Tuesday. Lots of high-stakes races this year. Let’s start with one of the more exciting races: U.S. Senate. Jeanne Shaheen is not running for re-election, leaving a wide-open field. Let’s start with the Democrats. Who’s running? Who looks like they might win?

Anna Brown:

Chris Pappas, the current representative for District One for Congress in New Hampshire, is running for the U.S. Senate, and thus far he has been the favorite to win the Democratic primary. He has a long political history in New Hampshire. He served on the Executive Council before he went to Washington. His family has a well-known Manchester restaurant, the Puritan Backroom. But he does face a challenge from Karishma Manzur, who is running a campaign to the left of Chris Pappas, for example, challenging him on issues related to Israel and foreign policy.

She's definitely a more left-leaning progressive candidate, and she's gained some momentum in recent weeks. Polls are showing that she is gaining that name recognition. That was really a big uphill battle against someone like Chris Pappas. So I still think Chris Pappas is going to win the primary, but I think that we are going to see a surprising turnout for Karishma Manzur, and we'll have to see how Pappas navigates that moving towards the general election, attracting those farther-left voters as well as the moderates that are usually his strong voting base. 

Rosemary Ford:

What about the Republicans? Some recognizable names there too. Who’s looking good there? 

Anna Brown:

We have John E. Sununu, who used to serve New Hampshire in Washington a couple decades ago. He is the brother of former Gov. Chris Sununu and the son of another former governor, John H. Sununu. He is running a campaign endorsed by President Donald Trump, despite criticizing Trump in the past.

He was sort of the early favorite to win, and he's still the favorite to win. But he's being challenged by Scott Brown. Scott Brown, funny enough — even though he did not get the Trump endorsement — does have the support of some farther-right Republicans in New Hampshire who see him as less part of quote “the deep state” as sort of an alternative candidate, more independent thinker. 

So the Scott Brown/John Sununu primary, as I said, is probably going to go to Sununu. Things got a little interesting this week when Sununu turned down a WMUR debate with Scott Brown and said that he'd done enough public conversations with Scott Brown. So he got a little heat for that, but he's definitely started focusing on the general election and Chris Pappas as opposed to this primary. 

Rosemary Ford:

When folks head to the polls, they will also be choosing folks for state rep and state Senate. Can you explain the importance of these roles for our audience? What do they do?

Anna Brown:

In New Hampshire, the governor is actually a very weak office. The governor doesn’t have a line-item veto. She can only sign or veto the bills that come to her. It's really up to the Legislature when we're talking about setting the state budget, deciding on school funding, spending on the roads you're driving on. So it’s much of what happens to you on a day-to-day basis that's related to the government is really driven by the House and the Senate. In fact, Governor Ayotte did veto quite a few bills this year, and then the Legislature overrode several of those vetoes. 

These are the elections that I really encourage voters to pay attention to. There's so much noise about the national level — and I'm not saying that's not important, but these state races, as I said, are really going to impact you

Rosemary Ford:

Are there any state rep or state Senate races that you are following?

Anna Brown:

First of all, there are some state representative primaries in the Lakes Region that I think are very interesting.

The Lakes Region overall saw a lot of population growth during COVID-19 and has moved to the left during the same time. It’s more open to Democrats, perhaps. There's also a really interesting movement to support independent and moderate candidates around the Gunstock Mountain issue, which is sort of this local controversy about wanting to privatize that, and there was some criticism that this was a Free Stater sort of action, and that really rallied moderates.

Now there are some moderate Republicans in office who are having primary challenges from more conservative, more Trump-oriented Republicans. If those more conservative, Trump-oriented Republicans win, they may be facing a harder win in the general election. Democrats may have more of an opening there, whereas if the moderate Republicans win the primary, they may be more likely to hold on those seats. So that Lakes region in general is really open to some political change, and I'm going to be watching that. 

I'm also watching races around Manchester. We saw in recent election cycles a definite move towards the Republican Party in Manchester. That was true with the mayoral race and with the state Senate race. Now for some state senators in Manchester, we have primaries on both sides. So I'm definitely going to be curious to see who is victorious there, and we're looking at voter turnout. 

Rosemary Ford:

What about uncontested races for state rep and state senate? How many are there?

Anna Brown:

The interesting thing is in the House and Senate, contested races are more rare in the primary than uncontested. Usually, it's actually really hard for parties to recruit enough candidates to fill every seat on the ballot. There are plenty of districts in New Hampshire where one party or another wasn't able to fill the full slate of candidates. So that's another reason why these contested primaries can be so notable, because it means there's that much interest, and overall, there were a lot fewer candidates who stepped up to run at the state level than in the past few election cycles. 

I think we can speculate about a lot of different reasons for that. I know that a lot of us are really frustrated by the tone in politics. I can see why people wouldn't want to step up. I think there's also conversations between the two parties about how they support or don't support local candidates. But definitely, even if there is a blank space on your ballot, don't rule out the chance for there to be a write-in campaign, because I have also seen in New Hampshire candidates get just enough write-ins that they end up on the general election ballot after the primary. So your vote really does count in New Hampshire. It's often decided at that state level by a dozen or fewer votes — so definitely make sure to learn who's on your ballot and get to the polls. 

Rosemary Ford:

Tell us about the work Citizens Count has been doing to keep voters informed about the candidates. 

Anna Brown:

Citizens Count creates a profile for every candidate who appears on the ballot at that state level — for your state representative, your executive councilor, state Senate, governor, all these races we've talked about. Then we send a survey to every single candidate. We follow up by phone, by email, and I tell them, “We don't endorse. Whatever you want to put on that profile page, however you want to answer these questions. If you want to tell us you hate our questions and you’d rather we ask something else. We'll put it on the page.” We truly just want to make it that one-stop shop for voters to see where their candidates stand.

We've had over half of candidates respond to us. Those that haven't, that are in office, we still have their full voting records. We've tried to fill in as much as we can, so please do take advantage of our website. We want this to be a resource for both candidates and voters to connect. 

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you Anna, interesting as always. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

We tell people to get sober. But what happens after they do?

By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative

For someone fighting addiction, 90 days can mean everything.

It can mean waking up sober. Making it through another day without using. Going to treatment when you don’t want to. Taking the drug test. Showing up for work. Making the phone calls. Sitting through the appointments. Trying to repair relationships that addiction damaged.

It should be a victory, and it is. But sobriety doesn’t automatically come with an apartment. It doesn’t come with a security deposit. It doesn’t fix your credit. It doesn’t put food in your refrigerator. It doesn’t give you a reliable car. It doesn’t guarantee a job that pays enough to survive. And it certainly doesn’t erase everything that happened before you got sober.

For someone coming out of treatment or sober living, the hardest part can be trying to build a completely different life while standing on a foundation that may already be cracked.

New Hampshire recognizes the importance of recovery housing, which provides substance-free environments for people building the stability and support necessary to maintain sobriety.

But what happens when the program says it’s time to move on? Or when someone has a job but can’t afford the security deposit? And what happens when they have nowhere to go or they’re a parent trying to prove they’re ready to have their children back?

People have to take responsibility for their choices. Addiction can hurt families, relationships, communities and, sometimes, innocent people. But if we tell someone that recovery is possible, we also have to be willing to talk about what makes long-term recovery possible. Because while telling someone to change their life is one thing, providing the tools to actually build that life is another.

New Hampshire has invested in recovery housing and supportive housing, including funding intended to expand housing options for people affected by opioid use disorder and co-occurring disorders. Those investments matter. But the need doesn’t disappear simply because programs exist.

The N.H. Coalition of Recovery Residences has made reducing barriers to recovery-supportive housing part of its mission, and its housing assistance efforts have provided significant financial support to people seeking safe recovery housing. But ask someone who is actually trying to find housing what happens when the application is approved and the money isn’t there. Ask what happens when the person has employment but doesn’t have the first month’s rent and security deposit. Or when sober living ends before permanent housing becomes available and  the only available apartment costs more than the person can afford. 

And for the newly sober parents involved with child welfare, reunification isn’t simply about saying, “I’m sober now.” They have to demonstrate stability, and stability requires resources – housing, transportation, mental health support, employment, childcare, a support system.

The bottom line is, we cannot punish people for succeeding at recovery. A person can be sober and still be homeless and unemployed. Or still have court involvement or carry trauma, Recovery requires more than telling somebody to stop using. It requires helping them build the conditions in which staying sober is possible.

Investing in the person

New Hampshire has made substantial investments in substance-use-disorder prevention, treatment and recovery. There is also opioid settlement funding being directed toward communities dealing with the consequences of the opioid crisis. The money matters, but so does where it goes, because if we’re serious about recovery, we need to think beyond detox, the treatment bed, the sober house.

We need to think about what happens later – six months, a year, two years later. That’s when somebody is trying to maintain a lease, keep a job, raise a child, pay bills and deal with all the ordinary stress that comes with being human. That’s when recovery becomes a lifestyle instead of a program.

If someone is doing the work, we need to make sure there is somewhere for that work to lead. Give them a chance to find a job, to find safe housing. Give them transportation. Give them treatment and recovery support that doesn’t disappear the moment a program ends. Give parents meaningful opportunities to rebuild relationships with their children. Give people the tools to become independent instead of keeping them permanently dependent on crisis services.

So, helping people stay sober for 90 days is one thing, but it shouldn’t be the moment when we stop asking what somebody needs. It should be the moment we ask: What’s next?

Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Hiking safety: How to be prepared when the days get shorter and colder

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity. 

The N.H. Fish and Game Department does an average of 180 search-and-rescue missions a year, rescuing ill-prepared or injured hikers. On Aug. 14, Fish and Game rescued four New Jersey teens — who were underprepared for their hiking adventure — from Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains. As we move into the fall, it’s important to be aware of how hiking safety can change as the days get shorter and colder. Here to discuss that is N.H. Fish and Game’s chief of law enforcement, Col. Kevin Jordan. 

Melanie Plenda:

To start, can you tell us more about what happened during that rescue in Franconia? 

Kevin Jordan:

We received a call late in the evening on Aug. 14. The weather at the time of the call had really deteriorated through the day. We had higher winds, and the temperature had dropped a bit. We received a call from four young individuals from New Jersey that were above treeline on a Franconia Ridge trail, and they were experiencing difficulties coming down.

The initial report said there was a hiker struggling to breathe. That changed to an injured lower leg, which later would change to they really were above their skill levels and unprepared, and so we made the decision based on the weather conditions and the fact that they were unprepared to initiate a search for them, to go and get them, and bring them down. 

Melanie Plenda:

What does the rescue process typically look like?

Kevin Jordan:

The N.H. Fish and Game Department has 48 officers statewide. On any given day, probably half of those are off, so we've reduced our field force to about 20 to 25. The trails in the White Mountains are known as some of the most challenging parts of the entire trail system, and they present all kinds of physical and weather challenges because of the height of our mountains and the exposure to the weather.

When you do a typical carryout under those conditions, you are going to need 16 to 20 people. So if Fish and Game were delegated to be the only agency doing this, we would not be able to succeed — it would be very difficult for us to do that. We rely a lot on what I call “professional volunteers.” These are groups of hikers who have decided that they want to contribute to the hiking community, so they have expended time training with us. They're part of five different teams located strategically throughout the state. Those teams are well-prepared. They have good hiking equipment. They train with us on a regular basis. We reach out to them for these search missions.

Now when we do that, what a lot of people don't realize is that there is a risk every time they leave the trailhead. Those risks include things like falling, injuring themselves — volunteers can take one wrong step and be out of work for eight weeks with no salaries. They're going above tree lines, above 4,000 feet in the dark, in usually adverse weather conditions, so anything can happen. That is something that we take very seriously, so we take careful consideration when we get these calls to make sure that risk is worthy of the call. And in this case, people were put at great risk for something that, really in my opinion, could easily have been avoided. 

Melanie Plenda:

What are the most common scenarios Fish and Game receives when getting calls for search and rescue?

Kevin Jordan:

The two things that lead the calls for us are unpreparedness — believe it or not, people without flashlights or headlamps are the majority of our calls. I don't know what I’ve got to do to get people to carry a flashlight. It's one of our 10 essentials in the Hike Safe Card program. We promote it publicly every chance we get. I think the thought process is “I'm not going to be out overnight, so I'm not going to bring a light.” In my job, I have never left the roadway without some sort of light source, because you just don't know if you're going to be caught out longer or it's going to take longer, or you're going to come across an injured hiker that you're going to want to help, and you're going to need that light later in the night.  Clothing is probably second to that — being cold because they don't have proper gear with them. 

We also get a lot of injuries. We get a lot of really prepared, good hikers, experienced hikers who fall and twist an ankle. You're on brutal terrain, and you're out there when it's wet and slippery, and people fall and twist their knees. So I would say injury and unpreparedness, unpreparedness leading the charge, injury running a close second. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you tell us more about the Hike Safe program? What benefits does this voluntary card give Granite Staters?

Kevin Jordan:

Years ago, we created it in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, a Hike Safe program. We put together public information that we could promote to try and avoid some of these scenarios by listing the 10 essentials that should be included in a backpack, safe ways to hike, and things to avoid while hiking. That program was established back in early 2000, and we started campaigning on that, putting that out to the public in hopes that people would pick up some tips from that and hike in a more safe manner.

Fast-forward, as hiking calls increased, the fund to pay for these rescues wasn’t sufficient.  For years and years and years, our only search and rescue fund was $1 from every OHRV, ATV and snow machines. One dollar from each one of those would go into a search and rescue account. The fee was created in 1989 and has never gone up a dime — I’d like you to tell me anything else you know of that hasn't increased since 1989, but that never did. 

So, beginning 15 years ago, I was frustrated. I didn't feel that it was fair. Our sportsmen and women were paying almost 100 percent of the cost of search and rescue. Hikers and climbers were paying nothing. So I began going to the Legislature, repeatedly asking for a more equitable way to fund search and rescue. I felt, and still feel today, the best way to do that is from general funds, tax dollars. The state is benefiting from these folks. They're buying meals, they're buying gasoline, they're staying in hotels, and the state has a responsibility, I feel, to make sure these people make it home safely on Sunday night, and I think we should pay for that. The legislature agrees with me to this day, but there's always been a reluctance and an inability, I guess, in their minds to find that funding. 

In 2014 and ’15, a couple of things happened. One was that the Hike Safe card was created to help fund search and rescue. We kept the fees as reasonable as we could — $25 a year for an individual and $35 for a family. It gives a hiker an opportunity to contribute to the search-and-rescue fund. It also would be kind of an insurance card so that they wouldn’t be billed for a rescue — the law still says if they’re incredibly reckless, they do something extreme, they will still be billed — but to this day, we’ve never billed anyone with a Hike Safe card or a license.  It’s been highly successful. The first year, we sold $75,000 worth; the past year, we sold $445,000 worth of Hike Safe cards. It has really been very helpful. 

Melanie Plenda:

Any final advice on how hikers can be prepared for their hiking adventures this fall? 

Kevin Jordan:

I've done this for 36 years, and I don't know of a time in New Hampshire's history where we have had more information available on how to do this and do it safely, right down to the very trail that you would be considering. I can promise you, there's a guide to guide you on how difficult it is, how far it goes, things you should watch out for, and how to prepare. Our weather apps are superior to anything that we ever had 15 years ago. So you can get accurate, in-the-moment, weather. We use it all the time when we come and get you.

All this information is available. You don't need to go into a hiking store and spend thousands of dollars. We're talking about a $5 two- battery flashlight with an extra set of batteries. We're talking about stuff that you probably have in your closet — a nylon rain jacket to go over a fleece vest, No cotton — wearing clothes that are not going to soak up the water. Just spending a little bit of time and a little research to prepare. You can do this. People do it all the time, year-round. It can be done very safely. Just respect it. 

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you, Kevin, for joining us today. Visit hikesafe.com to learn more about hiking safety. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

New Hampshire rents are already going up, but is AI driving some even higher?

Companies managing N.H. apartment complexes have settled federal lawsuits over using ‘anti-competitive’ algorithmic software to set prices

By Kelly Burch-Granite State News Collaborative

When Jacqueline Plante got her lease renewal notice in June for the Portsmouth apartment where she’s lived for three years, it seemed strange.

Rather than offering her a rate for a typical 12-month lease, the renewal spelled out 11 different lease terms, with a huge variation in what the rent would be. Month-to-month would cost her more than $4,000, while a 12-month lease would be $2,146 per month. The most affordable option was an 11-month lease, at her previous rate of $2,075 per month.

She checked the availability of other apartments in the complex as if she were a new tenant. She found apartments identical to hers with prices below $2,000 per month for a 12-month lease — depending on the day she checked. This seemed “funky” to Plante, so she reached out to her property management company, Forest Properties Inc., which is based in Cambridge, Mass.

"That’s when I was informed that they switched over to an AI revenue management software,” said Plante, a 35-year old physical therapist. “That’s generating your prices per month.”

Plante is one of what experts say are many renters in New Hampshire finding that software using artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms are dictating their rent prices. Nationally, the Department of Justice has reached settlements in the past year with at least four corporate landlords — operating at least seven New Hampshire apartment complexes — and one software company for using algorithms and private data to set rent prices in ways that violate federal antitrust laws that forbid price fixing.

But policymakers say the issue is even more widespread. In 2023, the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that algorithm-set rents cost renters $3.8 billion that year alone, increasing monthly rents by an average of $70. 

These new technologies, if left unchecked, could add strain to New Hampshire’s already tight rental market, experts say. Legislation introduced last year at the state and federal levels could fight that, but for now there’s building frustration and a lack of transparency about how the rise in AI is affecting renters.

“It’s really a black box,” says Nick Taylor, director of Housing Action NH, “which is what’s concerning to a lot of folks.”

Investigations and legislation

It’s normal and acceptable for landlords to use publicly available information — such as rents listed on real estate websites — to set their prices, Taylor says. However, the practice becomes potentially illegal when companies use software that uses non-public information to set rent prices in a way that decreases competition in order to maximize profit for landlords, the federal Justice Department and experts say.

Last year, the Justice Department reached a settlement with RealPage, a revenue management software company based in Texas. Before that, the department settled with Charleston, S.C.-based Greystar Management Services, the largest landlord in the U.S., to refrain from using the “anti-competitive” software. (Greystar operates six New Hampshire properties, in Lebanon, Salem, Londonderry and Merrimack.) Most recently, in June, the DOJ reached a similar settlement with Willow Bridge Property Company of Dallas, Texas, which operates a property in Bedford.

New Hampshire U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-2nd District, worked on the RealPage investigation while she was deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division under President Biden.

The settlement required RealPage to “end alignment of pricing among competitors” and cooperate with investigations of property management companies. However, it did not include any fine or admission of guilt.

“It’s insufficient, Because the settlement is really about one company with no penalty and no admission of wrongdoing, this is no way a permanent fix,” Goodlander said.

She added that any technology that allows corporations to collude on pricing violates federal law — specifically the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. While the law is old, it’s pertinent.

“Price-fixing for most of history happened in smoke-filled backrooms,” she said. “What we see now are new and sophisticated data-driven, algorithm-driven tools to fix prices.”

U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-2nd C.D., who as a deputy attorney general during the Biden administration worked on an antitrust investigation of RealPage, a developer of algorithmic rent-setting software, is the sponsor of the “End Rent Fixing Act of 2025,” which would forbid two or more property owners from coordinating on rent prices, including by using AI, algorithms  and non-public data. (Courtesy)

Still, because antitrust laws are so broad, federal judges are sometimes hesitant to enforce them, Goodlander said.

“That’s what’s motivating the effort to refine and update the federal antitrust laws,” she said.

Last year, she sponsored H.R. 6124, the “End Rent Fixing Act of 2025,” which would forbid two or more property owners from coordinating on rent prices, including by using AI, algorithms  and non-public data.

“When corporate landlords contract for a basic service — and that service is about coordinating rents and supply — that is the conduct we’re trying to get after,” Goodlander said. She added that the issue of algorithm-driven rent recently came up during a community event in Keene.

Legislation has also been introduced in New Hampshire. House Bill 1612-FN would have made the use of price-fixing software by landlords a violation of the Consumer Protection Act, and require the state Justice Department to investigate complaints of the use of price-fixing software by landlords.

The bill died, but Rep. Jonah Wheeler, D-Peterborough, one of the bill’s sponsors, hopes similar legislation will be introduced again.

“We understand very clearly these are very necessary [pieces of legislation] to protect tenants,” he said.

Other states are also taking action. New York updated its antitrust laws last December to explicitly ban the use of algorithm-driven rent-setting, and California adopted a similar measure in January. Most recently, New Jersey passed a law banning algorithm rent-setting in July.

No other option

The use of technology to set rents has already caught the attention of the N.H. Justice Department, according to spokesperson Michael Garrity.

“This is an issue the N.H. Department of Justice's Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau is aware of and is actively monitoring at this time,” he said, encouraging anyone who thinks they have experienced anticompetitive behavior or price fixing to file a complaint with the department.

Part of the challenge in bringing this issue to light is that renters often accept their AI-set rent, because they believe they have few options in New Hampshire’s tight rental market.

"We know it’s happening, but it’s a little challenging for folks to pinpoint who is being harmed by this and how often it’s happening,” Taylor said.

With two large dogs, Plante has very limited options for rental apartments. Despite her frustrations, she re-signed her lease for 11 months.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “These property managers and rental companies can really do whatever they want, and we have to either follow or move. It’s a really frustrating, helpless feeling.”

In part because of that, she’s now looking for jobs outside New Hampshire — and she thinks other young professionals may do the same.

Neither the property manager for Plante’s complex (which she asked not be named, because of privacy concerns) nor the regional manager for Forest Properties could explain why her rents were set as they were. They essentially said, “It’s the AI, this is how it is — kick rocks,” she recalls.

Forest Properties — which operates nine New Hampshire apartment complexes in Portsmouth, Manchester, Nashua, Seabrook, Goffstown, Salem, and Rochester — did not respond to requests for comment. The company does not appear to be under investigation in regard to how rents are set, and Plante did not assert that what the company is doing is illegal.

Plante has since reached out to various lawmakers and policy groups and found they're “aware of the problem, but no one knows how to fix it,” she said.

While updating laws to address price-fixing is important, Taylor said there are also policy decisions that could mitigate the impact of these unfair practices. Building more rental units, for example, will help give renters more options.

In addition, Taylor would like to see a “significant push to try to get more local community developers building housing.” Those landlords often have more rapport with their renters and are more willing to work to keep good tenants in their homes.

In the meantime, tenants like Plante are left feeling disrespected and disempowered.

“It just, logically, makes no sense,” Plante said. “[I] just feel devalued and stuck.”

If you’ve been impacted by algorithm-driven pricing — in housing or elsewhere — we want to hear from you. Reach out to reporter Kelly Burch at burchcreative@gmail.com. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Why do local property taxes make up the lion’s share of N.H. education funding?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Property taxes pay for a lot of important things in New Hampshire, in particular public education. New research from the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute estimates that Granite State property taxpayers pay 72% of the dollars spent on public schools. Why do they carry the majority of this cost, and what can be done to change that? Madeline Randall discusses how public education is funded in New Hampshire, as well as some of the new laws impacting education, with Ben Reynolds, senior policy analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute, and Anna Brown, the executive director at Citizens Count.

Madeline Randall:

To start us off, can you tell us how education funding is calculated in New Hampshire.

Ben Reynolds:

About $4.15 billion in total revenue goes toward public schools for education. The revenue comes from various sources, but the three main areas come from local sources, state sources and federal sources.

With that, one of the main state sources is its “adequate education aid,” which is about $1.06 billion. The term “adequate education aid” is how the state defines its term for education aid that was set by the state Supreme Court's Claremont decisions in the 1990s. For that state adequate education aid, the state starts off by looking at the number of pupils that live within a community, it sets a base rate amount per pupil for that. The state also looks at those student characteristics as well as other community characteristics to help with determining the aid, and then sends that money directly to local governments.

Madeline Randall:

What role do property taxes play? And how can that vary from town to town?

Anna Brown:

In addition to that per-pupil adequate funding that Ben talked about, local property taxes are a significant part of school budgets, so it is up to each municipality to decide how much they want to add to that state per-pupil amount for their schools. That's most of what you're talking about when you're seeing your local property tax bills. So there's a local decision-making process that goes into it, which is unrelated to the state property tax rate, which is set across the state.

Madeline Randall:

Ben, tell us about your recent research concerning education funding. What were some of the main findings?

Ben Reynolds:

One of the main things that we saw was that property taxes made up about 72% of revenue for local public schools during the 2024-25 school year. Really only about $700 million of that $4.5 billion comes from state revenue sources that aren't property taxes that are raised and retained locally. We also saw that the state’s share of total education funding has been declining over the last decade and that school costs have been increasing over the automatic 2% annual increase in the state's education funding formula.

Madeline Randall:

Let's talk a little bit about legislation. What happened in the last legislative session?

Anna Brown:

There are two big bills that are directly related to this. The first, House Bill 1563, created a three-tier structure for reimbursement for special education. We haven't talked about that yet in the school-funding formula, but the state does provide some more money per-pupil based on special education needs, if they're English language learners, if they're eligible for free or reduced lunch, and so on.  The state tweaked that special education reimbursement formula — that is important insofar as some of those increasing school costs are coming from more students needing special education. 

But particularly relevant to our conversation today is HB 1300. That bill in this upcoming general election and also in 2028 is going to have every municipality vote on a tax cap that would limit local school budgets. So this — as I said, it's already up to localities to decide how much more they're going to be raising beyond that per-pupil amount from the state — but this would usually get voted on as an option during the town meeting season in the spring. By putting it on the general election ballot, Republicans in the House and Senate are hoping, “OK, this will be a chance for more of the public to weigh in to say that we really want to limit local school budgets.” It remains to be seen if that is going to unfold – or if, as happened at many local meetings in the spring, voters continue to say, "No, this is what our schools need. We're not going to put a tax cap in place.”

Madeline Randall:

Why is New Hampshire ranked last in the nation for how much the state contributes to public education funding? 

Ben Reynolds:

Looking at the amount of state revenue that goes towards the total revenue for public education — of the total $4.15 billion spent, the state's contribution is $1.06 billion. In other states, that ratio is kind of flipped, where it's a little more of a state contribution than local. But when you also look at it at a dollar basis per-pupil, the rankings do change a bit. 

Overall, for looking at both local and state revenue of dollars per-pupil that go toward education, New Hampshire is ranked ninth. When you only look at local revenue dollars per-pupil for public education, New Hampshire actually goes up to fourth. When you pull it only for state revenue per pupil,, then we go down to 34th. So that percentage of the state revenue contribution, as well as the state dollars per pupil, New Hampshire on a state level is a bit lower than other states in terms of funding public education. 

,Anna Brown:

I would just add that in addition to inflation, some particular areas that are really driving increased costs are health insurance costs for school employees, special education, and in fact the state prorates some of that reimbursement for special education. Prorate means that it's not going to give 100% of what theoretically it might. But this also is worth mentioning as part of a historical tradition in New Hampshire of local control, for better or worse. 

Many legislators will argue that it is up to localities to decide how much they really want to fund their schools or not, and so some people see it as a virtue that there's very little state input, and that it's mostly on local taxpayers to raise the funds and make the decisions. That being said, there's also a lot of debate around the fact that some towns have much wealthier residents who have higher property values so it's easier for them to contribute more to schools, whereas property-poor towns end up with a much higher property tax rate to extract the same amount of tax revenue from their property owners. So there are questions of equity in the system.

Madeline Randall:

Do you think this could change in the future?

Anna Brown:

The first thing that I will say is New Hampshire, compared to many other states, has a shoestring budget, and as I mentioned, this is a bit of a choice. There's a lot of use of and reliance on nonprofits for other services that in other states would just be paid for by the government. This also means that a lot of these costs are falling on municipalities instead of at the state level. 

For this to change, I think that we would have to see one of two things happen. First, I think there would have to be a new revenue source to come in. And since Republicans in New Hampshire have made very clear that they are anti just about any form of new tax, any form of new revenue — with very limited exceptions — that would mean Democrats taking the House, the Senate and the governor's office. That would be an uphill battle. We could have a whole other conversation about that, but certainly a sweep of all three would be hard to do.
We do then have to look and ask what's going to happen next in the state Supreme Court. It's been ruling on the issue of school funding for decades now, and we haven't seen major moves in the distribution between states and localities. If anything, it continues to really fall in the localities.

At this point, we know that the state is actually seeking to overturn the Claremont decisions that are the foundation of a lot of the rulings that do put more onus on the state to fund education. So, I think that if you have a complete sweep and a change of party control, maybe you get a new revenue source. It is also possible that future rulings from the Supreme Court could really push the Legislature to provide more state funding. But if anything, it seems like the winds at the court are swinging in the opposite direction.

Ben Reynolds:

I think it's important, if you want to kind of equalize this ratio between the state and local contributions, for the state to provide more money. The state really limits how local governments are able to raise revenues — they are pretty much only able to raise revenues through local property taxes. This really limits local officials from finding ways to come up with additional revenues when costs are increasing.

We did see in the last budget cycle that the state faced some resource limitations, partially because of past decisions to reduce state tax revenue. The final repeal of the interest and dividends tax took effect in the last budget cycle. We also saw that there were higher costs to maintain existing services. So if the state, in this upcoming budget cycle, wanted to provide more money to local governments, then they're going to have to take a look at tax revenues, and the existing services that they want to fund as well.

Madeline Randall:

What would be your advice to Granite Staters who would like to see the state make education funding a higher priority?

Anna Brown:

There are many examples that I can point to in New Hampshire where legislators have been swayed by interactions with individual voters at public hearings, at community meetings, from one-on-one emails, and so at Citizens Count, we really do always encourage folks to be connected with their legislators. 

Our advocacy toolkit on our website has some tips — for example, how to attend a public hearing, how to write a letter to a legislator — and I would say it's really important to highlight the personal stories and personal impacts that you are seeing in your life, because — even though we love the work of the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute and it's so important to have that real data — it's also true that legislators are human, and they're going to connect with those stories a lot. 

I think that we also need to be ready to have a complex conversation. There's no easy silver-bullet solution to how education, let alone education funding, has been changing and is going to continue to change. So I think that we need to be working on bipartisan relationships and willingness to dig into this very sticky problem.

Ben Reynolds:

I think it's also important for Granite Staters to understand how much New Hampshire relies disproportionately on local property tax bases to fund all kinds of public services. Depending on how they can get state aid for public education, that could significantly reduce the upward pressure of local property taxes for other aid. The state could also provide more aid for roads and bridges, for public safety or for water and wastewater infrastructure, and those would also decrease the upward pressure as well.

Madeline Randall:

Thank you Anna and Ben for joining us today. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

We can’t have educational excellence without educational equity

By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative 

There is something different about back-to-school season when you have a high school senior. You know this isn’t just another first day. There are college applications. Scholarships. Financial aid. Graduation requirements. Senior pictures. Prom. Graduation. And approximately 47 moments when somebody reminds you, “This is your last year.”

Then there is the freshman. The kid who is walking into high school for the first time, carrying a backpack that probably weighs more than they do and trying to figure out where they belong in this new world of bells, schedules, teachers, changing classrooms and expectations that suddenly feel a whole lot bigger.

In my house, I get to experience both at the same time.  And somewhere between buying school supplies and trying to mentally prepare myself for the emotional roller coaster that is senior year, I started thinking about something bigger: What exactly are we sending our children back into? Because back-to-school season is usually packaged as something cute – new backpacks, sneakers, school supplies.  But underneath is a much bigger conversation.

New Hampshire’s public schools served 160,323 students during the 2025-26 school year – all with different needs, different families, different challenges and different dreams. And they are not walking into the 2026-27 school year from the same starting line.

Some families spent the summer preparing for college. Some spent it preparing for kindergarten. Some are trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for school supplies. Some are worried about whether their child will receive the special education services outlined in an IEP. Some are wondering whether their child will have access to the counselor, paraprofessional, teacher or program they depended on last year.

And some parents are quietly wondering whether they can afford another school year at all.

Here in Concord, the Concord School District entered the 2026 budget season facing a roughly $17 million shortfall. That shortfall eventually resulted in difficult decisions about staffing and programs, along with a 12.2% tax increase. The district’s website has an entire section devoted to the FY27 budget. But here’s the thing:  Children don’t experience budgets as spreadsheets. They experience them as people.

A position eliminated on a spreadsheet may become a familiar adult who isn’t in the building anymore. A reduction in a program may become an opportunity that disappears. A staffing shortage can mean a child waits longer for help. And when you’re the parent of a child who needs additional support, “we’re doing the best we can” doesn’t always feel good enough. Because your child’s education isn’t a luxury. It’s their future.

New Hampshire has spent years arguing about how we fund education. The arguments can get complicated very quickly. But parents don’t necessarily experience those debates as complicated policy questions. We experience them at the kitchen table. Can I afford the school supplies? Can I afford the field trip? The sports fee? The laptop? Can I take time off work for the meeting? Can I get my child the services they need? Can I afford to live in the community where my child goes to school?

And that’s where I think we sometimes lose the plot, because we talk about education as though every child walks into the classroom carrying the same backpack. They don’t.

LIke the kids whose parents have learned an entirely different educational vocabulary: IEP, 504, evaluation, accommodation, modification, paraprofessional, related services, least restrictive environment. For these families, back-to-school isn’t just about whether their child has pencils. It’s about whether the support system is actually there when the child walks through the door. When your child needs additional support, you don’t simply drop them off and hope for the best. You advocate, ask questions, attend meetings, read paperwork, make phone calls. You follow up and advocate some more. 

Maybe we need to stop measuring school readiness by whether classrooms are decorated and buses are running. Maybe we start asking whether our teachers have what they need. Whether counselors have manageable caseloads. Whether children experiencing poverty have access to food. Whether families can afford to participate in school life. Whether students with disabilities are receiving meaningful support. Whether teenagers have someone to talk to when life gets ugly. Whether our seniors can see a pathway to their future. Whether our freshmen are walking into a system that will help them become the people they are capable of becoming.

We cannot talk about educational excellence while ignoring educational equity. Every child walking into a classroom deserves more than a good first day – they deserve a fair chance at a good future. So are we giving every child what they need to succeed, or are we simply hoping they figure it out on their own? Hope is not an education policy. Our kids deserve better than that.

Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Tradition disrupted: How does the Democratic Party’s presidential primary decision affect N.H.?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Since 1920, New Hampshire has held the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, a tradition even written into state law. But that law and tradition were disrupted in 2024, when the Democratic National Committee decided to hold its first primary elsewhere, and it will likely be disrupted again in 2028. What does that mean for New Hampshire voters and upcoming elections? Discussing that are New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan and John Lappie, associate professor of political science at Plymouth State University. 

Rosemary Ford:

John, to start us off, what’s the history behind New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary?

John Lappie:

The first-in-the-nation primary happened more or less by accident.

In the 19th century and into the 20th century the presidential candidates were usually picked by state party leaders at a convention, and there wasn't really any participation by ordinary voters in the process. Primaries for president were democratizing reforms that began in the early 20th century, and even by the 1960s, only a couple of dozen states had primaries. But New Hampshire was an early adopter.

Our first primary was held in 1916. We became first in the nation in 1920 by accident, the Legislature decided they wanted to save money and increase participation in the primary, so they moved it to coincide with the town meeting. It was a way to save money, but of course, over time, as primaries became more common, and especially to 1952, when candidate names were actually added to the ballot in our primary instead of voters just voting for delegates representing a candidate, it became very influential.

Rosemary Ford:

David, what kind of impact do you think having the first primary has on the state and its voters? 

David Scanlan:

It's not so much on the state as the rest of the country. The thing about the New Hampshire primary is that it has always been for the average voter. Back when the New Hampshire primary law was first written by a state representative from Richmond, N.H., named Stephen Bullock who was a farmer who felt that the nominations for president should be decided by the citizens and not party bosses in the back room. That principle holds true today.

So, New Hampshire has had this process where, because we were first, the candidates come here. The voters have a longstanding tradition and culture of kicking the tires of the individuals that want to be president. They have a long history of not being afraid to ask difficult questions and putting the candidates through the moves that they need to become president. 

We've often heard from candidates themselves that have participated in the presidential primary that the primary made them better candidates. It has taught them how to talk to the average voter, what issues are important. In the end, New Hampshire voters may not select who ends up being the nominee, but they certainly do a great job of picking candidates who would make great presidents.

Rosemary Ford:

On July 24th, the Democratic National Committee voted for South Carolina to be the first state to hold its primary election in 2028. How does that affect New Hampshire?

David Scanlan:

New Hampshire and its primary results are unpredictable. The national party does not like that, especially when they may have a favored candidate that they think has the best chance of winning in the general election. But New Hampshire takes its role very importantly. It's a longstanding tradition that we did not take from anyone; it just began here, and we ended up being first by default. We have grown very strong roots from that point to the present time, and the service that we provide to the rest of the country in that regard is very important. 

It's an easy state to campaign in. There are very few barriers to getting on the ballot. It's a small state geographically and population-wise. An unknown candidate without name recognition or a lot of money can come to New Hampshire and campaign and do really well here, and they can finish in the top three. It certainly creates a foundation for becoming the nominee.

It really comes down to a different philosophy. New Hampshire's is, “Look, we're willing to vet the candidates. We've done a good job.” The candidate that comes out of New Hampshire is the choice of the people that live and vote in this state, and it is not going to be the selection of the party elites moving forward.

If you remember when the DNC began this nominating process they had a set of criteria to determine those states that would make early primary states — efficiency, rigorousness of scheduling, and things like that. New Hampshire literally checked all the boxes in that regard. What happened on the 24th was it came down to a debate, really on ethnicity. Should a state like South Carolina, which has a predominantly black population, go before a state that has a predominantly Hispanic population, like Nevada? 

Those two states were actually fighting with each other over that. It seems like the original criteria that New Hampshire did well in was just simply tossed out the window. Because of that, New Hampshire is going to fight for its traditional place on the calendar.

Rosemary Ford:

On July 22nd, the UNH Survey Center released findings that tracked Granite Staters’ opinions on prospective candidates for the 2028 primary election. Of course, we don’t know who’s running yet, but, according to their study, U.S. Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the favored Democrat candidate and Vice President J.D. Vance was the preferred Republican candidate. How accurate are polls like these in predicting outcomes for elections, especially this early?

John Lappie:

Polls are a snapshot in time, and those results match what people are thinking about right now. It's a long time until primary season, so the results will almost certainly look very different from what we're seeing in the polls right now. 

That being said, I think we can glean something out of it based on how high-profile or low-profile the candidates are already. If you're U.S. Sen. John Ossoff, Democrat from Georgia, I'm not too disheartened by polling 2% in New Hampshire because most people don’t know who he is yet. He has a chance for growth. If I'm somebody like former Vice President Kamala Harris, and I see that I'm not polling well in New Hampshire, that's a lot more concerning, because everybody already knows who you are, and that would suggest there's not that much appetite for her candidacy.

Rosemary Ford:

How are things going for this year’s mid-terms elections? Will voters notice anything different?

David Scanlan:

There are going to be some subtle but new changes in the polling places. There has been almost a complete transition from the old electronic ballot counting devices that used optical scan technology to two new devices now that use digital scan technology. We expect that they will operate better with fewer breakdowns because they will store an image of every single ballot and that will make post-election auditing a lot easier and a lot more accurate. 

There are some real benefits to this changeover. More and more polling places now are using electronic poll books for voters to check in. So a voter can show at the polls, have their photo ID scanned, voter information will pop up on the screen because the checklist is loaded into the devices before the election. Voters will be able to get in the shortest line – they won't have to get in the line where the letter of the alphabet that begins with their name always seems to be the longest. 

The real benefit is at the end of the night when it's time to close the polls — simply a stroke of the keyboard will give instant results on the number of voters that checked in, which party's ballot they took, and that information can then be uploaded into the statewide voter database, so it will be more accurate. 

Then we have a new accessible voting system in place for individuals with disabilities that is more user-friendly. There are also tighter requirements for voters now. Voters that are registering for the first time will have to show documentation of identity, age, domicile and citizenship. With citizenship, if a voter attests that they do not have their citizenship documentation, then they can sign an affidavit to prove that qualification.

ID requirements also have changed, especially for college students. College IDs now are no longer an acceptable form of ID, so students will have to show a driver's license either in the state of New Hampshire or the state that they lived in before or while they're attending school. So those are changes that voters should be aware of, and if they have any questions on the requirements, then they should reach out to my office or the local clerk's office in the town that they are living in while they're going to college.

Rosemary Ford:

John, what are your thoughts on the midterms, both here in New Hampshire and across the country?

John Lappie:

It could still change, but this is around the time of the year, especially Labor Day, when people start paying more attention to the general election. The overall environment is favorable to the Democrats. That matters more at the level of the U.S. House, where people usually don't know quite as much about the candidates.

I think they usually know more in a state like New Hampshire, where we only have two House members. But if you're talking about a state with dozens of House members, like Florida, New York, California, they tend to get lost in the shuffle. In those places people saying, "Well, I'm upset with this party, so I'm going to vote for the other party” —  that matters a lot more.

I like to say that New Hampshire is a true purple state. We've seen this over the governorships of Sinunu and Governor Ayotte — they're winning elections as Republicans. Republicans winning the state Legislature, even as Democrats have won the federal offices. Lots of people voted for Kamala Harris and Kelly Ayotte, or Joe Biden and Chris Sununu. That used to be very common across the U.S. but is still very common in New Hampshire.

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you both for joining us today. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

When does age become a diagnosis?

By Shamecca Brown-Granite State News Collaborative 

“You’re too old.” It’s a phrase many older adults fear hearing – not because they’re afraid of aging, but because they  fear aging has made them invisible.

I recently spoke with a 75-year-old man who is fighting cancer. Despite his age, he still travels, enjoys life, and wakes up every day with the same goal many of us have: to keep living. He wants to spend more time with the people he loves, make more memories, and continue fighting for his health.

But when he asked about additional testing for possible prostate cancer, he felt his concerns were dismissed because of his age. He told me he was even willing to pay out of pocket if insurance wouldn’t cover it. To him, the decision wasn’t about money, it was about having the opportunity to fight for his life. His experience isn’t the only one that left him questioning how older adults are treated.

He told me that after his last colonoscopy, he was informed he was now too old for routine screenings and that Medicare would no longer cover them. During another visit, he said his primary care physician stopped performing the thorough annual physical he had grown accustomed to and declined to include a PSA test with his routine blood work, explaining that Medicare would not pay for it.

Whether those decisions were based on current medical guidelines, insurance policies, or clinical judgment, the message he walked away with was heartbreaking: You’re too old. That feeling matters.

Healthcare is built on evidence, and physicians have an obligation to recommend tests that are medically appropriate while avoiding procedures that may do more harm than good. Medicare also has coverage rules that influence what services are routinely paid for. But none of that changes the importance of listening to patients and explaining those decisions with compassion and respect.

Growing older should never mean becoming voiceless.

The stories don’t stop at healthcare.

The man also shared the experience of a friend in her 80s who was pulled over after rolling through a stop sign. What might have been a warning or a routine traffic ticket, he said, instead resulted in her driver’s license being taken away. She ultimately hired an attorney and was able to get her license reinstated.

Every situation has facts we may not know. There may have been legal or medical reasons behind that decision. But together, these experiences raise a larger question that deserves discussion.

At what point does age begin to shape the way people are treated, not because of what they can or cannot do, but because of assumptions made about what they should no longer be allowed to do?

Older adults are not statistics. They are parents, grandparents, veterans, neighbors, mentors, taxpayers and survivors. Many continue to contribute to their communities every single day. They deserve healthcare that respects their goals, honest conversations about risks and benefits, and the dignity of being active participants in decisions about their own lives.

This isn’t an argument that every test should be performed or every citation should be dismissed. It’s an argument for respect.

The question isn’t whether someone is 75, 85, or 95. The question is whether we’re still listening when they tell us they want to keep living, and living well.

Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Cyclospora: What can N.H. residents do to protect themselves during the current outbreak?

On this episode of “The State We’re In,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan of the N.H. Division of Public Health talks about cyclospora, the infectious parasite that’s been involved in a massive national outbreak that so far includes dozens of cases in New Hampshire.

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda: 

For those who have missed the recent news reports, can you tell us what cyclospora is and why people are concerned?

Benjamin Chan: 

Cyclospora is an intestinal protozoan parasite. It’s not something that’s usually life-threatening, but it causes profuse, watery diarrhea. It can also cause things like abdominal cramping, loss of appetite. People can have nausea and vomiting, although perhaps the vomiting part is less prominent than with other types of intestinal infections. Most people with a normal healthy immune system will get better on their own over time, but they can have prolonged symptoms. 

If somebody thinks they might’ve been exposed to cyclospora and has on-going symptoms of watery diarrhea, for example, there is testing that can be done, and that testing can be important to identify an infection. There are treatments, antibiotics that can be given, that can help lessen the severity, shorten the duration of illness. 

This is, unfortunately, a relatively common infection that occurs this time of year. It’s spread through contaminated water and fresh produce. Usually what we say is that it’s spread through the “fecal-oral” route. That means it’s spread when somebody has cyclospora in their stool, and that stool contaminates water, and that water is used to irrigate crops in another state or another country and then the contamination then gets on the fresh produce. Then, when it gets shipped to somebody and they eat it, they can become infected with cyclospora. This is how outbreaks happen, and historically, this is a parasite that is known to cause outbreaks. 

We've had cyclospora outbreaks in berries and lettuce, cilantro and other fresh produce in the past. We’re seeing a very large increase in cyclospora infections nationally, this year — that’s what people are hearing about in the news. Thousands of cases identified in other states like Michigan and Ohio have led to a recall of lettuce. That lettuce [identified at the start of these cyclospora outbreaks] has come from a certain area of central Mexico and been distributed nationwide to many other states across the country, including New Hampshire. 

Melanie Plenda: 

Can we talk a little bit about how New Hampshire has been impacted by this? 

Benjamin Chan: 

Cyclospora is a reportable disease, meaning that if a provider or a laboratory diagnoses somebody with cyclospora, it gets automatically reported to the Division of Public Health so we can investigate, try and get some idea about whether there could be an outbreak — for example, related to contaminated food that might need to be recalled. 

We’ve been watching what’s been happening at a national level, and every year, typically, in New Hampshire, we have fewer than 10 people diagnosed with cyclospora. Currently in New Hampshire, and these numbers are on our website, we have a total of nearly 80 people so far, in 2026, that have been diagnosed with cyclosporiasis.  

Melanie Plenda: 

Do you have a sense of why it’s different this year rather than previous years? 

Benjamin Chan: 

It’s not entirely clear what’s different this year. We do know that this is an organism that can lead to large outbreaks, and we don’t always have a good picture of what’s happening at a national level.

The national outbreak was first recognized when another state identified a large increase in cyclospora infections that were being reported to the state health department. They investigated, as most states do across the country, and they identified that a majority of people being reported to them ate at Taco Bell. That led to a nationwide recall. That’s sort of how this initially has played out. 

As more and more attention and awareness has come to this outbreak, that has led to more testing. Factored into this is the idea that probably every year people get cyclospora infections — they develop symptoms, they don’t seek testing because it’s not regularly ordered, or routinely available, and they get better on their own, so they’re never tested, never identified. But in the setting of a large national outbreak, where we’ve done messaging to the public and to healthcare providers, it raises awareness of the fact that there was this outbreak. 

The more testing you do, the more people are identifying the infection, and more testing leads to more infections that are identified and then reported to public health so that they can be investigated. I think there’s going to be more information coming in the next days and weeks  around potentially other sources of contamination. But again, this is an organism that we know causes outbreaks, and this is the time of year when we would expect to see outbreaks. The numbers we are seeing are much, much larger than historically what we’ve seen in the past.  

Melanie Plenda: 

What should people do? Should they be avoiding all lettuce or fresh produce? How can they handle this?

Benjamin Chan:

I think there are a number of steps that people can take to protect themselves if they’re concerned about cyclospora.

It’s generally recommended that people wash their fresh berries and fresh produce to the extent possible. If people are concerned that a vegetable might be contaminated they can cook it — cooking will kill the cyclospora parasite. Also they should make sure that they have good handwashing, make sure there’s not cross-contamination happening in the kitchen — between cutting boards, washing the counters, washing the utensils. 

The other steps that people can take is just to be aware of where their fresh produce is coming from. There are, this time of year, lots of different farmers markets, particularly in New Hampshire, that are selling locally grown, fresh produce. There are companies and businesses out there that, regarding lettuce, grow lettuce in greenhouses, with much lower risk of contamination. There are products that are out there that people can take advantage of that are either locally grown or grown in ways that reduce or minimize the contamination, particularly for lettuce.

We still recommend and generally promote people to eat fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, but there are steps people can take to make sure they’re minimizing the risk for food-borne infections.

Melanie Plenda:

I want to thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Chan. All great information. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Attention and prevention: Staying on top of the risks from tick and mosquito bites

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

No one likes getting bitten by ticks and mosquitoes. Hopefully, it’s just painful and annoying, but sometimes these pests can cause health impacts that can be concerning. State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan, who helps prevent and control the spread of disease and promote the health of Granite State residents, discusses what the concerns are and what we should do about them.

Melanie Plenda:

Anecdotally, how is this season for ticks and mosquitoes? What do you know about their prevalence?

Benjamin Chan:

I think maybe it would be helpful to start by saying that the health department generally tracks infections and disease. We don't routinely track some of the vectors, or the insects like ticks and mosquitoes, that can spread that disease.

There are a few ways that we can assess how active a season we're having with ticks and mosquitoes. One certainly is by how common some of these diseases are that we're tracking, like Lyme disease for ticks and West Nile virus for mosquitoes. But there are other sources of information. Mosquito trapping occurs in certain areas of the state. We also can assess and have data coming in about emergency room visits for tick bites. 

I think generally what we're seeing, at least early in the season, is a very active tick bite season. There were a higher number of emergency department visits for tick bites in March and April than maybe we've seen in the last couple of years, but that largely has evened out, and the trend we're seeing now is more in line with what we've seen in past years. 

Regarding mosquito season, it varies year to year, depending on weather conditions — how much rain we're getting. I don't believe that we're having a more active mosquito season than we typically see, but some of our community partners, like our towns and cities, and some of the companies that do mosquito trapping in these local towns would have a better idea. 

Melanie Plenda:

To put a little bit of context around the prevalence of Lyme disease, last year there were about 1,800 cases. This year it's around 1,500 or 1,600. Not that people shouldn't be careful or aware of the disease, but how prevalent is a tick? How common is it for someone to get Lyme disease if they get bitten by a tick? Do you have a sense of that, or is there a way to quantify that?

Benjamin Chan:

It's a great question, and actually, there's not a great way to quantify the risk from any single tick bite. What I can say is that New Hampshire, including the rest of New England in general, is a high-incidence state for Lyme disease, meaning Lyme disease is found commonly in people and in ticks in our region. 

I think we go back to the idea of prevention — how do people stay healthy this time of year? How do people prevent getting infected with some of these pathogens? It comes back to preventing tick bites and preventing mosquito bites. There’s a variety of ways that people can do that. With some of these infections, there are treatments – antibiotics that can be given to treat an infection. So, if for whatever reason prevention fails, somebody gets bitten by a tick and they develop Lyme disease, there are antibiotics and treatments that can be given to cure the infection.

That's not the case with all of these pathogens, particularly the viruses. Powassan virus that's transmitted through tick bites and Eastern equine encephalitis, West Nile virus and Jamestown Canyon virus that are transmitted through mosquito bites are viruses for which there are no specific treatments. There are no antibiotics or antiviral medications that work, so somebody is medically supported until their body can clear the infection on their own.

Melanie Plenda:

Generally, what symptoms should people look for with tick and mosquito bites? When should they head to a health provider versus head to the pharmacy? 

Benjamin Chan:

I will point to a couple of different times when somebody should talk to their healthcare provider. The first is if somebody has severe or prolonged symptoms, the symptoms of a lot of these types of infections are not specific; fever, fatigue, maybe a mild headache, some muscle aches. They are all very common symptoms. If somebody is developing severe symptoms — severe headache and neck pain to the point where it hurts to move their neck, or family or friends are noticing the person is confused, or they're having other concerning neurologic symptoms like seizures or changes in their mentation and cognition — those are all warning signs for more severe invasive types of infections.

People should phone their healthcare provider or even go into the emergency department if they display any of those types of more concerning symptoms. The other time is if symptoms just aren't going away — prolonged fever, prolonged headache, other concerning symptoms people may be having that aren't going away — then they should be talking with their healthcare provider.

The other time when someone might want to be on the phone with a provider is if they have a tick bite and the tick has been attached for a prolonged period of time. There is a prophylactic or preventive antibiotic called doxycycline that can be given as a single dose that can prevent Lyme disease.

Now, the tick has to be attached for a certain amount of time in order for the Lyme disease bacteria to spread from the tick into the person, so that doesn't happen right away with Lyme disease. But if somebody, for example, finds an engorged or enlarged tick on themselves, it's probably been there for more than 24 hours. They can talk to their healthcare provider and get a single-dose prescription for an antibiotic that can help reduce the chances of coming down with Lyme disease. 

Melanie Plenda:

What should you do if you find a tick on you? Should you bring it somewhere to be tested?

Benjamin Chan:

Generally, we don't recommend tick testing. There are places that do that that are out there, but as a general medical recommendation, testing a tick doesn't necessarily change how somebody is treated — that's sort of a core tenet, if you will. Whenever we're talking about medical recommendations, does an intervention change how you treat the patient? And in this case, taking a tick and testing it doesn't necessarily change what happens with a person who's bitten by a tick.

Melanie Plenda:

Are there other insects of concern when it comes to health impacts?

Benjamin Chan:

It's a good question. Primarily, what we're concerned about in New Hampshire is really around ticks and mosquitoes. But I think maybe it's also a good opportunity to highlight the fact that this is a time of year when people might be traveling.

So when people travel, they should be aware of the risks in the areas that they're traveling to. While ticks and mosquitoes are the primary concern here in New Hampshire — particularly around these diseases that we've been talking about — there may be insects in other locations of the U.S. or of the world, where different types of infections can be transmitted through fleas. There also might be other types of infections that are transmitted through tick bites or mosquito bites that aren't present in New Hampshire. 

If people are thinking about traveling, particularly if they're traveling internationally. Generally, it's a good idea to be talking with a travel medicine clinic to see if there's certain precautions people should be taking to see if there are vaccines to prevent diseases while people are traveling.

Melanie Plenda:

What should we do going forward, in terms of prevention?

Benjamin Chan:

Some of these infections have antibiotic treatments, some of these infections have no specific treatments, particularly against some of the viruses that are transmitted through ticks and mosquitoes. 

A lot of this comes back to preventing the tick bite or preventing the mosquito bite in the first place as the best way to prevent infection and stay healthy. I also mentioned there are no specific vaccines for people to prevent these types of infections either. It really comes down to preventing tick bites and preventing mosquito bites, and there are a number of ways to do that. 

First, there’s avoiding habitats where ticks might be present. Ticks like to hang out in sort of borderline or transitional-type habitats where maybe you have shrubs and tall grasses, so avoiding going into those types of habitats can prevent tick bites. 

Mosquitoes are most active at dawn and dusk, so to minimize the risk of mosquito bites, people can avoid going outdoors at times of the day when mosquitoes are most active around dawn and dusk.

Then, if people are outdoors or in areas where there might be ticks or mosquitoes, applying an insect repellent to exposed skin that's effective against ticks and mosquitoes is important. A lot of people know of DEET-based repellents. Some people don't like using DEET, and that's fine. There are other options out there — more natural options, like lemon or eucalyptus-based insect repellents.

There are a number of other steps people can take. There are certain types of insecticide sprays that can be put on clothing, like permethrin-based sprays, that can help repel ticks and mosquitoes. It's important to do tick checks when coming inside after being outdoors, both on yourself and also your pets and your gear.

As for mosquitoes, one way of minimizing them around one's home is to make sure that there's no standing water — buckets or pails or wheelbarrows or old tires that have standing water in them — because mosquitoes like to breed in even small amounts of standing water. We generally recommend people walk around and make sure that there aren't pails holding water in one's yard as a way to try and reduce mosquito populations around someone's home.

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Chan.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.