Chuck Robbins: Water Issues
The degradation of our lakes from cyanobacteria and milfoil is of great concern to all New Hampshire taxpayers, even if you never get your feet wet in them. As an example, the three New Hampshire municipalities with the lowest tax rates and a population of 5,500 or more are Wakefield, Rye and Wolfeboro. What do they have in common? Waterfront.
As a state, we have done very little to protect our waterbodies from the erosion of roads around them, which can contribute up to 50 percent of the contamination feeding cyanobacteria. This leads to poor dissolved oxygen levels, a killer for all aquatic life. To put it in perspective, this would be similar to me transporting you right now to a very high elevation. You wouldn’t die, but you would certainly struggle to breathe.
A summary of what our Legislature is doing about this serious problem hampering the future of these great revenue generators that you, the real estate taxpayers and tourist-dependent business owners, depend on is not much.
In 2022, the state passed House Bill 1066 and was supposed to direct the Department of Environmental Services to “immediately take action” and fund that action to fight cyanobacteria.
That was followed by House Bill 276 in 2023, which was to create a $25 million bridge fund addressing the overwhelming need to protect these assets. That fund reflects only three-tenths of 1 percent of our state budget. It never passed.
All that ever was raised was $1 million, which was combined with $1 million from federal COVID money. Currently, there is only $200,000 remaining.
Kicking the can down the road, the current Legislature has come up with Senate Bill 598, a study group headed by Sen. Mark McConkey. It is nothing more than a practice in “taking from Peter to pay Paul.”
At McConkey’s first meeting to discuss SB 598 on Aug. 21 there was no mention of any new dollar funding. At Wakefield’s Aug. 26 selectmen’s meeting to install a Wakefield shoreland department, I called out McConkey for creating a bill that was just an election-year performance.
At McConkey’s Sept. 4 meeting, as he was closing the hour-and-34-minute meeting, he said, “Wait a minute!” Then proposed a $5 million bridge fund while telling the Department of Environmental Services to cut $6 million.
Wakefield’s current board of selectmen fight me on creating a shoreland department to combat these problems and protect Wakefield’s 300,000 linear feet of waterfront zone, which produces up to half of our $23 million budget.
I successfully petitioned to install the state’s first full-time shoreline officer in 2016. He left from lack of support in 2024 once the two selectmen supporting this position were no longer in office. That position remains vacant.
Where are we now?
The party currently in power has cut out the Interest and Dividends Tax, which mostly only benefited the top 8 percent of taxpayers, while you, the 92 percent, see money lost from your town budgets and increasing real estate taxes. That’s a cost of $300 million a year.
They also created Education Freedom Accounts fo the benefit 7 percent of New Hampshire’s schoolchildren who go to private schools, of whom only 3.3 percent were ever in our public schools. Since its creation, that fund has grown to $51 million. House Majority Leader Jason Osborne’s wife took thousands of dollars from it. Guess where it’s headed?
The Democrats voted unanimously against both of these issues.
Wakefield has lost $1.5 million a year in state aid and local tax increases from these two issues. That means, for every 1,000 people in your town, you have lost $250,000 from these programs.
I asked Osborne, McConkey, Reps. John MacDonald (R-Wolfeboro) and Republican representatives Lino Avellino and Mike Belcher of Wakefield to sit down with me at a videoed roundtable and explain their positions on these two costly programs, which would be shown on local cable stations.
McConkey and Belcher declined. The rest did not respond.
Chuck Robbins lives in Wakefield.