Three of the candidates for the two NH House of Representatives seats in Peterborough, or Hillsborough 24, talked issues at a virtual forum on Thursday night. Challenger Chris Maidment (R) and incumbents Peter Leishman (D) and Ivy Vann (D) found plenty to agree and disagree on throughout an hour of questions presented by members of the NH League of Women Voters. Candidate David Pilcher (R) did not respond to an invitation to the event.
All three candidates were asked to respond to a ConVal high school student’s questions related to the End Sexual Violence on Campus campaign: whether sexual violence is an issue in the state, what the legislation could do to address that culture, how they would provide institutional support to survivors.
“This is a bigger problem than ‘The police need to understand rape victims are almost always telling the truth,’ this is about ‘We are citizens,’” Vann said, and that sexual violence needs to be understood as “an everybody problem,” rather than just a women’s problem. “Even the most enlightened of us has a tendency to discount womens’ voices,” she said, citing the “hateful, vulgar, sexual, violent remarks” female state house representatives receive regularly.
All three candidates agreed on the seriousness of the issue and said they’d require schools to share reported assaults with police. Vann and Leishman said they’d support mandating a course on consent in high school curriculum.
Maidment said he would encourage such curriculum to be introduced, and even earlier in education than high school, but said that cost needed to be considered. He also advocated for sexual violators to be prosecuted to the fullest extent and kept away from victims, and spoke to the importance of teaching young men and women about acceptable behavior in the workplace, at school, and generally in society. Leishman spoke to the humiliating process a family member endured while reporting a rape many years ago. “Legislature can make a difference,” he said, calling for more awareness of where to go for help, and a reporting system that keeps victims from becoming more victimized.
Maidment said he understands unfunded mandates to be unconstitutional. He recommends legislators “look at the mandates and decide whether it’s really important and fund it, or get rid of the mandate.” He believes that school districts should be funded for transportation in proportion to the amount of miles driven, given the same costs per mile from district to district. “We need better ways to get the results we’re looking for without coming back to the taxpayers again and again,” he said. He later called out Rep. Leishman for turning down federal grants for new public charter schools during the pandemic. In response, Leishman said he would do it again and stressed the need to adequately fund the state’s more than 20 existing charter schools, which receive more than double the amount of state funding than other public schools because they don’t receive local tax support.
There are disparities between districts that the current system doesn’t account for, Vann said, such as discrepancies in tax bases, family income, English as a second language students, and at-risk youth – and the state’s responsible to even out some of those differences, she said. Funding based on average attendance might not be the best way to allocate funds, she said. So far as transportation goes, it’d be better if there were more opportunities for walking to school, she said.
Vann and Maidment found some common ground in their discussion of any new sources of state revenue they’d support. Both supported basing the state vehicle registration fee on miles traveled or vehicle weight rather than its valuation, as is the current policy. They also both agreed that marijuana should be legalized and sold, but diverged on their vision of how the state can capitalize on it: Maidment envisions modeling the industry after the state’s liquor stores, which draw in customers from surrounding states. Vann said she envisions taxing it “to the limit.” Leishman had not yet joined the forum for the discussion at that point.
“One of the main reasons I moved to New Hampshire is they respected the right to own a firearm,” Maidment said. He said he owns several semiautomatic guns and carries a semiautomatic pistol every day. “New Hampshire is in the top three safest states in the country and has been that way despite not having these laws,” he said, describing recently proposed legislature designed to temporarily confiscate weapons under a “red flag law” or limit the ability to convert semiautomatic weapons to fully automatic as “feel-good.”
Vann said she voted for the “Red Flag Law” and would do so again for its potential to curb firearms’ roles in suicide and domestic violence. Leishman also said he supported all gun control measures. “As a gun owner myself, there’s actually no need for high capacity magazines,” he said, and “no need for guns that have been used for mass killings.”
When asked what he would sponsor or support that confronts the climate crisis, Maidment acknowledged the climate is changing, but said he didn’t believe state-level government intervention could do anything substantial to solve the problems associated with it.
Vann cited further investment in carbon neutral energy sources, local land use legislation that encourages active transportation over driving, and investments in energy efficiency for public buildings and houses as policies she saw as effective. With regards to the net metering expansion bill that was vetoed by the Governor this year, Vann said she voted for it because “the cheapest energy is the energy you don’t have to build a plant to produce.” Maidment said he would support a revised expansion bill where homeowners would receive wholesale, rather than retail rates, for their energy. Leishman had not yet joined the forum for the discussion.
Peter Leishman has been in New Hampshire for about 55 years and is running for his tenth term in the state legislature. He’s served on the judiciary, environment and agriculture, and election law committees, and spent the last ten years on the finance committee. As owner of the Milford-Bennington Railroad, Leishman said the winter off-season provides him with enough time to show up in Concord every day to attend to budget business. He is pro-choice, in favor of tougher gun laws and repealing the death penalty, and tries to be very accessible to constituents, he said.
Chris Maidment moved to Peterborough in 2017 with his wife and now has two young children. He said he wants to keep taxes low and maintain spending “where it matters,” protect rights, abolish the death penalty and legalize marijuana. In his opening remarks, he noted Peterborough’s higher property taxes than surrounding towns and his hope for a “fair taxation system that allows young people to move in.” Maidment is most interested in the education and finance committees but acknowledged that he may not have a choice in committees as a new representative.
Ivy Vann has lived in Peterborough 16 years, raised four kids in the area, and is running for a fourth term in the NH House, she said. Vann wants to capitalize on her experience and ability to spend time at the state house to take care of issues best executed at state level, rather than local, she said. Vann has served on the Fish and Game committee, and the transportation and public works and highways committees, and now wants to move onto the municipal and county committee because of her interest in specific issues likely to wind up there, she said. Vann is a certified urban planner and listed some of her previous pursuits, including driving a school bus, attending divinity school, and working as a children’s librarian and a news reporter and editor for the Milford Cabinet.