Todd Selig - Land Use Change Tax Program Under Fire

House Bill 1515 proposes major changes to the assessment and use of the Land Use Change Tax (LUCT), and is scheduled for a hearing before the House Municipal and County GovernmentCommittee on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. in LOB Room 301. This bill threatens local control, raises significant concerns on several levels, and should be killed.

First, the bill provides that the failure to pay all property taxes on current use land within 30 days after the date of notice of tax will constitute a change of use, triggeringpayment of the LUCT. This is an extremely harsh penalty that, to our knowledge, municipalities are not seeking. The bill also provides that land will be considered changed in use and subject to the LUCT if the landowner does notnotify the local assessing officials within 30 days that the land has changed from one qualifying use to another. That is unnecessary and extremely harsh.

Second, the bill provides that if any LUCT assessment is not paid within 30 days after the due date, the property shall be deeded to the municipality. Again, this is extremely harsh and is neither in the interest of the property owner nor the municipality. Municipalities generally do not want to acquire land because of unpaid taxes -- they simply want the taxes paid.

The bill repeals the provisions of RSA 79-A:25 that, upon majority vote of the legislative body,allow placement of a portion of any LUCT revenues into the Conservation Fund. This is a tool that many municipalities have used very successfully to fundacquisition of land or conservation easements. It is an important element of local control and represents an option that should be preserved for municipalities.

Finally, the bill repeals RSA 79-A:25-a and 25-b, which authorize the establishment of the LUCT fund, an accounting mechanism that allows LUCT revenues to be segregated from the General Fund until the legislative body within a traditional Town Meeting setting addresses the use of that revenue at the next annual meeting. There is no reason to remove this local option for the vast majority of communities in New Hampshire with traditional Town Meetings.

            The disposition of LUCT proceeds as part of New Hampshire’s Current Use program has been a topic of robust conversation and debate amongst citizens within our state’s communities since the program was established in 1973.   Local control, however, should be preserved, and the changes proposed as part of HB 1515 are contrary to the interests of New Hampshire communities and the state as a whole. 

Todd I. Selig has been Durham Town Administrator since 2001.  After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University, Mr. Selig went on to complete a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of New Hampshire.  He has served in a variety of positions within both the municipal and school sectors including positions in Raymond, Laconia, New Boston, Hopkinton, and now Durham, NH.  In 2003, Todd Selig was awarded the Caroline Gross Fellowship allowing him to attend the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.  He was named as one of New Hampshire’s “40 Under Forty” by The Union Leader in 2005.  Mr. Selig serves as chair of the board of directors for the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies and previously served as a trustee and vice-chair of the board of PRIMEX (N.H. Public RiskManagement Exchange).  He is a member of the International City/County Management Association, a member of the New Hampshire Municipal Managers’ Association, and a member of the Laconia and Durham Historical Societies.  Originally from Laconia, NH, Mr. Selig resides with his wife and two daughters inDurham, New Hampshire.

Cory R. Lewandowski - Legislative Session Ends: The Good, the Bad and the Unresolved

By Corey R. Lewandowski, State Director, Americans for Prosperity- New Hampshire

New Hampshire voters sent a clear message in last November’s election that they want lower taxes, smaller government and less regulation by electing candidates who echoed and supported that message.

Our legislators deserve credit for passing a state budget that cuts spending by 11% WITHOUT raising taxes or adding any additional fees to New Hampshire residents. 

Each legislative session is marked not only by the individual legislators but also by the times. Given the current economic climate and the reality that our state and our country are still emerging from the recent recession, being able to pass a budget that reduces spending without increasing taxes to pay for the reductions is commendable. Speaker Bill O’Brien and the rest of the members deserve our appreciation for doing exactly what the voters sent them to Concord to do – reduce spending and cut taxes. After an arduous fight, the current budget includes a reduction in the tax on cigarettes. While this does not impact every taxpayer directly, we all reap the indirect benefits as this tax cut helps New Hampshire businesses stay competitive with neighboring states, thus keeping their prices down and enabling them to maintain and create jobs.

The House and Senate passed SB 2 that caps spending on annual budgets in cities and towns in New Hampshire.  Both chambers also approved SB 146 requiring state agencies in addition to their usual budget request to submit an additional budget that shows a reduction in their spending by 10%.

The House also passed CACR 6, a proposed constitutional amendment, which would have required a 3/5 super-majority vote to impose any new increases in taxes or license fees. Sadly, this is one of many pieces of legislation approved by the House which the Senate failed to act upon. The Senate also failed to pass HB 648, the eminent domain bill which sought to assert the rights of New Hampshire landowners against moves from foreign companies to take and utilize their private property. Both of these bills represented opportunities in which the Senate could have acted to protect and preserve the rights and prosperity of Granite State residents.

Perhaps the most notable instance in which the Senate failed to follow the will of the people is on the repeal of New Hampshire’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The House voted twice with veto-proof majorities to end our state’s participation in this failed cap-and-trade scheme. Unfortunately for the electricity ratepayers of New Hampshire, the Senate stalled, amended and watered down the RGGI repeal before finally passing it onto Governor Lynch without the amount of support needed to override the Governor’s expected veto.

Remaining to be addressed when the legislature reconvenes is the move to override Governor Lynch’s veto of the Right-to-Work legislation that was passed this session. This vital piece of legislation will increase New Hampshire’s competitiveness both in the region and around the country. We should encourage our legislators to stand with job creators across the Granite State and support an override of the Governor’s veto when this comes to a vote.

As we continue to monitor the votes in Concord, we must remember that the most important votes cast are those at the ballot box. Every two years we have the opportunity to assess the job performance of our elected officials. While the issues and candidates may change, what remains unchanged is the seriousness with which New Hampshire citizens approach this solemn responsibility.

Corey is a Windham, NH resident

Kelly Ayotte deceived the State Senate

By Chris Dornin

            U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte is so tough on crime she misled lawmakers about the draconian New Hampshire child predator act she wrote and lobbied into law in 2006. The former state attorney general told state senators the sex crime recidivism rate for all sex offenders was 90 to 94 percent. That’s according to the verbatim transcript of her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony on April 4, 2006. Dubious statements like that underlie much of the national media and legislative hysteria that demonizes this class of offenders. 

            Ayotte based her claim on a Canadian study she submitted with her testimony, “Lifetime Sex Offender Recidivism: A 25 year Follow-Up Study,” published in 2004 by Ron Langevin and colleagues. That was the only research she presented, yet it must have taken Ayotte or someone on her staff days of reading academic journals to find this single most damning report.

            Langevin followed 320 Canadian sex offenders first seen at the author’s clinic for evaluations between 1966 and 1974. The research team found an overall 61.1 percent sex crime recidivism rate. The same recidivism rate rose to 88.3, counting confessions in counseling and new arrests, regardless of outcome. The subgroup of molesters of children outside the family had a 94.1 sex crime recidivism rate over 25 years. That is by far the highest rate in any of the recidivism studies I’ve read or heard of. It is the number most often cited by lawmakers and judges.

            But criminologists widely agree sex offenders have very low sex crime recidivism today. Indiana sex offenders released in 2005 compiled a 1.05 percent sex crime recidivism rate in the first three years out of prison. State corrections officials said this figure showed “a great deal of promise.” The typical rate in state after state is around three percent after three years. 

            In a rebuttal to Langevin, Canadian researcher Karl Hanson accused him of using a nonrandom sample of people chosen for evaluations as part of major prosecutions and civil commitments. In the 1960s and 1970s, only serial predators faced the loss of freedom for their sex crimes. Since then the prison census of sex offenders has risen a hundred-fold, and the folks on the sex offender registry today are far less prone to recidivism. The Internet shaming roster includes teen perpetrators who lost their virginity with their teen victims.

            Hanson observed that Langevin used an unusual definition of a recidivist, anyone who has committed more than one sex offense at any time in their lives. Other social scientists define a recidivist as someone who commits a new crime after incarceration. 

            Canadian researcher Cheryl Webster went so far as to accuse Langevin of unethical conduct. In her essay entitled “Results by Design: The Artefactual Construction of High Recidivism Rates for Sex Offenders.” she said the Langevin sample was much larger at first. He ignored all the people who were purged from the national records after 15 years for lack of new crimes. Those were the non-recidivists. 

            Kelly Ayotte is capable of doing great harm in Washington. 

Chris Dornin of Concord is a former correctional counselor, a retired Statehouse reporter, and chairman of Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform.



NH Senate Kills Two Sex Offender Bills, One Bad, One Good

By Chris Dornin

The NH Senate last week tabled and thus killed HB 1628, a bill to encourage police to actively notify the neighbors whenever a sex offender is released into their midst. A dozen opponents, including several sex offenders, had packed the senate public hearing on the legislation.

In response, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 3-1 to kill the bill politely by sending it to interim study in an election year. A co-sponsor of the bill, Sen. Sheila Roberge (R-Bedford), voted to effectively defeat her own legislation after hearing the evidence against it.

There was no debate on the later Senate floor motion to table. Whatever infighting led to that outcome happened behind closed doors. After the vote, one senator said people were worried about the consequences to the families of sex offenders if neighbors got into the habit of welcoming every sex offender harshly.

I certainly expected an emotional floor fight in the senate chambers. Sen. Robert Letourneau (R-Derry) missed the committee vote, but he co-sponsored the bill and would have voted for it. Close split decisions are rare in senate committees and often lead to donnybrooks on the senate floor. All 24 senators received an email from me the night before the final vote with a copy of an op-ed I had just published in the Laconia Citizen. The full text appears at the bottom of this update.

I’m sorry to say the Senate killed HB 1484 the same way, a bill to bar towns from imposing residency restrictions against sex offenders. I heard conflicting reasons from senators and sources close to the governor for the surprising vote to table this fine legislation. It had sailed through the House and left Senate Judiciary Committee with a 5-0 ought-to-pass endorsement. The sponsors tentatively plan to resubmit the bill for next year.

Losing this favorable legislation was palatable in an election year. Only five towns have adopted these residency restrictions, and several have chosen not to enforce them in light of a district court decision last August. It shot down the Dover residency restriction against sex offenders as a violation of fundamental property rights.

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An Op Ed in the Laconia Citizen May 12, 2010

 " We are losing the war on sex offenders Community Commentary"

By Chris Dornin

But not the way you think. The stereotype of the mean stranger watching the schoolyard underlies the last two decades of sex offender laws. Ironically, these feel-good, knee-jerk statutes endanger the very kids they aim to protect.

State Sen. David Boutin (R-Hooksett) is sponsoring House Bill 1628 this spring to encourage police departments to use active public notice when sex offenders are released into a neighborhood. He filed the bill to please constituents hoping to drive all the sex offenders from Hooksett. Joel Dutton, a man on the sex offender registry, had been charged with a new sex crime. When Dutton made bail, his neighbors started a website against him with these and similar comments:

"You show true restraint by not beating the tar out of this lowlife." Chris Johnson

"I hope you guys get rid of the bastard. What a piece of crap." MTgirl

"This is an incestuous family of whack-jobs and psychopaths, and it makes me feel good to know they are going down." Steve

"Hang'em high and let the sun set on em. Only in a perfect world right? Haha" Josh T

Boutin echoed those feelings in his Senate testimony. "Late September of 2009 a convicted child sex offender heinously struck again and was charged with felonious sexual assault against a 7 year old Hooksett girl," Boutin told lawmakers. "Quick adoption of this bill and dissemination of notification guidelines to local law enforcement will go a long way towards preventing another sexual assault, with regrettable consequences for the victim, family and community, who all share in the burden of the pain."

There was much more to the story. The prosecutor has dropped the case against Dutton for lack of evidence. A neighbor had accused Dutton of molesting his own niece, who still lives with Dutton, his wife, and his brother in law.

States like Pennsylvania and New Jersey evaluate all their sex offenders for threats to the public and save active notice for the worst of the very worst. That lifelong punishment after incarceration can include mass emails, newspaper ads, wanted-style posters, and hostile PTA meetings. Those states also have strong safeguards against vigilantism. In the last decade dozens of registered sex offenders have been murdered.

These laws shame the very group of ex-cons least prone to do another crime. The recidivism rate for new sex charges against registered sex offenders is averaging about 1 percent per year in state after state. Likewise, the research says more than 95 percent of sex crimes are committed by people who have never been convicted before, usually the loved ones of the victim. Between a third and half of the offenders against kids are teenagers or younger themselves.

The middle school in Hooksett had a bizarre episode of active notice this winter. Jennifer Frank, a visiting detective from Plymouth State University, displayed student Facebook pages in front of the whole school. Some belonged to the children of local sex offenders. Then she posted their fathers' Internet mug pages from the state registry. Charles Littlefield, the Hooksett superintendent, confirms that these children were "traumatized." Steve Harrises, the principal, says he was "blindsided" by the assembly.

Something worse happened when Frank went to Fall Mountain High School. Steve Fortier, a school parent, gave this testimony at the Senate hearing on HB 1628. Fortier is not a sex offender, by the way.

"Many of the sex offenders whose information was shown (in front of the school) are family members of teens who were sitting in the audience," Fortier said in written testimony. "Because most youth sexual abuse is committed by a family member or someone else known by the victim, there was an even more troubling consequence. Many of the victims of the sex offenders were watching the assembly. This retraumatization, including the stigma associated with being a teen sexual abuse victim, was, in my opinion, not worth whatever gains were made through the assembly."

Other Fall Mountain parents have said kids ran out crying and stayed away from school for days. One couple has asked the Civil Liberties Union to represent them in litigation.

The hysteria sweeping New Hampshire against sex offenders has already reached a critical stage. Hostile neighbors drove convicted child murderer Raymond Guay from Manchester to Chichester to New Hampton last year. Along the way he stayed with the family of Pastor David Pinckney, whose parishioners gave the ex-offender meaningful handyman jobs to do. Pinckney told senators that men like Guay can assimilate safely back into society.

"I would welcome him back in my home," Pinckney testified.

Mobs gathered outside the apartment of registered sex offender Gloria Huot in Manchester a couple of years ago. People burned dolls on her wooden porch, according to news reports. Huot shared the apartment with another woman and her kids.

John Crawford, a former Laconia State School resident on community placement, was bludgeoned to death in 1981. Three former State School residents were awaiting trial on molestation charges. Rumors that Crawford was a sex offender had spread through his neighborhood before his murder.

A man at NH Prison stabbed two sex offenders in Concord and tried to burn an apartment building with seven sex offenders. The Maine vigilante who killed two sex offenders in 2007 was coming here next. After his suicide, police found a New Hampshire hit list on his computer.

Nobody can identify the very few predatory child rapists among the 2,700 mug shots on the New Hampshire registry. Judging by registry data from other states, most are incest offenders at low risk to commit a new crime. Some are husbands stung on the Internet without an actual victim. Some are drunken college guys who misunderstood a no for a yes. Some are former Romeos with 15-year-old girlfriends. Those are all criminals, I'm not minimizing their crimes, but they were well punished in prison. Few will recidivate. No one can tell if the folks branded by the registry have families to share the horrors of active notice.

None of the names comes with a clinical risk score. On line they all look bad. If HB 1628 becomes law, bullies will follow the children of sex offenders. Some will lose their jobs. Landlords will evict some of them. Some could become those mythical strangers watching the sandbox from the shadows.

Chris Dornin is a retired Statehouse reporter and religious volunteer into N.H. Prison working for criminal justice reform.

Work for Smarter Criminal Laws, Humane is Cheaper

By Chris Dornin

The New Hampshire House last week passed the finest piece of criminal law in decades by a lopsided 256-57 vote, ignoring the benighted advice in a recent editorial by the publisher of the Union Leader. SB 500 would let nonviolent inmates leave prison at or near their minimum sentences and start parole with a decent chance to stay clean, sober and crime free. Today large numbers of prisoners fail parole at their first and even second and third chances. Many max out and hit the streets homeless and broke. They soon return to prison, some having harmed new victims.

We as a penny-pinching, humane society can stop that revolving door by using half a dozen simple, research-based policies contained in SB 500. These best practices have lowered crime rates, prison costs, parole costs and recidivism rates in states like Texas and Kansas long known for being harsh on criminals. SB 500 gives parole and probation officers the power to bust a consenting person back into a halfway house for up to five days without a court or parole hearing.

That mild, but immediate, sanction should steer most ex-cons back to compliance without losing their hard-won jobs, apartments and new stake in a law-abiding society. If that intervention fails, the person would go into a halfway house for 90 days of intensive rehab. Today, about the only tool in the parole officer’s kit is a court petition to send someone back to prison or jail for the rest of their maximum sentence.

Under SB 500 almost all inmates would hit the street at least nine months before the end of their maximum sentences. That’s to assure the high-risk parolee the greatest possible support when leaving the safety of the cellblock for the perils of freedom.

A 180 degree change in vision like this was unthinkable even a year ago. But the prison population has grown 31 percent in the last decade, while yearly correctional costs have spiked from $52 million to $104 million. If future legislatures agree to it, most of the projected savings from closing selected prison units starting as soon as 2013 would go into community treatment programs and better supervision.

The Center for Public Policy Studies has forecast a prison population of 3,029 by 2015 under the current growth trend. If SB 500 succeeds as hoped, that census would drop from 2,878 now to 2,422 five years out. The Strafford County contract to house female state prisoners would end in 2013, saving $750,000 per year and $2.3 million by the end of 2015. Closing one pod at the Concord prison and the unconscionable, makeshift dormitory with 100 cots in a gymnasium at the Berlin prison would save $3.2 million in salaries by 2015.

The state would save another $5.3 million in cumulative marginal costs for food, clothing, medical care and inmate payroll from jobs in prison industries. Throw in the avoided $37 million construction cost of another wing at the Berlin prison if the state ever needs to build it, plus those future operating expenses. Some years from now the state might need a whole new prison, without SB 500.

Few pieces of legislation have emerged from such good planning. A team of consultants from the National Association of State Governments gave lawmakers an in-depth analysis of data culled from our prisons, jails, courts, probation departments and parole offices. These experts were assisted by NH Charitable Foundation and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the US Justice Department. Focus groups took input from victims’ advocates, the judiciary, defense lawyers, parole officers, the executive director of the parole board, prison planners, police chiefs, the association of counties, prosecutors, jail superintendents and other stakeholders.

The sponsors of SB 500 include Senate President Sylvia Larsen, House speaker Terie Norelli and key leaders in both parties who sit on the committees that handle crime legislation and pay for it. They’ve all shown tremendous vision and some political courage. The Justice Reinvestment Commission behind the bill met for eight months. More than a score of key policymakers vetted the advice of the consultants, including the three court chief justices, legislative leadership, several state department heads, the governor’s office, top managers from the Department of Corrections, and the attorney general as chairman.

The state has won $1 million in federal seed grants to fund the first phase of the Justice Reinvestment project before the savings kick in to sustain it. Lawmakers did well to seize the resulting once-a-generation, fleeting chance to save some money, rebuild the lives of offenders, ease some dangerous prison crowding, keep parolees safely out of prison and reduce the crime rate. That sounds almost too good, but it’s actually happening elsewhere. Do the math. It costs more than $30,000 a year to incarcerate someone. Community supervision costs pennies on the dollars we’re spending now.

The alternatives were ugly. California tried to jail its way out of a crime problem and built so many prisons it can’t pay for them now. Thousands of inmates are going free without any premeditated plans to manage them in the community. It’s a desperate experiment in wholesale dumping.

Chris Dornin is a retired Statehouse reporter working for smarter criminal laws.