Windham doesn't need someone to go to Concord and fight for a political party. It needs state representatives to go to Concord and fight for this town.
Three things are on the line in this election. They aren't complicated. And they aren't partisan. They're just what Windham needs.
Strong Public Schools
Windham's schools are among the best in New Hampshire. That didn't happen by accident. This community invested in them — deliberately, consistently, and over many years. That investment deserves to be protected.
What concerns me is a coordinated effort — happening right now in Concord — to systematically undermine public education through a series of policies that individually might seem modest but collectively represent an ideological assault on the public school system that communities like ours have built.
The first threat is money. New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account program was originally intended to give homeschooling families and students in underperforming districts a genuine alternative. That's a defensible goal. But when income caps were removed, the program transformed into something else entirely. The families now using it most are families who already had their children enrolled in private schools — families who were never the intended beneficiaries. That's not expanding opportunity. That's a transfer of public money to private institutions with no accountability to taxpayers — and it comes directly out of the funding that should be going to Windham's kids.
The second threat is control. There is a proposal to implement open school enrollment across New Hampshire — an unprecedented, radical restructuring that nobody in Windham asked for. This isn't a modest reform. It would effectively eliminate school districts as we know them, destabilize local school budgets, and force towns like Windham to compete for their own students. It is a top-down mandate dressed up as parental choice.
The third threat is your voice. Repeatedly, our current representatives have voted to make it harder for you to have a say in your own school budget — pushing to replace simple majority votes with a two-thirds supermajority requirement to pass school budget increases. Think about what that means: a minority of voters could permanently block the community from investing in its own schools. That's not fiscal responsibility. It's a cynical attempt to rig the process against the very communities these representatives were elected to serve.
I want to be clear: I support public education innovation. Windham Academy and schools like it — publicly funded, publicly accountable — are a legitimate alternative for some families and I have no objection to them. What I oppose is using the language of choice and innovation to dismantle a public school system that works.
What I'll fight for:
Oppose open school enrollment and protect Windham's school district
Restore income caps on the school voucher program so public dollars serve the families who actually need help
Oppose any attempt to replace simple majority votes with supermajority requirements for school budgets
Oppose unfunded state mandates that burden local school budgets
Keep curriculum and school governance decisions with local school boards — not Concord
Local Control
Windham has grown more than any other town in New Hampshire over the past 25 years on a population percentage growth basis. And we did it our way. We're not a NIMBY community — we've welcomed growth and managed it responsibly, balancing new development with the infrastructure, schools, and community character that make this town rare and special.
What we won't accept is having that taken away from us.
New Hampshire has a real housing shortage. That's not in dispute. I see it in my own work. Veterinary nurses I work with who live in Nashua, have told me about their frustration with trying to buy a home in New Hampshire where they can raise their families. That frustration is real and it deserves a real solution.
But the current approach is deeply misguided. A one-size-fits-all state mandate doesn't account for the fact that a dense urban neighborhood along the Route 3 corridor and a residential community like Windham have completely different capacities, infrastructures, and needs. And when I look honestly at where the housing shortage is most acute, it's concentrated along high-traffic transit corridors — not spread evenly across every town in the state. The solution should be targeted and surgical: direct density where the infrastructure already exists to support it, not impose it uniformly on communities that have spent decades planning carefully.
Right now, Windham is facing proposed developments that would add thousands of new residents in a very short period of time — the equivalent of growing our entire town population by 10 percent or more almost overnight. These aren't projects that emerged from community planning. They're the product of blunt state mandates that treat Windham like a number on a housing quota.
And I want to be clear: my criticism here isn't partisan. A signifcant number of New Hampshire Democratic state legislators voted for these top-down housing mandates, too. That was the wrong vote, regardless of who cast it. Getting housing policy right matters more than party loyalty — and Windham residents deserve a representative who will say so plainly.
There's one dimension of this that has received almost no serious attention — and it should.
Windham sits on a bedrock aquifer. If you live along the Range Road, you already know what I'm talking about. You may already be feeling it. We have some of the deepest wells in New Hampshire, and well reliability isn't an abstract concern for many residents — it's a daily reality. Calls to local well companies about unreliable wells are already increasing. I've heard neighbors say it plainly: "I don't have the money to drill one or multiple deep wells."
That's where we are today — before a single shovel breaks ground on any new high-density development.
High-density development in this part of town doesn't just mean more traffic and crowded schools. It means blasting through granite. And when you blast through granite in an area already straining its aquifer, you risk causing real, lasting harm to the wells your neighbors depend on for drinking water. I am genuinely worried about this — not as a talking point, but as a neighbor who has looked at what's being proposed and cannot find a single serious surface water infrastructure plan that addresses these concerns or makes current residents whole.
I'm an unapologetic environmentalist. There are legitimate physical constraints to growth, and water is the most fundamental one. You cannot mandate density into a community and ignore the geology underneath it. Any development proposal for this corridor that doesn't begin with a credible, independently verified plan to protect existing well water reliability shouldn't be on the table. Full stop.
What I'll fight for:
Replace one-size-fits-all housing mandates with a targeted, geographically specific approach that directs density where infrastructure can support it and provides real incentives to NH municipalities that are able and willing to accommodate this additional development.
Restore Windham's authority to manage its own growth and land use decisions
Oppose state mandates that force high-density development on communities without the infrastructure or community consent to absorb it
Require any large-scale development proposal in Windham to include a credible, independently verified plan that protects existing well water reliability and makes current residents whole
Protect the schools, roads, and community character that 25 years of responsible growth has built
Ensure that Windham's future is decided by the people who live here — not handed down from Concord
Lower Property Taxes
Rising property taxes are out of control and right now there’s no end in sight. This isn't a talking point. It's the reality that shows up in your mailbox every year.
Let's be honest about how we got here: over the past decade, Concord made a series of tax policy decisions — reducing the Business Enterprise Tax, the Business Profits Tax, and eliminating the Interest and Dividends Tax — on the promise that it would grow the economy and ultimately benefit everyone. It was a reasonable theory. 10 years later, the evidence that it worked simply isn't there. What it did instead was reduce state revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars every year and the majority of the tax dollars that we used to collect left the state entirely (they did not get re-invested in NH).. And when the state stops funding the services towns are required to provide, those costs don't disappear. They show up on your property tax bill.
The Interest and Dividends Tax alone generated roughly $135 million a year for public services. Analysis shows that more than half of the benefit of eliminating it flowed to the top one percent of households by income. For everyone else the outcome was higher property taxes to make up the difference.
The math isn't complicated. Divide that lost revenue across New Hampshire's approximately 500,000 property tax paying households and you get $500 to $600 per household per year in relief that we're simply not getting — because Concord made choices that shifted the burden onto local property taxpayers instead. That's not an estimate pulled from thin air. It's arithmetic. And it's fixable.
What I'll fight for:
Restore adequate state revenues by revisiting the BPT, and Interest and Dividends Tax decisions that have cost municipalities hundreds of millions per year.
Let’s focus business tax policy on accomplishing measurable and attainable goals like encouraging small business growth, attracting start-ups and expanding high-tech manufacturing
Stop cost-shifting from the state to local governments that drives up property tax rates
Deliver real, structural property tax relief — in the range of $500 to $600 per household — through honest fiscal reform, not political promises
Support smarter funding approaches for public safety and infrastructure that reduce the burden on local taxpayers
The Bottom Line
Strong public schools. Local control. Lower property taxes. These aren't Democratic priorities or Republican priorities. They're Windham priorities.
Our current representatives have been voting against these things while telling you they support them and paying lip service to The NH Hampshire Advantage. Right now, what we’re feeling is the NH Nightmare of runaway property taxes. That gap between what they say and what they do is exactly the kind of thing I've never been able to walk past.
Windham deserves better. That's the whole agenda. Plain and simple.