The reports last week that there are no new outbreaks at the New Hampshire Veterans Home was a welcome reprieve for the residents, staff, and family members who have suffered heartbreaking losses over the last few months.

As a veteran, the situation at the veterans home was incredibly personal for me. That’s why from the very beginning of the crisis I have pressed Gov. Chris Sununu and state officials for transparency to ensure they were doing everything they could to get the outbreak under control. Unfortunately, it is clear that the governor and his administration fell short.

This reprieve from the deadly outbreak at the veterans home gives us time to mourn, to act to ensure that residents and staff at every nursing facility in the state receive the vaccine, and to reflect on what our leaders could have done differently to prevent and contain this deadly outbreak, so we can avoid such a failure in the future.

Early in the pandemic, the Legislature passed a bill requiring the Sununu administration to develop a plan to safeguard long-term care facilities. Sununu vetoed the bill. The governor has still yet to answer serious questions about what plans and protocols were in place to protect the veterans home.

Then, at the start of the outbreak at the veterans home, Sen. Donna Soucy and I wrote Gov. Sununu asking for a plan from his administration to control it. We asked Gov. Sununu to explain his plan to address the staffing shortages arising from so many infected personnel, how he would ensure that every possible protective measure and equipment was available to staff and veterans. We called on him to appoint an outside, independent expert or experts to fully investigate the causes of this outbreak and what could have prevented it. Gov. Sununu still has not responded.

More calls for transparency came from other New Hampshire veterans who wanted to know what Sununu and his administration were doing to mitigate the outbreak. They were also met with silence from his office. As the veterans home outbreak continued into December, it became clear that Gov. Sununu would not communicate with members of the Senate, New Hampshire veterans, or his constituents who were asking for transparency into how he was handling the situation.

Given the gravity of this situation and the governor’s silence, I believed that information should have been made public about what Gov. Sununu and his office had done to respond to this situation. I filed a right-to-know request in December to the governor’s office, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Safety. I asked for this information to respond to my constituents’ questions about what the governor was doing to end the outbreak.

While I wait for information from the governor or his office, I continue to hear from many of my constituents who said that Gov. Sununu’s administration had not done enough to support the veterans home staff, which impacted the residents’ well-being. I understand that the governor and his administration were juggling many aspects of the pandemic at the time of these requests, just as other health agencies and organizations were. However, our elected officials must meet a standard of transparency and accountability in any situation, but especially during public health crises. It is unacceptable that Gov. Sununu felt that those standards did not apply to him.

If we want to avoid another tragic health crisis like the one we saw at the New Hampshire Veterans Home, we need to ensure that our public officials prioritize transparency and accountability. I hope that moving forward we can come to expect transparency and accountability from Gov. Sununu and his administration. In the meantime, I look forward to the governor’s response to my letter.

(Lou D’Allesandro of Manchester represents District 20 in the New Hampshire Senate.)