As he approached retirement from his career as a surgeon, Gary Woods slowly and intentionally weaned himself off of performing difficult procedures. At 65, he’d no longer do nerve repairs; after 70, he wouldn’t work with general anesthesia.
“I’d stop doing them one year too soon rather than one day too late,” he said.
Woods, now 84, applied the same principle to his work in the New Hampshire Legislature. After representing Bow and Concord for eight years, he’ll retire at the end of his current term in hopes of clearing the way for a younger person to step up.
Six of Concord’s 13 state representatives will not run for reelection this year, setting up a slate of new faces to serve the capital city.
Their reasons vary: For Woods, who represents Wards 5 to 8, it’s about leaving the work before he ages out of it. For Merryl Gibbs of Ward 9, health issues are the driving factor. For 77-year-old Jim Snodgrass, who plans to depart after just one term, it’s a matter of frustration.
Snodgrass, who represents Penacook, got in the race to honor the memory of the late Art Ellison, who held it before him. He sits on the Education Policy & Administration Committee, drawing on experience from his 48 years at the helm of Concord’s alternative high school, Second Start.
He became disillusioned, however, with the struggles of being in a Democratic minority.
“Losing all those votes all the time was very disheartening,” Snodgrass said. Republicans current hold a 215-177 majority in the House, easily steamrolling Democrats’ agenda. When asked about his accomplishments or specific legislation he’s proud of, Snodgrass said instead that most bills were challenges.
Snodgrass’s high-profile education committee reviewed nearly 200 bills this year, which he said began to resemble a full-time job. Coupled with some degree of powerlessness to advance Democrats’ education platform and increase what he sees as “stingy” state funding for education in a Republican-controlled Legislature, Snodgrass said he felt unsatisfied.
“I didn’t feel like I wanted to go through another two years,” he said.
Eric Gallager, who has represented Ward 6 since 2020, shared the frustrations of being in the minority and said he’s disappointed to be departing from the Legislature ahead of an election year where he believes Democrats could regain control of the House.
Financial pressures, however, are leading him to look for other work. Legislators in New Hampshire make just $100 a year.
“I really need to be finding a real, paying job,” Gallager said, and “since being a state representative doesn’t really pay anything, that means doing something else.”
Gallager said two of his bills became law, including one that ensures people can take their pets with them during emergency evacuations and one that repealed the state’s autism registry.
Merryl Gibbs will wrap her two terms making some movement on housing policy. After spending much of her career working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Gibbs said she’s proud of changing state regulations on things like parking spaces — a law passed last year that requires fewer parking spaces per unit of housing, which she said makes it easier to “build housing rather than building parking lots.”
Even as she leaves, Gibbs said she hopes to stay involved. She particularly wants to expand free school lunches, a policy that Democrats have been trying to pass for years.
“I’ll try to contribute in any way that I can, even if I’m not able to be a representative anymore,” she said.
Two other state representatives will leave, including former mayor James MacKay of Ward 4 and James Roesener of Ward 8. Roesener made U.S. history in 2022 when he became the first openly transgender man to be elected to a state legislature. MacKay and Roesener did not respond to interview requests from the Monitor.
Several representatives reflected on the political antics in the New Hampshire House and the many “personalities” that fill the chamber. Woods said he’s seen an alarming amount of misinformation and disinformation filtering into policymaking, especially around vaccines, science and health issues. He prides himself on working across the aisle on things like Medicaid work requirements, which he said was a harmful bill that he edited and voted for to try to soften the blow.
He sees the two-year term structure of the Legislature as an encumbrance on its effectiveness, conditioning lawmakers into a short-term perspective.
“They can’t think past the end of their nose … ‘We can’t tell the next Legislature what to do'” is a prevailing sentiment, Woods said. “There’s constraints, and that’s just the defiency, and that’s an overarching problem.”
Who’s on the ballot
Seven of Concord’s state representatives, along with state Sen. Tara Reardon, will seek a return to the State House. All are Democrats, hoping to keep their seats and potentially flip the House this fall.
Here are the candidates who have filed for office in each ward, with a column denoting incumbents. The filing period is over, but other candidates who wish to get on the ballot have until Aug. 5 to collect and submit signatures to the city’s supervisors of the checklist, according to guidance from the Secretary of State.
