Sometimes I wonder if the people leading this state and this country ever stop to ask a simple question: How did we get here?
Not how we pay for it. Not how we study it. Not how we blame one party over the other. Just how did we get here?
For 30 years, New Hampshire has patched problems instead of building real solutions, and become experts at managing decline while calling it progress. I feel it the same way most Granite Staters do: in the mailbox, the grocery store and the gas pump.
Energy is the clearest example. In 1996, we restructured the market and bet competition would handle it. Today we buy most of our power on the regional grid, pay some of the highest rates in the country, well above the national average, and still heat most homes with oil and propane that move with global markets. Seabrook, our one working nuclear plant, came online in 1990, the last major piece of energy infrastructure this state actually built. The latest “fix” is another study and a roadmap for reactors that don’t exist yet. A family filling an oil tank in February doesn’t care about relief five years out. They’re paying a bill due now.
Food and lumber tell the same story.
New Hampshire produces only a small fraction of the food its residents consume, despite nearly 4,000 working farms. What’s missing isn’t another freezer grant, it’s processing capacity that lets local producers actually contain input costs and reach market.
We’re one of the most forested states in the country, yet milling capacity has shrunk for decades. The result is raw logs leaving and finished lumber returning at a markup that hampers a housing market already pushing median home prices past half a million dollars.
Bottom line: property taxes are up 59% since 2009. Towns cover most of their own bills because the state picks up only about a quarter of the cost. Low-income households pay nearly three times the share of their income in property taxes that high earners do. Energy and grocery costs show up on that same bill every year, compounding the effect.
This is not sustainable, and none of it had to be this way.
On energy, stop treating studies as progress. There are hundreds of megawatts of solar and storage projects waiting on reviews that take years. On food, build regional processing capacity instead of scattering grants. On lumber, tie incentives to mills that actually get built, staffed and serve state needs. Under all of it is housing: we can’t build our way to affordability if the people pouring the foundations can’t afford to live and grow here.
Some will ask what this costs, since Granite Staters already pay more than enough. Fair question. The honest answer is this isn’t about raising taxes or creating new programs. It’s about stopping waste on bureaucracy and patches that don’t work, redirecting how federal dollars already flowing through this state get spent and clearing the path for private investment that respects local communities.
None of those fixes requires picking a side. A solar developer waiting two years doesn’t care who’s governor. A dairy farmer who needs a processing plant doesn’t care which party controls Concord or Washington.
The truth is, one party didn’t do this to us. Both did. The same playbook for 30 years: patch it, study it, borrow against it, kick the decision down the road. In the end, it all gets reconciled on the same property tax bill.
This seat has changed parties four times since 1996, and the property tax bill went up every single time.
Recent farm legislation has continued directing the largest increases in commodity support toward big operations elsewhere, while local and specialty food programs received little to no mandatory funding. Our farmers need a representative willing to fight to redirect those dollars toward processing, input costs and market access that would actually help farms here.
New Hampshire’s federal balance of payments is roughly even in the most recent data. Most of what comes back pays for fixed costs rather than building roads, grid upgrades or processing capacity.
Nobody is defending a two-year wait for a solar hookup. Nobody thinks massive subsidy checks should go to operations that have never set foot here while a farm on Route 12 gets nothing. The disagreement isn’t over what’s broken. It’s over who gets credit for fixing it, and that fight has cost us 30 years.
A state that grows more of its own food, generates more of its own power, and mills more of its own lumber gets cheaper to live in and harder to knock off balance. That’s the self-reliance “Live Free or Die” was meant for.
Sometimes the solution is as simple as learning from history and refusing to repeat the same mistakes, especially when political gridlock gets in the way. We need to put sound policy ahead of ideology and approach this state’s strengths and weaknesses with the pragmatism that actually delivers for people. My goal is to bridge those differences, make real policy the priority, and give Concord room to build with a federal partner instead of a federal obstacle.
That’s the seat I’m asking for. Not miracles. Not pretending one election fixes 30 years of patching. Just someone willing to work with whoever will move the ball, and prove the things we agree on don’t have to wait.
Because the bills are due, and the only way they stop piling up is if we build instead of patch, starting now.
Robbie Mahrou is an independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District.