Several weeks before the general election, when he hopes to fend off a Democratic challenger, state Sen. Tim Lang shared a stage with a political opposite at a non-partisan gathering in Concord.
Three days of deliberation at the New Hampshire Forum Civic Assembly, where Lang spoke alongside Democratic Sen. Tara Reardon, resulted in six housing policy recommendations ranging from increasing the supply of manufactured and pre-built homes to expanding water, sewer and public transportation infrastructure to support affordable housing.
Lang said these directives represent a commitment to bipartisanship that he shares.
“There are plenty of policies where we can find consensus, and sometimes even if we can’t find consensus, we can still make the law better by listening to each other, by making some changes after hearing each other,” he told the Monitor.
His opponent in the race for Senate District 2, Kurt Webber, sees him in a different light.
The tenor of one of the Republican senator’s recent social media posts about state funding for public education struck Webber as divisive: “Facts on the right, fiction on the left,” Lang wrote on Facebook.
“That type of language is not constructive,” Webber said.
Two ratings of Lang’s tenure as state senator concern Webber, as well: Citizens Count, the non-partisan civic engagement nonprofit, recorded Lang voting with his party 99% of the time, and the libertarian coalition New Hampshire Liberty Alliance gives Lang an 80% approval rating.
“I don’t think he’s a card-carrying Free Stater, but boy, he sure votes with them a lot,” Webber told the Monitor. “And one of the biggest issues I have with the Free Staters is their attitude towards education. When you see what they have done and they’re trying to do, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion other than they’re trying to destroy public education.”
Webber told the Monitor he’s observed an exodus of integrity, civility and compromise from politics, and that a strong sense of service compelled him to run.
Although he’s a political outsider, Webber — a Scouts leader of 30 years, an active Rotarian, retired community college teacher and former volunteer football coach — is far from an unknown figure in the Lakes Region, where he’s running for office. Webber previously served 23 years in the U.S. Army and founded the Patriot Resilient Leader Institute, which, since 2013, has offered therapeutic retreats for veterans and first responders at Camp Resilience in Gilford.
For all their differences, Lang also views this race, his bid for a third term as state senator, as a “continuation of service.”
He told the Monitor he entered state politics “just to do good governance,” to manage the budget and the state’s tax policy and to ensure state agencies aren’t hampered by outdated rules.
If voters return him to his Senate seat in November, Lang said reviewing the state’s education funding model will be his priority. He rejects the notion that the state has reduced its funding for education as “ridiculous” but said that “as revenues allow, I think we can help municipalities with the cost of education.”
A broad-based income or sales tax is out of the question for Lang, but he suggested that given the state’s most recent revenue report, which shows actual revenue outpacing planned revenue, adjustments to education funding can be made “within the revenue streams we have by just being smart.”
Webber said he also opposes an income or sales tax. In 2022, he campaigned for the House of Representatives as an independent, and he describes himself now as a “moderate Democrat” and “fiscal conservative.”
He is a proponent, however, of reinstituting the state’s Interest and Dividends Tax, repealed after the 2024 tax year. About 8% of tax filers paid that tax in 2021, the last year it existed in full force before being progressively phased out. That fiscal year, which ran from July 2020 to June 2021, the tax returned $120.7 million in revenue to the state.
By recovering that revenue and reinstituting an income cap on Education Freedom Accounts, New Hampshire’s school choice vouchers, Webber believes the state can make strides towards more fairly funding public education.
“In the past 10 years, $3 billion in costs have been downshifted from the state to the towns, and the property taxes — we have the fourth-highest property taxes in the nation, and that needs to change,” Webber said. “Lang has been complicit in that because even before he was a senator, he had a couple terms as a state rep. I think he’s part of the problem, and I want to be part of the solution.”
Webber also said he disagrees with open enrollment, a policy that would have allowed students to attend any public school of their choosing, and with Lang’s proposed framework for it. Lang reworked the proposal’s original funding model so that state adequacy funds would follow students from one district to the other, rather than relying on sending districts to pay tuition directly to receiving districts.
With education as with cannabis, where Lang engineered a proposed model for legalization that would have given state liquor stores the license to sell recreational marijuana, the senator believes he possesses the open-mindedness to listen to opposing viewpoints and return to the drawing board when needed.
Lang said he met with between 30 and 40 school superintendents and principals before proposing his plan for funding open enrollment. As far as his voting record is concerned, he said much of the negotiation he does happens in committee, before a bill is even subject to a vote.
“I listened to what they said in the areas that I could move the [open enrollment] bill, and I agreed that we could find compromise. I adjusted that bill significantly. I think that ability to have conversation, not be intractable in your position, is extremely important,” Lang said. “You’re going to see the left vote with the left and the right vote with the right on those partisan heavy issues. That doesn’t mean we still don’t find compromise.”
