Two Republican incumbents vying to continue representing Pittsfield and Chichester in the State House will face off against two challengers who will appear on the ballot as Independents.
State Reps. Cyril Aures and Clayton Wood have represented residents in Merrimack County District 13 since 2022. They have prioritized low taxation and low government spending — interventions they hope will relieve the financial pressure felt by many Granite Staters. Aures and Wood also highlighted the school administrative unit system as a burden on taxpayers, and suggested consolidating supervision in order to reduce spending.
The two Independents, Becky Berk and Paul Twomey, say they joined the race to present an alternative to Aures and Wood, who were running uncontested. While Berk rooted her campaign in a desire to deliver change for the residents of Pittsfield and Chichester, Twomey was more practical; he said he began his bid primarily because he believed residents should have an option beyond the incumbents, and no one else seemed interested in running.
“I just felt that in the world we live in, people needed to have an option, and there was going to be no option on the ballot,” he said. “I had some very different plans for the rest of my life that didn’t involve sitting in the legislature for two years.”
In a race with an empty Democratic ticket, Berk said she believes that civility must prevail over political hyper-partisanship. Aures, for his part, alleged that Berk and Twomey are Democrats in Independents’ clothing.
School funding and property taxes
Aures said that he and his challengers clearly have fundamentally different views on taxation.
“Their philosophy is tax more and spend more, which means they have to take more money out of my constituents’ pockets, in order to spend the money on programs that they like,” Aures said. “My take, and the Republican, the conservative take is spend less, and therefore tax less.”
With this guiding principle, he said, his “current constituents will continue to keep more of their hard-earned money.”
Aures and Wood both pinpointed school-related property taxes as a way to ease residents’ tax burdens and pointed to House Bill 1300, which created a statewide referendum allowing residents to cap school budget growth.
“I would like to do more with the schools, and it goes hand in hand with lowering the taxes,” Wood said. “We’re spending way too much money on the schools, and … that’s how we got the HB 1300, giving the voters a chance to slow things down.”
They also highlighted SAU consolidation as a priority if they win reelection. Wood said the reasoning is clear, linking consolidation to cost-cutting.
“I look at the schools as a business. I get into a fight almost immediately because it’s clear why we’re in trouble, because nobody wants to look at this as a business,” Wood said. “They want to look at it as a school, so they’re never going to get to a solution.”
For Berk, cutting business taxes, which Aures supported, is ultimately not in the interest of voters because it only makes local property tax burdens worse.
“People who are working one, two, three jobs to try to make ends meet in a town like Pittsfield are now having to continue to work even harder because a lot of the expenses that were covered by the interest and dividends tax now trickle down to the local property tax,” Berk said.
Berk acknowledged that New Hampshire’s education system is imperfect, but she said that the state’s property tax-based approach to funding schools is the “root cause of the whole mess.”
“It’s so much easier to take, I would say, the lazy man’s route, and just slap a property cap, which is truly a cap on local school districts,” Berk said.
Twomey voiced a similar concern.
“When you use the property tax to fund public education, what you’re doing is pitting your children against your home, and that’s a choice that nobody wants to make, and nobody should have to make,” he said.
Party lines
Aures argued that “there are no Independents in New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire is a two-party system. You can say you’re an Independent, but if you don’t pick one party or the other, then you have no say in what happens in Concord, and therefore, you cannot help your constituents, because you have no voice,” he said.
Berk resists categorization. She said she ran as an Independent because she wanted to avoid political partisanship.
“I’m really tired of the back-and-forth smear campaigns between the two major parties,” she said. “One of my key platforms is to reintroduce civility back into the political process. I think we’ve lost that along the way. I expect hard questions. I expect tough conversations, but I insist on civility.”
Though she and Twomey are campaigning together, she said that they also maintain ideological independence.
“Paul and I are not in lockstep with each other on every single issue,” she said. “We are independent, so we’re independent from the major political party platforms, and we’re independent from each other.”
Merrimack District 13 is a two-seat district. Though the two pairs are campaigning together, voters are free to choose any two of the four candidates.
Twomey said that if voters “had a choice between me and [Berk], you should go for her, because she’s amazing.”
Of his own journey in politics, he said he has arrived at a new outlook.
“I didn’t intend to get elected. I just wanted there to be a choice out there,” he said. “I’ve since changed my mind and decided that it probably is important — but I don’t know if it’s important in a 400-person legislature for anybody to get elected — but I decided that the challenges of being a legislator are ones that I will be happy embracing.”
