Ever since the resurgence of BLM 5 years ago, many people have retooled the saying in the image of their own important issues.
“(Your passionate issue here) matters.”
Look no further than HB446, which is fortunately on its way to the Corner Office right now. That bill makes non-academic surveys opt-in by parental consent. Most responsible parents and regular intelligent people recognize the importance, though the enemy camp fought that one, tooth and nail, in the legislature because grant money was yoked to participation rates. Go a few years back in time, and the same battle was fought over vax issues.
While not a matter of opting in or out, SB225 was about property owners being given proper notice when their city/town has the whole community appraised for updated values. While introducing it to the Senate, Kevin Avard addressed the element of surprise, as the notice sent out in Nashua had a finite and very small window of time to take action. He cited common examples of how one might reasonably not read their mail in time for the required action item’s deadline. This is akin to an opt-out situation. Rather than replaying the video multiple times to accurately quote him, I will just place a sound byte here.
Back to HB 446, Victoria Sullivan and various others made the same argument in the Senate chamber about parents being slammed with the burden of gathering satisfactory and reliable intel in time to opt their kids out of a non-academic survey.
Let’s revisit the summer of 2023, just a few months before the last city election, which for Nashua also included the election of a mayor. I already mentioned community power being opt-out in an older article here, but an astute, attentive, and alert Ward 3 resident just called attention to this troublesome article. If you’re not one to click on links or read NHPR, that’s understandable, so I’ll give you the nutshell version. Community Power has lost $8M.
There are two takeaways, dear readers, one for Nashua voters and the other for ALL Granite Staters. I’ll start with the latter by emphasizing the importance of the burden of making the sale being placed on the salesperson. That also goes for Senator Twitley, New Futures, and the rest of their ilk that want to passively link the databases of kids on Mass Health with kids eligible for welfare school lunch. If the lazy parents want (more) free stuff badly enough, they will do the work to make the arrangements, but let’s get back to the Nashua takeaway. This November’s city election unfortunately does not include the mayor, but voters may want to find out if their aldermen supported Community Power in important roll-call votes and if they supported it being opt-out, now that $8M has been lost. That’s a huge number, almost twice the $4.5M in ESSER funds that Alderman Dowd lost track of and kept secret until AFTER the last election. Make the Donchess Donkeys wear their stain of stupidity on full display before the election.
