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Belknap County Delegation Chair Harry Bean Proves That the Peter Principle Is Alive and Well

Background: Well,  Monday night was supposed to be THE night that the Belknap County Delegation (made up of all the NH State Representatives from Belknap County) to finalize the Belknap County budget for the next year. The “Biz” items on the Agenda: Approve Budget Review Committee Minutes of February 15, 2023 Presentation of Review Committee’s … Read more

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Belknap County Budget

The county commissioners are troubled by restrictions placed upon them by the delegation. They have requested to have limits on transfers within the budget removed.

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Belknap County NH

Faces Change but the Problems Remain

Every two years in New Hampshire almost all elected officials either terminate their service or stand for re-election. Over the course of the past 7 years, documented in this series, many of the faces have changed.

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Belknap County NH

The Hits Keep Coming – Part 3

If you are keeping count, this is the third in the series of posts outlining the problems which continue in Belknap county.

The county administration for 2018 has taken a more low-profile strategy in their attempts to take control of appropriating authority. On July 17, 2018, at the Executive Committee review of the budget, a little problem popped up.

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Belknap County NH

The Hits Keep Coming – Part 2

The 2017 sprinkler scam fell apart pretty quickly so for 2018 the Belknap county commissioners tried a more stealthy plan to snatch a few bucks from the contingency fund.

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Belknap County NH

The Hits Keep Coming

As the ink was still drying on the 2017 Belknap county budget a crisis arose which would require dipping into the county’s contingency fund.

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Belknap County Investigation

For far too long the Belknap County Board of Commissioners have been usurping budgetary authority from the County Convention.

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Belknap County Commissions – acting like Monty Python (“Run Away!”)

Yes, this is part of this post, where the emphasis was on how they left the County Attorney in a lurch – yes, she is an elected official but reports to the Commissioners (yet, the County Convention sets her budget). Yeah, playing politics.  It both rather amusing to watch this childish stunt (“Oh look, we’ll … Read more

Belknap County Convention / Tardiff-Gammon lawsuit – Where Commissioners put the County Attorney in a really bad spot

As I alluded to here, there is not a whole lot of love lost between the Old Guard style County Commissioners and the County Convention.  Most of it currently stems from the fact that the Convention has set the budget and has brought out a very little used RSA to lock in the line-item accounts, thereby limiting the power of the Commissioners to transfer Dollars on their own (they will have to get permission from the Convention’s Executive Board).  Thus, with this lawsuit (brought by Tom Tardiff and Dave Gammons as the election of Collete Worseman as Chair in a secret ballot vs a call of the roll), there is a need for an attorney to represent Convention. The logical choice would be to have the County Attorney, Melissa Countway Guldbrandsen, represent the Convention.

But, as you watch the videos, it is clear that the most logical solution is lost in politics – and it gets even better when the County Commissioners decide to pull a page out of the Michigan Wisconsin (yes, WI….thanks to Grokster Steve for pointing out my mistake) Democrat Representatives playbook (as when the latter group ran away to Illinois to deny the Michigan Legislature a quorum when the Right To Work law came up for debate) and scampered for the door (see Part 3) when the Convention started to ask about using the County Attorney in earnest.  And, yes, they were leering from the doorway until a question came up and a voice was heard “They’re in the hallway”.

Part 1:

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Guest Post by an angry Belknap County taxpayer

I have to say that I have been quite happy with the leadership of the Belknap County Convention this year in setting a “protect the taxpayer outlook” in examining and correcting the budget that the Belknap County Commissioners set at the beginning of the budgetary cycle.  Yes, I said correcting!  Even though they are elected officials, they showed a Statist’s view of other peoples’ money – spend it!  Even as they couched it in terms of “Oh, needs have risen so much but we have carefully cut to bone – and we are giving the taxpayers of Belknap Conty an almost 9% tax hike in their property taxes“.  In other words “screw you – we are taking your money for our purposes”.

That is, until what I consider the conservative wing of the Convention stepped in to protect taxpayers – as they are promised to do.  The running rise now is 0.3%.  My take is why is it always the taxpayers that are on tap to take the haircut – let the County Commissioners, County Admin Debbie Shackett (whose antics apparently haven’t  improved all that much since being Evans Juris’s sidekick here in Gilford – remember that wonderful Code of Ethics you and Evans  spent “hours” working on – only for me to discover you both had plaigerized it from Sunnyvale, CA?) and the rest sit in the barber’s chair….but I digress.  Here is the guest post from an interested reader from the Budget meeting for the County this past Monday:

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The meeting on Monday, February 25th was nothing but a disgrace. The County Commissioners, who believe they are all high and mighty treated the delegation and Representative Worsman with disdain and disrespect. They are the first to yell point of order, and make faces to the public. Their conduct is unbecoming elected officials. As I sat and listened to the antics of whom I now call the Three Stooges, I wonder how three grown men, can treat a lady, who always treats them with respect with such disdain. When Chair Worsman, told Rep Holmes he could not abstain from the vote, the stooges along with their cohort County Administrator Shackett, asked what parliamentary procedure she was using, and said it it Chair Worsman’s rules. I almost became unglued, because during the last budget session of 2012 when then Chair Millham, told members of the delegation they could not abstain from voting, not once but twice (review the videos) they never said a word. This just shows that they have no intention of being civil, no matter what the delegation does.

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