Also on today’s menu:
Disclosing Medical Misconduct
Former Marina Manager Charged With Sex Trafficking
Sununu Helps Trumpist Colleagues
In 1957, Massachusetts — a beneficiary of New Hampshire’s flood control infrastructure — signed a pact with the Granite State in which the Bay State agreed to make annual payments representing 70 percent of the lost property taxes in the cities and towns where the dams and impoundment areas took away land, including Franklin, Hill, Bristol, and New Hampton. Yet, by the early 1990s, Massachusetts first placed a $300,000 cap on its annual contribution and, in the ensuing years, paid either no money or only a partial amount of what it owed.
Last week, Attorney-General John Formella announced a settlement payment of $3,477,195.30 from Massachusetts, along with a commitment from both states “to propose an agreed upon mechanism to ensure that fair reimbursements will be calculated more easily and paid to New Hampshire on a timely basis in future years.”
Franklin’s dam is situated just ahead of the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers that come together to form the Merrimack, part of a network of dams that provide flood protection along the entire length of the Merrimack River, including Franklin, Northfield, Boscawen, Canterbury, Concord, and Bow. Along with Blackwater Dam in Webster and other dams at Hopkinton and Everett Lakes, the network reduces the chance of flooding in the industrial and residential centers of Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire and Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill in Massachusetts.
Disclosing Medical Misconduct
A House subcommittee appointed by the Joint Committee on Oversight of the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services is recommending new legislation next year to require the state Board of Medicine to publicly disclose any provider misconduct or known malpractice lawsuits.
The subcommittee report, which was formally accepted on October 31, states, “The citizens of New Hampshire have a right to information that they need in order to make informed decisions about the health-care professionals that they ask to care for them.”
The subcommittee was appointed to make recommendations about the operations of the New Hampshire Board of Medicine after a Boston Globe Spotlight investigation compared New Hampshire medical malpractice reporting with Massachusetts. The Bay State reports malpractice cases settled in the courts and board actions against physicians, while New Hampshire only reports on board actions, not malpractice cases.
Former Marina Manager Charged With Sex Trafficking
John E. Murray, 56, the former manager of West Alton Marina, who already was facing multiple counts of sexual assault involving underage marina employees, was indicted last week on federal sex trafficking and child exploitation charges alleging 12 counts of production of child pornography and four counts of sex trafficking of a minor.
The indictment alleges that Murray solicited minor employees of the marina for sexually explicit images and videos of themselves, often in exchange for cash. He also is accused of subjecting minor employees to unwanted sexual contact and sexual acts over the course of several years, dating back to at least 2015.
Murray is scheduled to appear for arraignment today in U.S. District Court in Concord.
Sununu Helps Trumpist Colleagues
Governor Chris Sununu, a moderate Republican who once joked that former president Donald Trump is “f—-ing crazy,” has endorsed fellow Republicans Don Bolduc, Karoline Leavitt, and Robert Burns, who made it onto the November 8 ballot by “embracing Trump or his views more loudly and proudly than their primary challengers,” writes Annmarie Timmins.
Leavitt and Burns have defied campaign tradition by not pivoting toward the middle for the general elections in order to win over centrist Republicans and undecided voters, but Bolduc, who is challenging Senator Maggie Hassan, has changed his message several times. Before the primary, Bolduc questioned the 2020 election results. Two days after the primary, he said he no longer thinks President Joe Biden stole the election. A few days after that, he said he needed more information to be certain, and during a debate last week, Bolduc appeared open to the debunked claim that voters were being bused into the state.
Wayne Lesperance, a political science professor and interim president of New England College, commented, “It’s actually quite a fascinating dynamic to have Donald Trump and Chris Sununu, who I would argue represent very different perspectives in the Republican Party — or different approaches anyway — actually working sort of together. It’s unplanned, but it’s a complementary relationship for Republican candidates who had to tack very much to the right during the primary, and now are trying to find a credible way to the middle.”
Café Chatter
On ‘Halloween Memories’: What great memories. It really took me back. I never had a store bought costume, my mom loved to figure out a costume and make them for us. You are very right, things were very different. We had our boxes to collect change for, I can’t remember exactly what charity, but we always did it trick or treating. As we lived in the village of New Hampton we walked everywhere. My next door neighbor always made those marshmallow jack o’lantern treats. Any and all treats we received from her were homemade. No one cares do that now. The best is we had a neighbor who always gave out full size Hershey bars! Yum! I loved this cafe article.
— Candace Skurnik
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