Also on today’s menu:
Murder Suspect Pleads Not Guilty
Living Up To Flood Control Agreement
State Has No Backup Plan For Lost Rental Money
Anyone who understands the law could have foreseen the outcome: Belknap County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Leonard dismissed the lawsuit that former Gunstock Area Commissioner David Strang had filed against Doug Lambert and the other commissioners, ruling that Strang had brought suit against the wrong body. It is the Belknap County Convention that accepted Strang’s verbal intention to resign as a de facto resignation and removed him from the GAC.
It is a problem Strang has demonstrated since his appointment to the Gunstock commission: He made it personal. Instead of objectively looking into whether Gunstock’s finances were being mishandled — something many members of the county delegation had suggested — Strang angrily attacked the performance of the management team, leading to a walkout that threatened the future of the county-owned recreation area. In the process, Strang demonstrated that he knew little about finances and could not grasp the meaning of the financial reports he read. Because Lambert had accepted the fact that Gunstock management was doing a good job, Strang turned his wrath on Lambert rather than challenging the county delegation’s decision to remove him.
A lawsuit against the county convention would likely have failed as well, given that the delegation affirmed its decision in a second, regular meeting. However, there was a chance that a judge would agree that the delegation erred in taking Strang’s verbal commitment to resign — once the Gunstock commission had enough members to maintain a quorum without him — as a formal resignation. Even had that been the ruling, the judge likely would have sent the matter back to the delegation to decide whether to remove Strang for cause, which the delegation could easily have done. It was apparent that Strang was unable to work with others, and if bullying the management team was not enough of a reason for removal, his belligerent behavior toward even other commission members made it clear he was unsuited for the job.
Murder Suspect Pleads Not Guilty
Twenty-six-year-old Logan Levar Clegg, charged with the murder of Stephen and Djeswende Reid on a Concord recreation trail in April, waived arraignment in Merrimack County Superior Court on October 26, pleading not guilty, but the evidence against him is compelling. Court documents allege that, before his arrest, Clegg had planned to escape with a one-way ticket to Germany.
When police arrested him on October 12 in South Burlington, Vermont, on an unrelated warrant from Utah, he had $7,150 in cash, two prepaid Vanilla gift cards, and an “apparent Romanian passport card” bearing the name “Claude Zero” with his picture, according to an affidavit filed in Vermont Superior Court on October 19. He planned to leave two days later.
New Hampshire officials have charged Clegg with two counts of second-degree murder in the shooting deaths of the Reids. Clegg had been living in a tent in the woods near where the bodies were found. He was returned to New Hampshire to face prosecution.
Living Up To Flood Control Agreement
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has agreed to pay New Hampshire $3,477,195.30 to settle a dispute over lost property tax revenue along the Merrimack River caused by flood control measures put in place after the devastating flood of 1936 to keep downstream communities safe from future flooding. Former New Hampshire Governor John Lynch and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had started discussions on how to resolve the problem back in 2006.
The original 1957 agreement called for Massachusetts to make annual payments representing 70 percent of the losses, but Massachusetts capped the amount to $300,000 during the 1990s, paid nothing in 1995, and made only partial payments between 1995 and 2002. From 2003 to 2006, the Bay State paid nothing, but Romney told Lynch he wanted to resolve the matter, and the two states reached a settlement in 2014. Since 2015, however, New Hampshire has paid 100 percent of the lost revenue to the impacted communities without any reimbursement from Massachusetts, according to Attorney-General John Formella.
“New Hampshire will finally be properly compensated for the vital services that it provides to the entire Merrimack Valley,” Governor Chris Sununu said when announcing the end of the impasse.
State Has No Backup Plan For Lost Rental Money
Housing advocates are urging the state to develop a backup plan before a federal rental relief program ends on Dec. 29. The U.S. Treasury Department left New Hampshire out of the latest round of funding to support the state’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which has been helping pay rent and utility bills for low-income residents since March 2021.
A September investigation by the Granite State News Collaborative found that 750 to 900 people receiving rental assistance are residing in hotels due to a lack of available apartments.
Sununu blamed the Treasury Department, saying it was unfairly abandoning New Hampshire families without warning. Democrats, however, have said that the state’s slow rollout of housing funds in 2021 is the reason for the lack of more funding by the Treasury.
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