by Ed Naile, Chairman
Finally, The New Hampshire Municipal Association, aka, The Local Government Center, may get what’s coming to it for skimming $100 million from municipal insurance contracts, some of which was diverted for their own payroll enhancement.
Self-dealing with taxpayer money and playing politics have caught up with the weasel nest in Concord that was set up in 1941 to support MUNICIPALITIES. NHMA sold out to and added to its Board of Directors, SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS in 2003.
And as with almost anything involving the public education industry, it was then time to skim a little off the top and re-interpret words and statutes in order to feather their own fat nests.
How are diverse public school and municipal issues served by a BOD made up of selectmen, basically volunteers, and overpaid, under supervised, edu-speaking, contracted school superintendents?
I have not trusted this non-profit monopoly for almost as long as I have been involved in municipal politics.
My eyes were opened when I sat on a Board of Selectmen along with an employee of NHMA’s Property Liability Trust who would cook our Town of Deering books year after year until I was elected and began the long process of straightening them out.
I call those three years, My Fifteen Minutes of Hate. Everyone was mad at me. But I learned how the system protects itself.
It is time to break up NHMA, or whatever it wants to call itself, and let municipalities bid out their insurance as a group.
Just like NHMA tried recently to change the law that prevents its self dealing, it should be a simple matter for the Legislature to draft legislation to eliminate this organization. After all, they are a creature of the Legislature.