Lancaster Farming
Steve Taylor, New England Correspondent
CONCORD, N.H. — Led by farmers and sportsmen, close to 300 citizens at a hearing gave a near-unanimous thumbs down to legislation aimed at creating a new supersized New Hampshire state agency that would combine the departments of agriculture, fish and game, forestry, parks and cultural resources.
The controversial measure had quietly passed the state senate earlier in the current session, but when it came up for a hearing before the House committee on executive departments and administration April 23 it hit a buzz saw of opposition.
Testimony was so strong that the committee subsequently recommended unanimously it be killed when it comes up for a floor vote later this month. It is very rare for a solid committee vote to be overturned by the full 400-member House.
Gov. John Lynch had put forth the idea of merging the departments in his budget address in February, calling it a “possible efficiency” that should be studied for possible implementation by 2012-2013. An aide, Pamela Walsh, at the House committee hearing tried to defend the proposal, saying there was “no predetermined view of an outcome” in Lynch’s suggestion.
But things apparently went off the tracks with submission of Senate Bill 132, which called for a commission to “develop implementation plans” for the merger of the five agencies. It passed on a voice vote in the upper chamber before affected constituencies realized what was going on.
When it arrived on the House side word soon got out about what SB 132 contained, however, and groups such as the New Hampshire Farm Bureau and various hunting and fishing organizations sprang into action.
State Farm Bureau president Jeff Holmes, a Langdon dairyman, alerted each county Farm Bureau via his regular Friday email legislative bulletin and telephoned follow-ups. Soon Farm Bureau was distributing “Purge the Merge” buttons for opponents of SB 132 to wear at the House committee hearing.
Groups ranging from farmers’ markets to “localvore” food enthusiasts joined the Farm Bureau crusade alongside sportsmen and other recreation interests, and on the day of the hearing so many people showed up that the hearing had to be shifted from the regular committee meeting room to the 400-seat Representatives Hall.
Testimony at the hearing was passionate and, in the view of several committee members, reasonable and convincing. Some said they had received more calls in opposition to SB 132 than on any other bill in their legislative careers. And letters of opposition came from near and far, including from the president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture Ron Sparks of Alabama.
Arguments against the measure included the unlikelihood of any savings being achieved by consolidation; loss of transparency and access in a large bureaucracy; blurring of identity of specialized agencies such as agriculture; and the “tainted” process by which the merger proposal had been brought forward.
Farm Bureau president Holmes said a merger would water down the agriculture department and diminish its ability to deal with major current issues such as biosecurity and contagious animal diseases. Many other farmers followed Holmes to the witness podium in the course of the lengthy hearing.
Proposals to shuffle agriculture and other agencies into newly configured mega-departments are nothing new in New Hampshire. Dating back at least 30 years, governors and legislative leaders have repeatedly stirred up hornets’ nests of controversy when they’ve offered plans such as one to place agriculture alongside banking and insurance agencies in a department of commerce or another that would have peeled off much of agriculture’s functions and buried what remained in a small bureau deep in the department of resources and economic development.
Invariably New Hampshire Farm Bureau, commodity groups and other allies of the agriculture department have handily beaten these schemes back with hardball lobbying and massive turnout at legislative hearings.
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CNHT Notes:
SB 132 House Executive Departments and Administration Committee did NOT recommend this bill. (ITL was UNANIMOUS)
Please write to your Representatives to ask them to OPPOSE this bill when it comes up for a vote on May 20, 2009.