what the hell some of the positions actually are<\/a>. Because no one knows. I certainly didn’t, though I wondered.<\/p>\nFor people in the rest of the country, New England may seem strange. To me, a county is something you have to remember so you can fill it on on forms. The county provides few to no services and is completely invisible otherwise. Towns border each other and there is no unincorporated land anywhere. (Note: there is some up north, and maybe more in Maine, but in southern New England nada.) In NH, the state government is “weak”; most services people are familiar with are tied to your town, because the state has no income or sales tax with which to provide for large state-wide programs. The first time I saw a county road was when I went to visit my in-laws in Wisconsin — I was surprised, because I’d never heard of such a thing. My view of government was Town->State->Federal.<\/p>\n
The New England tradition is for the majority of monetary business to be conducted at Town Meeting. This is just what it sounds like: a big meeting where all the voting age persons in town get together and vote on stuff, like the budget and warrant articles and new rules. As the population grew, especially in some of the southern towns, this became really impossible to continue, so NH instituted a variation. Towns that vote to become “SB2” towns have a meeting where the ballot is decided and all the warrant articles set up. Everyone can come to this meeting and have their say on things, and modifications can be made to submitted items. (Which means if you have something you’re interested in, you better go — or you may suddenly find that your request was slashed and all the money diverted to a new fire truck) Once the ballot is set, the town votes, not at a meeting, but just like normal voting with polls that are open all day.<\/p>\n
The state government has its own weirdness. Our governor is elected every two years. Because you can’t trust a politician for longer than that. We have a 5 person Governor’s Council, which has some power over budgetary stuff and is elected, but you almost never hear about them. They are a shadowy group. We have a senate consisting of 24 senators, who get paid a whopping $100\/year. No, I did not forget a 0 or a k at the end of that.<\/p>\n
Where things get weird and awesome is the House of Representatives. We have 400 members of the House, which is like 1 for every 3000 residents. Most adults who are at all active in the community will almost certainly know one (or more) representatives personally, if not well. It means that thinking you might like to take a spin someday as a legislator is not a completely unreasonable plan. They are also paid the big bucks, pulling down $100\/year just like the senators. The lack of pay and the vast number of people in the state legislature means that people can’t really make a career out of it the way they can in other states. Interestingly, the state seems to accomplish as much by way of legislating as other states do with their full-time members. (Could it be that legislating really doesn’t need to take up all that time and money? Hmmm.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As yet another election season draws to a close, I’ve been thinking again about what I like to call ‘cultural osmosis’. Which is that merely by growing up in an area, you tend to absorb how things work — schools, local government, public services, that sort of thing. And because these things are never actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}