Town candidates find consensus in the contentious during Candidates Night at Pease Public Library

James Kelly

Opinions Editor

He/Him

2/23/24

The Town of Plymouth’s candidates night opened with a question on school vouchers. “There’s [a question] here that’s a little bit controversial,” moderator Mike Conklin warned. School vouchers, which have been a recent hallmark of conservative platforms, are divisive in NH. And yet, every candidate at Tuesday’s event gave more or less the same answer.

Vouchers “have a place,” Jason Neenos said. Jennifer Desloges agreed. So did Aimee Lee, Ted Wisniewski, and Malick Hammond. The forum continued throughout the night with the same pattern; the candidates gently passed around a single microphone and mostly agreed. 

Five of the six candidates in competitive races for March 12th’s town election attended the event. Neenos, Desloges, and Lee, who is also the Plymouth Town Clerk, are running for two seats on the Plymouth Elementary School Board. Hammond, who serves on the Zoning Board of Adjustment, and incumbent Wisniewski are running for one select board seat. David Clay, who did not attend the event, is also running for the select board.

The candidates did answer the voucher question with subtle differences. Neenos, a Plymouth Elementary School Board candidate and adjunct professor at Plymouth State, emphasized the benefits of vouchers for students in Special Education programs. “Vouchers allow… parents to send their children to a school that has the resources that students might need,” Neenos said but noted he was concerned that the state legislature might expand the voucher program. 

Desloges and Lee, who are also running for school board, stressed the high property taxes in Plymouth, and worried about taxpayers taking on an additional tax burden that would not support public schools. “It’s hard to think that a lot of money would be drained out of our tax base and put somewhere else,” Desloges said. “The state should give more money to education than they do currently,” Lee, who is currently chair of the school board, added. 

The school board candidates all said they would prioritize creating positive environments in school and on the school board. “That’s becoming more and more difficult as we get more divisive,” Neenos said. Literacy is a priority for Desloges, who taught seventh-grade English in Plymouth for 39 years. The budget “is always a concern” for Lee, who said she monitored the school budget even before she ran for school board. Lee is currently in her third term on the Plymouth Elementary School board, where she serves as chair.

Wisniewski and Hammond agreed on the select board’s role in growing the town. Both candidates would like to see expansion in the Tenney Mountain Highway corridor, and at Tenney Mountain itself. Wisniewski says business development is necessary to lower the property tax burden. “You’ve got two things in juxtaposition with each other,” he said. “You’ve got the taxes, which are presently skewed towards the housing side of the equation. And you’ve got the business development, which could help lower those taxes.” There is such a thing as too far, though. “I don’t necessarily want to become the next Tilton,” Wisniewski said. The town should preserve resources and views, even as it develops. “It should be our own flavor of things,” he said.

“There’s a nostalgic desire to live without cell phones,” Hammond said. “To have it when you could just ring the triangle for dinner and everybody would come home.” But to live sentimentally in a sleepy mountain town is unrealistic, he said. “We’re gonna need to expand.” Hammond is also excited to see Tenney Mountain develop. “That is an economic boon for our area,” he said. Tenney Mountain development will “lead to a domino effect of other opportunities that come through.”

Candidates for both bodies addressed Plymouth State’s relationship with the town. On the selectboard side, that mostly meant taxes. As a public university, and therefore a nonprofit institution, PSU is exempt from many taxes. “PSU could contribute more fiscally,” Hammond said. “However, the town wouldn’t be what it is – it wouldn’t have the vibrancy that it does – without PSU’s contributions beyond the physical.” The town must find creative solutions, Hammond said. Part of that might come in the form of “payment in lieu of taxes,” voluntary payments from tax-exempt institutions. “I appreciate what [town manager] Scott Weden has done… as far as payment in lieu of taxes,” Hammond said.

“The funding issue is always an interesting challenge,” Wisniewski said. “Just like [the town is] challenged with… ever-rising taxes, I know that the university has also got challenges of its own.” Wisniewski focused on what PSU already provides to the town, like marketing and emergency service funding. “I know that they are doing things for us,” he said. PSU has been able to maintain a $400,000 per year contribution to the town, “and that was probably a very difficult conversation for both the Select Board and the university to come to that same number,” Wisniewski said. 

For Desloges, the question of how to handle PSU has “plagued” the town for 40 years. “A lot of property that is owned by the college: they don’t have to pay property taxes on it,” she said. “That is upsetting to a lot of people.” Nonetheless, she said, Plymouth is a “wonderful resource.” The elementary school’s relationship with PSU is particularly strong; PSU has welcomed elementary schoolers at Lamson, the Ice Arena, and the medieval fair, Desloges said. “The college does give back to us,” she said. “Maybe not financially, as much as we would like. But it does give back to us at our school level.”

Neenos agreed. “They do offer a lot of… nonmonetary contributions to the town,” he said, citing the PSU-provided crossing guards. PSU doesn’t get the support from the state that it needs, Neenos added. “We need more funding for education,” he said. “Not just for K-12, but for higher education too.”