The first thing to know about the “Paper-Gate” controversy between Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Executive Councilor Dave Wheeler is that it has nothing to do with office supplies — and everything to do with the power of their offices.
At first glance, the story looks like a battle between generations, with Wheeler playing the role of the senior citizen who insists on having the newspaper delivered to his porch every morning because he can’t read the obituaries on some newfangled iPhone, consarn it.
Printing out all the paperwork for all of the contracts the council reviews requires a mountain of dead trees. Ayotte’s office has gleefully used social media to share the details:
“We print over a MILLION (emphasis original) pages per year for our Governor and Council meetings, and if you laid it all out, it’d be 225 miles long. That’s the driving distance from Pittsburgh to Boston!” one post reads.
“If you stacked up all the paper used each year for Governor and Council meetings, it’d be 3.5 State Houses tall!” reads another.
And Ayotte — never missing an opportunity to tout her support for public safety — repeatedly noted Wednesday that delivering those boxes of printed materials “requires 240 hours of State Trooper time hand-delivering documents — equivalent to six workweeks per year.”
So it’s easy to reach the same conclusion longtime GOP politico Kevin Smith did on X (formerly Twitter):
“In 2003, when I was the G&C liaison for Gov. Benson, I called all the councilors to let them know the governor wanted to buy them all laptops to cut down on the waste and inefficiency of the paper process. It was immediately met with great resistance, and ultimately, none of them took the governor up on his offer. Now, 22 years later, the Executive Council is acting like it’s still 1990. It’s quite absurd that this process has not been digitized at this point.
“Gov. Kelly Ayotte is right to demand better for the taxpayers of this state.”
Benson’s legal counsel in 2003? Kelly Ayotte.
But there’s another story here: a governor with a contentious relationship with an increasingly aggressive Executive Council.
Wheeler and his allies, Councilors Joe Kenney and John Stephen, haven’t shied away from disagreements with Ayotte. At an Americans for Prosperity event in August, Wheeler and Stephen made it clear they had no intention of supporting Ayotte’s renomination of Taylor Caswell to head the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
His last day is this Friday.
Wheeler also used the AFP event to remind everyone of the council’s reach.
“We confirm the nominee for attorney general, the parks people, the transportation commissioners, the police commissioner,” Wheeler said. “And for all the unclassified employees, we’re in charge of setting their pay and the department heads’ pay, too. So they can be responsive if they’re coming up for a pay raise.”
That power was also on display Wednesday, when the council rejected more than a dozen agenda items specifically because information it requested about those contracts had not been provided by the Governor’s Office.
“The contracts that we tabled are all contracts with missing information, like the Certificate of Good Standing with the secretary of state,” Wheeler said after the meeting. He also mentioned other documentation, such as proof of liability insurance or details on who the owners or officers of a company are.
Councilor Joe Kenney called Ayotte’s anti-paper pitch “pure theater.”
“The past two governors, Hassan and Sununu, always gave the council the option of paper or electronic contracts to do the work of the people,” Kenney told NHJournal. “The real issue is not paper versus electronic; it’s the governor hiding information that we need to do our job and that the public deserves to see.”
But the people in Charlestown, N.H., who have been waiting for months for a bridge repair don’t care whether the details are on a laptop, a clipboard, or a stone tablet. And yet their contract was shot down by the council on Wednesday as part of the petty dispute.
And that is not smart politics.
Which may be why, Wednesday night, Wheeler sent an email to his fellow councilors saying the missing information — some insurance forms and a Certificate of Good Standing — had been provided. He now wants the council to meet immediately and approve the project.
“I agree with Councilor Liot Hill that the Route 12 project is imminently important and the work needs to be undertaken immediately,” Wheeler wrote.
Which underscores the real story: The fight has nothing to do with paper and everything to do with politics.
The Executive Council has the advantage of basic math. As councilors are fond of saying, “Every governor has to learn to count to three.”
But in this case, Ayotte has the advantage of political math. Voters want their roads paved and their education programs funded, and they don’t want to hear about senior citizens who still use flip phones waiting for a binder full of details.
