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With his town facing skyrocketing local taxes, state Rep. Keith Ammon (R-New Boston) had enough of the annual spending sprees.

“Our taxes have gone up 30 percent in the last six months,” Ammon told NHJournal. “People cannot afford to live in town anymore. I just figured somebody’s gotta do something.”

Ammon is behind an effort to get spending under control by instituting a 2 percent cap on the town budget. That cap does not cut spending, but would limit future budget increases to 2 percent over the prior year’s approved budget. 

“Two percent is the standard inflation rate,” Ammon said.

But Ammon had to go to court this week to keep his tax cap proposal from being gutted by opponents. 

Rep. Keith Ammon (R-New Boston)

New Boston is already reeling from massive school spending spikes coupled with continuous town government increases. Some residents have seen their annual tax bill go up $2,000 in the last year. Meanwhile, the town’s proposed budget for 2025 comes in at $7,476,141, nearly a 5 percent hike, or $355,539, over the 2024 budget. That increased spending will result in a 2.6 percent tax increase for New Boston homeowners.

New Boston education spending has been soaring for years. Between 2001 and 2019, the school population grew by 22 percent, but spending jumped by 104 percent. Per pupil spending rose from about $16,000 to more than $27,000 over that same period.

After following state and local law, and collecting enough signatures to get the proposed cap on the upcoming Town Meeting ballot as a petitioned warrant article, Ammon learned last week there was a campaign to illegally change the cap article at the last minute.

New Boston is an SB2 Town Meeting municipality where voters decide on the budget and other warrant articles through a secret ballot vote, as opposed to a traditional open Town Meeting where nearly every question is put to a floor vote of the people attending the meeting.

In SB2 towns, voters are able to discuss and amend warrant articles during a deliberative session held at least a month before the ballot vote.

During the Feb. 3 deliberative session, however, New Boston voters were able to discuss the tax cap article, but not make any changes to the language of the article. Ammon told NHJournal there are people in town who wanted to derail the tax cap by amending the article via voice vote at the deliberative session and raising the 2 percent limit up to a whopping 50 percent. 

The problem with that plan, however, is that it would have been illegal. The town’s attorney and the town’s moderator both informed voters at the Feb. 3 deliberative session that under the law, the tax cap limit cannot be changed at the session. Town Meeting rules allow voters to amend appropriations up or down, but the cap percentage is not an appropriation, Ammon said. 

Days after that meeting, however, voters opposed to the tax cap went to selectmen and demanded a new deliberative session. They claimed a new deliberative session was required to correct the fact they were blocked from changing the tax cap on Feb. 3, which they called a “minor procedural irregularity.” The board agreed with the tax cap opponents, and scheduled the new deliberative session for Wednesday.

Ammon engaged attorney Richard Lehmann and filed an emergency motion in Hillsborough Superior Court — North in Manchester. Lehmann’s filing makes clear the tax cap opponents are trying to get their way by breaking the law.

“The petitioners do not seek to correct a ‘minor procedural irregularity.’ On the contrary, they seek a re-do of the meeting, at which time they will, presumably, seek to amend the language of Warrant Article 31 by changing (or removing) the percentage of permitted growth in the tax cap,” Lehmann wrote. 

With 24 hours to go before the “do-over” deliberative session, New Boston’s Select Board blinked and canceled the meeting.

“After reviewing this lawsuit with legal counsel, the Select Board is canceling the Special Deliberative Session scheduled for February 19, 2025, to avoid unnecessary expense to the Town litigating this matter,” the board said in a statement released Tuesday.

New Boston Town Administrator Carl Weber did not respond to a request for comment. Ammon said the board did the right thing by canceling the re-do session.

“I commend the Select Board for doing the right thing. It’s not always easy to make decisions on the fly like that,” Ammon said.

As of now, the tax cap question will go to voters on March 11. Ammon hopes voters choose to fix the out-of-control spending that is hurting their community.

“If we’re not going to do something about it now, when are we going to do something?” Ammon said.

“She cannot get back the life that was stolen from her.”

And that’s why Amanda Stewart of Jaffrey is suing her former endocrinologist Dr. John Turco, along with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health and others, who she says misled her into inappropriate “gender-affirming” surgeries and treatments that left her in pain and have ruined her life.

“Instead of protecting and properly treating Amanda, who was and remains an extremely vulnerable and unstable individual, these doctors and health care providers, and the organizations and facilities at which they worked, harmed her deeply under the pretense of providing so-called ‘gender-affirming care,’” according to the lawsuit filed in Hillsborough Superior Court — South last week.

The suit names Turco, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Cheshire Medical Center, Monadnock Family Services, and several individual doctors for years of alleged malpractice Stewart says have “harmed her deeply.”

“She will never be able to conceive and bear a child. Even if she could conceive a child, she would never be able to breastfeed her child. She lives in daily pain from the effects of the unnecessary surgeries and years of taking enormous amounts of cross-sex hormones,” according to the lawsuit. “She will never look the same and has to deal daily with severe alterations to her female body, such as bone structure and unwanted body and facial hair. She cannot get back the life that was stolen from her.”

Josh Payne, with the Texas law firm Campbell Miller Payne, said Stewart wants the healthcare system held accountable for misleading her for more than a decade and changing her life for the worse.

“Amanda’s story is a heart-wrenching representation of the negligence and lack of proper procedure in the practice of so-called ‘gender-affirming care,’” Payne said.

Stewart had a troubled early life, starting when her mother died when she was 14. Stewart, who is autistic, struggled with anxiety, depression, and loneliness throughout her teen years, according to the lawsuit. That was made worse when she ended up in a group home for a period of time, according to the lawsuit.

She started seeing Turco in 2007 when she was 22, and he immediately started pushing gender-affirming care without proper consent or full disclosure of the potential impacts, according to the lawsuit. Start’s lawsuit claims Turco never gave her any other choice.

“Defendants recognized that Amanda was mentally fragile and suffering, such that she would not be an appropriate candidate for so-called gender transition medicalization under any criteria, but they proceeded to medicalize and operate on her anyway,” the lawsuit states. “Indeed, on or about December 11, 2007, Dr. Turco wrote to a counselor Amanda had seen and a primary care doctor for Amanda, stating, ‘I am really worried that [Amanda] does mostly suffer at the present time from some psychological issues other than [her] gender identity issues.’”

But Turco soon had her taking massive quantities of testosterone, bringing her level far above those of biological men, according to the lawsuit. 

“[I]n July 2011, Dr. Turco noted that Amanda’s testosterone level was ‘very high at 2,640 ng/dl with the normal adult male range being 241-827,’” the lawsuit states.

Stewart suffered several mental health crises, some resulting in stays in the New Hampshire Hospital, as her physiological symptoms worsened while taking testosterone, the lawsuit states. Throughout her time with Turco, he made several notes that her symptoms improved when she stopped taking the hormone, and yet he continued to prescribe it in high dosages, according to the lawsuit. 

She would go on, under Turco’s care, to get a double mastectomy as well as a hysterectomy and oophorectomy, to remove her uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. She also had a procedure to close her vagina, according to the lawsuit.

Turco is known as a progressive advocate promoting sex reassignment procedures, receiving a “Lifetime Achievement Award” for social justice from Dartmouth last year.

But according to the lawsuit, Turco and other doctors who saw Stewart ignored the medical standards for gender-affirming care, such as the “Benjamin criteria,” which state cross-sex hormones “should not be administered without adequate psychological and medical assessment before and during treatment” and that problems should be well-controlled. 

“Yet these criteria were not remotely met in Amanda’s case according to the medical records produced prior to Plaintiff filing this lawsuit. “Amanda was not receiving testosterone with adequate psychological and medical assessment before and during treatment, and her problems were not well-controlled,” the lawsuit states.

These procedures were done without the psychological referrals necessary under the Benjamin criteria standards, according to the lawsuit. In fact, both surgeons who performed the procedures noted her impaired mental state when they saw her prior to the surgeries, according to the lawsuits.

Turco did not begin to question if Stewart was mentally competent to make decisions about her gender until 2016, after years of testosterone treatment and the surgeries. That was when Stewart had stopped taking the testosterone and stopped identifying as a man.

“Dr. Turco also noted that Amanda was not then living as a ‘transmale.’ Dr. Turco noted his belief that Amanda’s ‘underlying psychological issues’ made it ‘very hard for [her] to understand, evaluate and implement exactly what is [her] gender identity.’ Despite these observations, Dr. Turco continued to prescribe testosterone to Amanda,” the lawsuit states.

None of the doctors or counselors who saw Stewart questioned the care until she saw psychologist Dr. Carey Bluhm in 2019. At the time, Turco and staff at Dartmouth were pushing her to get more surgery.

“Dr. Bluhm expressed to Dr. Turco’s office his concerns that Amanda had Asperger’s and admitted to having ‘delusional events.’ Dr. Bluhm also expressed ‘reservations’ about additional plastic surgery procedures Dartmouth-Hitchcock staff had been meeting with Amanda about,” the lawsuit states.

Turco began acknowledging in 2021 that Stewart is, in fact, a woman despite the surgeries. In 2022, after she was taken to the hospital with suicidal ideation, Turco noted the testosterone treatments had “complications.”

Dartmouth Health did not respond to a request for comment.