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New Boston residents opposed to a two percent spending cap warrant article are going to court to stop voters from being able to decide on the measure. And they have a hearing scheduled for Friday.

A group of pro-spending-hike residents filed a lawsuit this week asking a Hillsborough Superior Court judge to force selectmen to reschedule a canceled deliberative session on the spending cap. Residents Jon-Paul Turek, Robert Belanger, Richard Backus, Dan MacDonald, Keith Prive, Elizabeth Whitman, Eileen Belanger, Marie MacDonald, and William Gould want to be able to change the proposed two percent cap ahead of the Town Election.

State Rep. Keith Ammon (R-New Boston) is backing the spending cap in response to years of rising property taxes in town. He recently told NHJournal opponents want to raise the cap to as much as 50 percent before it goes to voters, making the measure meaningless. 

“I don’t think that’s legal,” Ammon said.

The current controversy centers on the Feb. 3 Town Meeting deliberative session where the spending cap proposal was discussed. Both Town Moderator Lee Nyquist and Town Attorney Michael Courtney told people at that meeting the numbers in the two percent spending cap could not be changed under state law. 

But the residents opposed to the cap say that’s wrong, and they should have been allowed to change the numbers on Feb. 3.

“The misinformation provided by the Town Moderator and Town Attorney at the deliberative session constitutes a clear procedural defect, as it directly misled voters and deprived them of their legal right to amend (the spending cap,)” the lawsuit states.

After getting stymied at the Feb. 3 meeting, the anti-spending-cap group pushed New Boston’s Board of Selectmen for an emergency deliberative session where they could get their way. But Ammon went to court arguing such a move is illegal. The Selectmen stood down, canceling the planned Feb. 18 session.

Now, residents who want to spend beyond the cap are asking the court to force selectmen to hold the special deliberative session anyway, claiming it is the only way to protect the integrity of Town Meeting.

“The decision to cancel the Special Town Meeting was not an act of prudence but an act of abdication—one that directly harms the registered voters of New Boston by allowing an improperly handled warrant article to proceed to the ballot without correction,” the lawsuit states.

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.

With New Boston’s Town Meeting set for March 11, timing is running short to make any changes. A hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for Friday in the Hillsborough Superior Court — North in Manchester. 

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.

Former Allenstown Middle School instructor Daniel Rattigan has pleaded guilty to charges he threatened to mutilate state Rep. Keith Ammon (R-New Boston) and sexually assault one of his family members in response to the Republican lawmaker’s support for anti-CRT legislation.

“I’ve gotten crazy emails, but nothing like this one. It was unhinged,” Ammon said.

Rattigan, 31, pleaded guilty in Goffstown District Court on Friday to two misdemeanor counts — one for harassment and one for obstructing government administration. Two other identical charges were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

Rattigan will not do jail time, but instead has $1,240 in fines which are suspended for one year so long as he remains on good behavior. Rattigan is not to have any contact with Ammon, other than writing an apology letter.

“I doubt it will be sincere,” Ammon said.

Rattigan was reportedly upset with Ammon’s efforts to prevent schools from teaching Critical Race Theory-based content in New Hampshire classrooms. Ammon was one of the original sponsors of HB 544, which “prohibits the dissemination of certain divisive concepts related to sex and race in state contracts, grants, and training programs.” That legislation was set aside for an anti-discrimination law passed as part of the 2021 budget.

Rattigan called Ammon a racist in the messages and he made numerous obscene and graphic threats against Ammon and a family member.

“I truly hope you get skull f***ed to death you pathetic privileged white [expletive] boi,” Rattigan wrote in one of the messages.

Rattigan sent the violent and obscene threats to Ammon via Facebook in late February, as the politics around the anti-CRT law were getting heated. Ammons said he and his family spent subsequent months worried for their safety. 

“We were making sure the house was safe and making sure there are no unexpected visitors, as you can imagine,” Ammon said.

The threats started coming in on the night of Feb. 25, and included numerous misspellings and punctuation mistakes. Ammon assumed Rattigan might have been intoxicated and would think better the next day and apologize. Instead, according to Ammon, Rattigan continued to display angry and unhinged behavior.

Ammon went to law enforcement the next day and reported the issue, first to the Protective Services of the General Court, the branch of the New Hampshire State Police that protects state representatives, and then to the New Boston Police Department. 

Rattigan lists his employment on LinkedIn as being an Educational Assistant at the Armand R. Dupont Middle School in Allenstown. The profile claims he has worked at the school since 2013. 

On Monday, Allenstown Superintendent Peter Warburton said Rattigan worked at the middle school for a month and a half in 2013 and has not been employed by the district since.

Contacted by NHJournal through his Facebook account, Rattigan asked that no story be written because he feared losing his job. He would not reveal where he works, but he minimized the repeated and escalating threats he made against Ammon and his family. 

“It was a rude empty comment that I apologized for,” Rattigan said in a message.

Rattigan’s language was extremely crude, but his claims that supporters of the anti-discrimination bill are racists echoes language used by Democratic leaders in the legislature and progressive activists. It’s an interesting claim given the law literally bans government-funded instructors from teaching that one race, sex, or group is inherently superior or inferior to another.

State Rep. Linda Harriot-Gathright (D-Nashua) opposes the anti-discrimination law because, she says, New Hampshire’s public schools are racist.

“This language robs young people of an inclusive and realistic education by targeting efforts to talk about systemic racism in schools,” she said when the law was passed. “We need to be looking at how our systems promote racial inequity and working towards solutions. Systematic racism is still alive and well.”

New Hampshire’s biggest teacher’s union, the National Education Association-NH, and the state chapter of the ACLU have joined forces to combat New Hampshire’s new anti-discrimination law.

Unlike a previously filed lawsuit that used the phrase “divisive concepts” 103 times (a phrase that does not appear anywhere in the law), the lawsuit has updated its language, referring to the law as the “banned concepts” law.

The phrase “banned concepts” does not appear anywhere in the new law, either.

On Monday, the groups announced a new federal lawsuit filed in the United States District Court in Concord against the state’s new anti-discrimination law.

“This unconstitutionally vague law disallows students from receiving the inclusive, complete education they deserve, and from having important conversations on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the classroom,” said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire.

Meg Tuttle, the president of New Hampshire’s NEA branch, claimed the law prevents teachers from teaching full facts around controversial subjects.

“Parents and educators agree students should learn complete facts about historical events like slavery and civil rights. They agree that politicians shouldn’t be censoring classroom discussions between students and their teachers and that educators shouldn’t have their licenses and livelihoods put at risk by a vague law,” Tuttle said.

The problem for Bissonnette and Tuttle is the law passed this year does nothing to ban any concept from being taught but instead bans students from being discriminated against. Indeed, the law explicitly states it does not prohibit, “as a larger court of academic instruction,” teaching about this history of racism, sexism, etc. 

“I don’t think there’s any statement of facts (in the lawsuit) they can make other than people’s feelings,” said state Rep. Keith Ammon, R-New Boston, one of the legislators behind the bill. “The left created this false image of what the law actually states.”

According to the legal guidance issued to schools by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and the New Hampshire Department of Education, the law does nothing to stop any facet of American history from being taught in the classroom.

“Nothing prohibits the teaching of historical subjects including, but not limited to: slavery, treatment of the Native American population, Jim Crow laws, segregation, treatment of women, treatment of LGBTQ+ people, treatment of people with disabilities, treatment of people based on their religion, or the Civil Rights movement. Nor does anything prohibit discussions related to current events including, but not limited to: the Black Lives Matter movement, efforts to promote equality and inclusion, or other contemporary events that impact certain identified groups,” the legal advice from the Attorney General states. 

Instead, the law prohibits students being taught that “a person, because of their membership in one or more identified group(s), is inherently either: (1) racist, sexist, or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously or (2) superior or inferior to people of another identified group.”

Ammon said the lawsuit, like the error-filled lawsuit filed last week by New Hampshire’s American Federation of Teachers, is simply a fundraising stunt by the unions and the ACLU.

“They are using it to fundraise off their woke base,” Ammon said. “This how far the ACLU has fallen, they are challenging an anti-discrimination law in federal court.”

The lawsuit lists Andres Mejia as one of the plaintiffs. Mejia is director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice for the Exeter Region Cooperative School District, the school district where a Catholic student was punished for expressing tenets of his faith to another student outside the school’s purview.

“This law chills the very type of diversity, equity, and inclusion work that is absolutely necessary to ensure that each student is seen, heard, and connected, especially as New Hampshire becomes more diverse,” Mejia said in a statement.

The Catholic student and his family are suing the Exeter district, though without any help from New Hampshire’s ACLU. Bissonnette did not respond to a question on Monday as to why the American Civil Liberties Union would not defend a student punished for expressing his faith. 

Mejia is also a board member of Black Lives Matter Seacoast, a group that demands the removal of police officers from schools. 

Ammon says he does not think the lawsuit will succeed but does think New Hampshire taxpayers will still lose.

“We have to pay to defend the state in court against their lame allegations,” Ammon said.

In an unusual move, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to review controversial comments made online by two lawmakers. Yet, Republican leaders aren’t expecting the committee to find that they violated any House ethics codes.

It started as an inquiry into Rep. Robert Fisher, R-Laconia, and comments he made in an online forum that were construed as misogynistic, but Republicans successfully added Rep. Sherry Frost, D-Dover, in the inquiry for tweets she wrote earlier this year that some found “offensive.”

Before the House met in their regularly scheduled session on Thursday, it was anticipated that House Democratic Leader Steve Shurtleff would bring up a motion for a House committee to investigate Fisher’s comments.

“At any time any member says anything or does anything that holds this body in disrespect, it affects each and every one of us,” he said on the House floor.

Fisher was identified as the creator of a a Reddit forum called “The Red Pill” in a report from The Daily Beast last week. His posts on the message board garnered criticism for being disrespectful toward women and normalizing rape culture. He admitted to the comments, which were made as far back as 2008, but said they were taken out of context.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu and New Hampshire Republican Party Chair Jeanie Forrester have called for his resignation, but Fisher insists he will not step down.

Frost posted tweets earlier this year that said more terrorism is perpetrated by “white men who claim Christianity than by Muslims in the USA.” She also tweeted, “The people (read; men) telling me to ‘calm down’ & ‘not take it so hard’ are making me homicidal.”

The NHGOP criticized her for the tweets, calling her a “radical” and “a threat to her colleagues.”

“All representatives should be held to the same standard,” said Rep. Victoria Sullivan, R-Manchester, who put forward the amendment to include Frost. “This body cannot pick and choose who they support and who they do not.”

The House voted 182-180 to include Frost in the inquiry and then approved of the investigation of both lawmakers by a 307-56 vote, with Fisher and Frost voting in favor of the review.

“I think the truth will be out at the hearing,” Fisher told the Concord Monitor. Frost said she has nothing to hide.

The Legislative Administration Committee’s reviews will be limited to comments made by the two lawmakers during the current legislative session, which means Fisher’s previous posts will not be included, but Frost’s tweets will be reviewed.

After that, the committee will make a recommendation to the full House for each lawmaker. The committee could recommend that no action should take place, or that the representatives should be reprimanded, censured, or expelled. The House will then vote on the recommendations.

“Referring this matter to the Legislative Administration Committee will allow for an investigation into Representative Fisher’s involvement with this forum since his election to the New Hampshire House,” Shurtleff said in a statement. “As elected officials it is our duty to act with honor both inside the State House and out, and I am confident that the Legislative Administration Committee will give this serious matter the consideration it deserves.”

His statement didn’t include any comments about Frost, though.

Some lawmakers criticized Republicans for including Frost in the inquiry, saying the two lawmaker’s comments do not equate to equal treatment. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley took to Twitter to criticize the decision.

Misogyny rampant in @NHHouseGOP – voted to equate outspoken woman to a man praising rape. NH hangs its head in shame. #NHpolitics

— Ray Buckley (@ChairmanBuckley) May 4, 2017

Yet, House Speaker Shawn Jasper admitted that he doesn’t believe the committee will find that the lawmakers violated any ethics codes.

“I don’t think we’ve ever done anything quite like this,” he told the New Hampshire Union Leader. “Normally there would be something that falls under the ethics guidelines, and there’d be a complaint made by somebody and it would go to the ethics committee.”

Some lawmakers questioned why they spent time debating the issue.

@WMUR9 House votes to spend time investigating those who drop F-bombs on twitter. #nhpolitics don't we have more important things to do?

— Rep. JR Hoell (@NH_Braveheart) May 4, 2017

Rep. Keith Ammon, R-New Boston, motioned to table the matter, but it overwhelmingly failed.

“This is being used as a political football,” he said. “We need to have some more harmony in this body.”

Protesters lined the hallways of the State House and gathered outside on the plaza to protest Fisher’s comments. A protester’s sign said, “Rep. Fisher: This feminist says resign!” Another read, “Rape culture: He isn’t a symptom, he is a disease. Fisher must go.”

Fisher’s review hearing will begin on Tuesday, with Frost’s review to follow on Wednesday.

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