JANUARY 16, 2024
The 2024 session of the New Hampshire Legislature hit the ground running on January 3 and 4 with two long, and sometimes contensioius, days devoted to acting on the bills held over from 2023. With a very closely divided legislature, many bills were passed or defeated by only a handfull of votes. The majority can change day-by-day depending on absences. There was a fair amount of procedural manuvering on the part of both parties in order to keep bills alive that would otherwise have been defeated. I'm told that these two session days were not typical of legislative sessions.
My committee, Municipal and County Government, met the following week to take testimony on a number of proposed bills. Of note were bills proposing an optional Homestead Exemption to local real estate taxes, tax exemptions for certain veterans, interest due to taxpayers on overpayment of property taxes, eliminating the requirement for towns to publish Zoning Board of Adjustment hearings in the local “newspaper of record” if the hearing is noticed on the town website, and a bill regarding payments by libraries for electronic subscriptions.
You can search and follow current bills here. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the bill search tool.
I continue to be contacted by Enfield residents and others advocating for or against specific bills. Of note are concerns about bills affecting lake health, wake boats, LGBTQ rights, abortion, public document requests, cannabis, and housing. If you have interest in a particular bill or topic, please feel free to reach out to me at David.Fracht@Leg.State.NH.US. My goal is to represent you in Concord.
OCTOBER, 2023
David Fracht, Enfield's newly elected State Representative, joined with other members of the Grafton County Delegation who unanimously voted to accept an almost $12 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to expand broadband internet service throughout the entire county. The grant also required matching funds from the County in the amount of $5 million which was also unanimously approved by the delegation.
The purpose of the grant is to construct over 200 miles of “middle mile” fiber-optic cable at a total cost of $17,098,571 which will connect the Town Halls or other municipal buildings of 24 Grafton County towns, which are either not served or are under-served by high-speed internet service, to the internet backbone. With the presence of middle mile service in each town, commercial Internet Service Providers will then be able to build out broadband service to residents and businesses throughout the towns without having to incur the high cost of connecting to the internet backbone at a distant interface point. The middle mile network will be open-access which means that any number of commercial ISPs will be able to use the network to connect their local clients to the internet. The commercial ISPs will lease or purchase capacity on the middle mile network, and will eventually become owners.
This model is similar to the model employed in Enfield where the initial installation of fiber-optic cable was funded by a Federal Grant through New Hampshire FastRoads, a subsidiary of the non-profit Monadnock Economic Development Corp. which later transferred ownership to a commercial ISP (N.H Optical Systems Inc., and later FirstLight) with residential and business service currently provided by WiValley and Hub-66.
While Enfield will not receive any direct benefit from this grant, Fracht supported the project as it will improve broadband access in the entire county. Robust broadband is an essential part of 21st century life benefiting businesses, students, remote workers and others.
Fracht was elected to the New Hampshire Legislature in a special election in August, 2023. He is a member of the County and Municipal Government Committee and also chairs Enfield's Planning Board and is co-chair of its Master Planning Task Force.