Bill Signing Season is Almost Over: So Whatever Happened to that Bill?

Summer in New Hampshire is beach, boat, and fireworks season. But it’s also the time of year when bills that made it through New Hampshire’s legislative Hunger Games finally reach the governor’s desk for action. Bills signed by Gov. Sununu become law. Bills he vetoes usually die. That’s because overriding a veto requires a difficult-to-achieve 2/3 vote in both the House and Senate. Here’s a quick recap of some of the good, the bad, and the ugly bills that have made it to the finish line so far.

By the Numbers

In 2022, 1,208 bills were introduced in the New Hampshire Senate and House of Representatives. Of them, 354 (29%) were passed by both chambers. To date, 333 have been signed into law, 8 have been vetoed, and 13 are still awaiting action.

The Good

The following bills were (thankfully) signed into law by Gov. Sununu:

• HB 1609 adds a fatal fetal anomaly exception to the 24-week abortion ban that was signed into law by Gov. Sununu as part of the state budget rider in 2021. Worth noting is the 24 week ban remains in effect along with penalties for patents and health care personnel who violate it. More

• HB 1673 further amends the 24-week abortion ban signed in 2021 by Gov. Sununu. It changes the ultrasound requirement for women seeking abortions from 8 weeks to 24 weeks. More

• SB 422 and HB 103 expand Medicaid to include dental benefits for over 120,000 New Hampshire Medicaid recipients. More

• HB 481 improves governmental transparency by establishing the office of a right-to-know ombudsman. Through the ombudsman, NH residents can now appeal (for a $25 fee) right to know requests that have been turned down. More

• HB 1388 establishes a criminal penalty for “cyberflashing”. This crime happens when a person electronically transmits unsolicited lewd or obscene images of himself or herself to another person. More

• HB 1421 reduces the risk of lead poisoning in NH by requiring daycare centers and K-12 public and private schools to monitor the amount of lead in their drinking water and notify parents if it is above the Environmental Protection Act’s percentage of safe lead in schools. (I was a cosponsor). More

• SB 357 attempts to address higher-than-average suicide rates for first responders and corrections personnel by requiring mandatory mental health training on post-traumatic stress disorder. More

• SB 376 funds crisis intervention training for local police departments to help them better deal with people with mental illness. It also sets up a committee to examine cases where police officers use deadly force against people with mental health problems. More

• HB 1066 requires the state to create a plan to address dangerous—and increasingly common—cyanobacteria in NH lakes and ponds. More

• HB 1185 allows wastewater treatment plants to require discharge brought to plants for disposal by industrial or commercial facilities or septic haulers of industrial waste be tested for for PFAS. If PFAS is found, water treatment plants can now refuse it. (I was a cosponsor). The bill allows municipalities to regulate the level of PFAS they are allowing to enter their wastewater treatment facilities from commercial facilities. It also puts pressure on companies to reduce their PFAS use or optimize their processes.

• HB 1575 waives tuition in the New Hampshire university system for residents who are children of disabled veterans. More

The governor also used his veto pen to kill several radical bills that would have made him look bad to non-extremists had he signed them. His “good vetoes” include the following bills.

• HB 52 and SB 200. These bills would have taken New Hampshire’s two traditionally balanced congressional districts and gerrymandered them to create a Republican advantage in CD1 and a Democratic advantage in CD2. They also would have put both of NH’s current congresspersons in the same district. Following the governor’s veto, final redistricting maps were drawn by a special master. They were then quickly approved by the state Supreme Court. More

• HB 1625 would have repealed a New Hampshire statute allowing abortion clinics to create a 25-foot buffer zone around their facilities to separate protesters from patients and medical providers. More

• HB 1022 would have allowed pharmacists to dispense a debunked and potentially dangerous drug (Ivermectin) to treat COVID without a prescription. The move was praised by the NH Hospital Association. More

• HB 1131 would have struck a dual blow to public health and local control by banning school boards from adopting, enforcing, or implementing a policy requiring students or members of the public to wear a facial covering. More

The Bad

While using his veto pen to kill a handful of genuinely awful bills drew praise for the governor, his failure to veto some equally terrible bills flew largely under the radar. Since May, the governor has signed off on bills weakening future pandemic public health responses, exploiting children, expanding gun rights, making voting more difficult, and gerrymandering NH House of Representatives, state Senate, and Executive Council districts:

• HB 1604 requires state-run hospitals and county nursing homes to grant medical and religious exemption requests to their employee vaccine mandates, eliminating their ability to evaluate each request for merit and putting nursing home residents and vulnerable patients at risk. More

• HB 1003 prohibits health care providers from refusing to provide care or services based on patient vaccination status. In other words, health care providers won’t be able to require patients to be vaccinated, which increases the risk of infection for staff and other patients.

• With the signing of SB 345, NH took a big step closer towards legalizing child labor. It lowers the age limit for students to bus tables where alcohol is served from 15 to 14 years old. It also increases the hours most 16- and 17-year-olds can work when they’re in school. More

• The distaste the governor expressed when it came to the gerrymandering of congressional districts apparently did not extend to other bills he signed that all create new districts more advantageous to Republicans. SB 240 sets up a Republican supermajority in the state Senate with 16 of the newly-drawn districts leaning Republican and eight leaning Democratic. Meanwhile, SB 241 creates new Executive Council districts where 3 of the 5 districts all shift more Republican while an already Democratic district gets more Democrats. More

• SB 418 requires a complex new provisional ballot system be set up for first-time voters. It will likely delay the state's ability to certify primary election results in time to get general election ballots ready for overseas voters, such as the active-duty military. More

• HB 1000 prohibits state and local law enforcement personnel from engaging in “motorcycle profiling”-stopping or searching motorcycle riders based on nothing other than they are riding motorcycles or wearing motorcycle paraphernalia. While not necessarily a bad thing, the context is we now are living in a state that bans “profiling” motorcyclists (who are overwhelmingly male and white) by statute—but not racial profiling. More

• HB 1052 allows semi-automatic rifles with high capacity magazines (think AR-15s) to be used for hunting as long as the magazine contains only six rounds. (Hunting with fully automatic weapons is thankfully still illegal.) More

• HB 1636 changes NH law to allow loaded handguns to be carried on OHRVs and snowmobiles, a practice outlawed in many other states because of the heightened risk of a loaded weapon inadvertently discharging as drivers navigate bumps, obstructions, and occasional spills. More

A Sununu veto also saw him weigh in on the side out-of-state landfill operators and against residents in affected communities.

• HB 1454 would have established much tougher restrictions for new landfills. The goal of the bill was to prevent any contaminated groundwater from a new solid waste disposal area from reaching any river, lake, or coastal waters of New Hampshire within 5 years. The bill was prompted by a plan to locate a new landfill in Dalton, NH near an existing state park. More

The Ugly

Gov. Sununu signed a pair of bills that pit our state against the federal government. Both unnecessarily put Granite Staters at risk in different ways and have the potential to jeopardize the flow of much-needed federal funds into New Hampshire for policing and public health.

• HB 1455 blocks state enforcement of federal vaccine mandates and potentially jeopardizes federal public health grants. More

• HB 1178 prohibits any representative of the state or a municipality—including state and local police—from taking action to enforce or assist in the enforcement of any federal firearms law that is not written into NH state law. It essentially renders the federal gun-free school zones law, federal laws and prohibitions against machine guns and ghost guns, as well as key provisions of the recently-enacted Bipartisan Safer Communities Act unenforceable in New Hampshire. More

You can see a complete list of all of the bills the governor has signed here.