By Granite State Report
On March 16, Governor Kelly Ayotte grabbed a red pen, scrawled “VETO” and “NO SALES TAX!” across House Bill 451, posted a photo of it to Facebook, and declared: “NO Sales Tax. Not now. NOT EVER!”
There was just one problem. The bill had nothing to do with a sales tax.
What HB 451 Actually Was — and Wasn’t
HB 451 was a paint product stewardship program. It was a bipartisan and industry-supported measure. This program would have allowed consumers to return unused paint to retailers for recycling. The program would have been run by PaintCare, a nonprofit created by paint manufacturers through the American Coatings Association. Not by the state. Not by a government agency. By the paint industry itself.
The program would have been funded by a small per-container fee. This fee was estimated at around 75 cents per quart and $1.75 per gallon. It would then be added to the retail price of paint. That fee would go directly to PaintCare, the nonprofit administering the program. Not to Concord. Not to the General Fund. Not to a single government coffer anywhere. For something to be a tax, the revenue has to go to the government. This didn’t. By definition, it was not a sales tax.
The bill passed the House Environment and Agriculture Committee unanimously, 17-0. It passed the full House on a voice vote. It cleared the Senate 13-11. Republican support came from Ways and Means Committee Chairman Tim Lang of Sanbornton. He insisted it was a classic user fee. This is a mechanism New Hampshire has used for decades. The Business and Industry Association supported it. The New Hampshire Municipal Association also backed it. Casella Waste Systems, WM, and the Solid Waste Working Group were supporters too.
Ayotte killed it with a slogan.
The Real Cost to New Hampshire Taxpayers
Here’s the part that should matter to every property taxpayer in the state: you’re already paying for paint disposal. You’re paying more than this program would have cost.
New Hampshire municipalities spent at least $150,000 on paint disposal in 2024, according to the bill’s own fiscal analysis. That figure is almost certainly low. It only accounts for communities participating in the state’s Household Hazardous Waste Grant Program. The Northeast Resource Recovery Association has documented that individual hazardous waste collection events cost communities upward of $13,000 each. Paint constitutes more than half of the materials collected.
Those costs land directly on local property tax bills. New Hampshire already ranks sixth nationally in property tax burden. It has a median annual property tax payment of $6,372 — the third highest in the country. Every dollar a town spends hauling paint to hazardous waste facilities is a dollar added to that burden. HB 451 would have shifted that cost away from property taxpayers. The shift would have been to the people actually buying paint through a privately administered fee. This fee never touched a government account.
The bill’s fiscal note projected a net financial benefit to the state. It would have cost roughly $50,000 per year for a part-time DES employee to oversee the program. This would save municipalities at least $150,000 annually. The savings would likely be far more once you account for the communities not captured in the baseline data. The math wasn’t complicated. The Governor just didn’t bother with it.
This Works Everywhere It’s Been Tried
If paint stewardship were an untested experiment, the Governor’s caution might at least be understandable. It isn’t. PaintCare now operates in twelve states and the District of Columbia. This includes California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. Maryland is launching its program on April 1. Nationally, PaintCare has collected roughly 88 million gallons of paint. They achieved this through more than 2,500 drop-off sites. Most of these sites are at paint and hardware retailers.
The results are not abstract. Oregon was the first state to adopt the program in 2010. It has collected more than 10 million gallons of paint in fifteen years. In the most recent reporting year, 73 percent of latex paint was recycled into new paint. Over 99 percent of oil-based paint was reused or processed for energy recovery.
In Sacramento County, California, the impact was immediate and dramatic. The county’s Department of Waste Management had been spending approximately $150,000 per year to divert leftover paint from landfills. After partnering with PaintCare, those costs dropped to less than $8,000 annually — a savings passed directly to ratepayers. A Product Stewardship Institute evaluation found significant cost savings in California’s hazardous waste programs. These savings ranged from $2,750 to $800,000 per year. The average savings among the programs surveyed was nearly $152,000.
These are not blue-state pet projects. This is a model developed in partnership with the paint industry. It is supported by manufacturers. It operates in states across the political spectrum. The American Coatings Association — the national trade group representing paint manufacturers — built PaintCare specifically to handle this problem. The industry wanted it. The industry designed it.
Who’s Really Pulling the Strings
Ayotte didn’t arrive at this veto on her own. She listened to Americans for Prosperity. This Koch-funded advocacy operation issued a press release branding HB 451 a “hidden paint tax.” Americans for Tax Reform is Grover Norquist’s outfit. They declared that voting for it would violate the no-tax pledge. Ayotte and the supermajority of Republican legislative candidates signed this pledge during the 2024 campaign.
That’s all it took. A press release from a billionaire’s lobbying arm was issued. A bipartisan bill with unanimous committee support was dead. It had industry backing and offered real fiscal benefits for municipalities.
AFP-NH’s statement after the veto was a masterclass in saying nothing. They claimed the bill would have “shifted costs onto hardworking residents” and “expanded government mandates.” The irony is staggering. The costs are already being shifted onto residents. This occurs through property taxes, which are the most regressive tax mechanism in the state. The program would have shifted those costs to a user fee. This fee would be paid only by people who actually buy paint. A private nonprofit would administer it. That’s the opposite of a government mandate. It’s exactly the kind of market-based solution. It’s also the kind fiscal conservatives claim to support. That is, until AFP tells them not to.
The Facebook Comments Tell the Story
The most revealing part of this episode isn’t the veto. The revealing part is what happened in the comments section of Ayotte’s own Facebook post. This post has 4,000 reactions and 139 comments.
Her supporters were the people who were supposed to cheer and amplify the message. Instead, they pointed out that she had just scrawled “NO SALES TAX!” on a paint recycling bill. One commenter observed directly. She wrote “no sales tax” on a “paint product stewardship program” bill. It was not a sales tax bill. Another noted that the fee was a recovery charge to keep paint out of landfills and water supplies. A third pointed out that the bill was designed to make paint manufacturers take responsibility for recycling and disposal. However, she had vetoed it anyway.
These weren’t liberal activists running interference. These were people on the Governor’s own page, reading the actual legislation, and calling out the disconnect in real time. When your own base is fact-checking your victory lap, the victory lap has a problem.
What This Means Going Forward
The veto override is dead on arrival. The Senate vote was 13-11, well short of the two-thirds majority required, and with election season approaching, no one is going to stick their neck out on a bill that AFP has decided to call a tax. Senate President Sharon Carson has already backed the veto, declaring that “New Hampshire Republicans do not support new taxes” — a statement that manages to be both politically convenient and factually wrong about what the bill did.
So here’s where that leaves New Hampshire. Your town will continue to host hazardous waste collection days once or twice a year — if it can afford to. You’ll continue to store half-empty cans of paint in your garage because there’s nowhere convenient to take them. Your property taxes will continue to absorb disposal costs that twelve other states have already figured out how to handle through an industry-run program. And roughly 10 percent of the 780 million gallons of architectural paint sold in the United States each year will continue to go unused, with New Hampshire offering no systematic way to manage it.
Meanwhile, across the border in Vermont, you can walk into a participating retailer any day of the week and drop off your old paint for free. Connecticut, same thing. New York, same. Maine, same. But not here. Not in New Hampshire. Because someone at Americans for Prosperity wrote the word “tax” in a press release, and the Governor reached for a red pen instead of reading the bill.
“NO Sales Tax. Not now. NOT EVER!” makes for a great Facebook post. It makes for terrible governance. And when your own comment section is fact-checking you in real time, maybe it’s time to put down the marker and pick up the legislation.
Got old paint cans stacking up in your garage? Dealt with the hassle and cost of hazardous waste collection day? Tell us about it in the comments — we want to hear how this plays out in your town.
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