Appeal to Self-Interest, Never to Mercy or Gratitude

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Greene says show them what they get. In 2025 New Hampshire’s towns asked the Senate to keep a promise and the police and fire unions asked it to fix its own staffing problem. Same Senate, same table. Only one bill came back off it.

On January 30, 2025, the New Hampshire Senate voted 23 to 0 to make the state pay 7.5 percent of what towns and school districts put into the retirement system for their teachers, police and firefighters. Then, in the same sitting, it laid the bill on the table by voice vote, where it died. On May 15 the same Senate tabled a second retirement bill, 14 to 9, on a motion by Sen. James Gray. That one was for police and firefighters themselves. Six weeks later Gray moved to take it back off the table, the Senate amended it 24 to 0, the House concurred 322 to 41, and the governor signed it the next day.

Two asks, one Senate, one session. Both were about the same pension system, both were about money the state once promised and stopped paying, and both used the word “promise.” One got a voice vote and a shelf. The other got $42 million in the budget and $27.5 million a year promised through 2034.

Robert Greene’s thirteenth law is about how to ask. Do not appeal to mercy, he says, and do not remind people of what they owe you; gratitude is a weak lever and obligation is a weaker one. Show them what they get. The person you are asking will help you when helping you looks like helping themselves.

The towns asked Concord to keep a promise. The police and firefighters asked Concord to fix its own staffing problem. The record of the last four sessions says which of those is the right way to ask the New Hampshire Legislature for money, and it is not close.

Two asks

The first ask is the one Part Eleven of this series traced. From 1977 until 2009 the state paid 35 percent of the employer contribution for local teachers, police and fire; the 2011 budget cut it to zero. Since 2022 a bill to put the state back in for 7.5 percent has been filed every year. The towns’ case for it, as the New Hampshire Municipal Association put it to members before the January 2025 hearing, is that the 2011 change shifted costs onto property taxpayers, and that cuts to state aid “are, in effect, tax increases on property owners.” The House version of the same bill, House Bill 197, says in its first section that it “renews a promise made by state to municipalities” and calls itself the Property Tax Relief Act of 2025. House Finance retained it in March and never let it out.

The second ask comes from the other side of the same 2011 law. That budget also cut benefits for Group II members, the police and firefighters, who were on the job but not yet vested: a smaller multiplier, a later retirement age, a longer averaging period. The unions have been asking for the benefits back ever since. In 2024 they got part of them: House Bill 1647 raised the multiplier for years beyond fifteen, with $26 million attached, signed July 19, 2024. In 2025 they got most of the rest.

How each side asked

Read the hearing coverage side by side and the difference is not the merits. It is the verb tense.

The towns argued backward. The state paid 35 percent for thirty-two years. The state wrote a restoration into law in 2009 and erased it in 2011. The state owes. Every version of the bill since 2022 has been pitched as a correction, and the Legislature’s own fiscal note on the 2025 version reads like an invoice: $28.00 million in fiscal 2026, $28.74 million in fiscal 2027, $29.51 million in fiscal 2028, with the line “This bill does not provide funding.” The benefit offered in return was property tax relief, which is a benefit to the town’s voters, not to the people being asked. In 2022, when the conferees agreed to pay the towns once instead of permanently, the House’s conference chairman, Rep. Patrick Abrami, said out loud why the permanent version failed: how, he asked, could anyone know “that cities and towns are going to put it to tax reduction?” The towns were asking for gratitude and offering a result the askers could not guarantee.

The unions argued forward. In April 2024, at the Senate Finance hearing on the multiplier bill, the police association’s representative said vacancy rates in some departments were as high as 20 percent. Rep. Dan McGuire, a Republican from Epsom who would later move the House’s concurrence on the 2025 bill, told the committee “we have a serious hiring problem.” Sen. Donna Soucy said officers were leaving with six to eight years on the job and that Manchester’s fire department, which once had a waiting list, was getting ten or twelve applicants. The association’s director told senators the bill would help them keep “your troopers.” Not ours. Yours.

That last word is the whole law. The State of New Hampshire is a Group II employer. State troopers and corrections officers are in the same tier, under the same 2011 cuts, with the same retention problem; the retirement system publishes a separate employer rate for the state’s own police and fire members. When the unions said the benefit cut was emptying departments, they were describing the state’s own payroll. When the towns said the cost shift was raising property taxes, they were describing someone else’s.

Then a governor made the ask her own. Kelly Ayotte’s office describes the restoration as part of her promise to improve recruitment and retention of first responders, and when the budget conferees in June 2025 offered $15 million a year instead of the full package, she said the compromise fell short and that the people who serve had earned the benefits. The unions rejected it; the police association’s president said the package was not one they could support. Within a week the money was back, raised from $30 million to $42 million for the biennium out of funds that had been headed to the rainy day fund, and the restoration was attached to a bill that had already passed the House and cleared a Senate vote. The towns have never had a governor make their 7.5 percent her promise. They have had a fiscal note.

The one year the towns did get money shows the same rule from the other side. In 2022 the Senate added a one-time payment of roughly $28 million to a business-tax-cut bill, and Sen. Jeb Bradley explained it as help for people who were struggling. That is a mercy appeal, and it bought exactly one year. Sen. Bob Giuda, who made the motion to table the permanent version, said one year was good. Nobody in that conference room described the payment as something the state needed for itself, and the state has not made it since.

Notice, too, who the winning bill took care of. Municipal officials watched the 2025 Group II debate with their own interest in view: Keene’s city manager said she opposed any version that raised the employer’s share. The law as signed has the state, not the towns, pay the slice of the police and fire rate the new benefits create, 2.27 percent of police payroll and 1.65 percent of fire payroll from fiscal 2028. The unions’ ask succeeded in part because it was built so the towns had no reason to fight it. The towns’ ask has never offered the Legislature anything comparable.

The same Senate, the same table

Be exact about how similar the two paths were, because the difference in outcome is then hard to explain any other way.

In 2022 the towns’ bill passed the House 186 to 159 and the Senate voted 22 to 2 that it ought to pass, then 14 to 10 to table it; the towns got a one-time check instead, and the Tier B members got a change to how their pay is counted at retirement, signed into law that June. In 2023 the towns’ Senate bill passed and was tabled the same day; the $250 million Group II proposal floated that spring did not survive the budget either, which created a study commission instead. In 2024 the towns’ House bill passed on a voice vote and went to interim study in the Senate; the unions’ House bill passed, got $26 million and a signature. In 2025 the towns’ Senate bill passed 23 to 0 and was tabled in the same sitting; the unions’ vehicle was tabled too, 14 to 9, and then was the only one anybody came back for.

The senator who moved to table the police and fire bill in May was the senator who moved to take it off the table in June. The same Senate Finance Committee that sent the towns’ House bill to interim study in 2024, and that February sent the Right-to-Know fee-shifting bill this series covered in Part Ten the same way, voted 8 to 0 to send HB 282 forward. Tabling is not a verdict in the New Hampshire Senate. It is a parking space. What determines whether a bill is retrieved is whether somebody with power needs it retrieved, and that is a function of how the ask was framed, not how worthy it was.

What the losing side said right

None of this means the towns were wrong. They were owed, and the Supreme Court said in 2012 that the state could stop paying anyway. The unions were owed too, and said so: the firefighters’ president called the 2025 law the end of a fourteen-year fight for fairness, and Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, who left the conference committee in part over the $15 million offer, said the full package corrected a broken promise. The gratitude argument was on both sides of the room. The unions added a second argument the towns never had: that the state would lose its own troopers and corrections officers if it did not pay, and that a governor who had promised to fix it was watching.

The scale tells the same story. The 2024 multiplier bill affected about 1,700 Tier B members, by the figure Rep. Carol McGuire gave the Senate Finance Committee. The towns’ bill would spread its benefit across roughly 465 participating employers and every property taxpayer behind them. Rep. Ken Weyler, who chairs House Finance, said during the June 2025 negotiations that a large amount of money was going to a fairly small group and that some of his colleagues resented it. He was describing Greene’s law from the inside. A concentrated benefit to an organized constituency with a governor behind it moves; a diffuse benefit to every property taxpayer in the state, asked for as a matter of fairness, does not. The retirement system’s trustees will tell you both asks are about the same unfunded liability. The Legislature treated them as different species, because they were asked differently.

The verdict

Greene’s advice is cynical about the person being asked and realistic about the asker. The New Hampshire record is the realistic part. A town manager at a Senate Finance hearing has one argument available, that the state should pay what it used to pay, and the hearing record shows it does not move a committee. A police chief at the same hearing can say officers are leaving, and point at the state’s own troopers, and the governor’s own promise. That argument moved $68 million in two sessions and put a $27.5 million-a-year promise on paper through 2034.

If the towns’ bill comes back in January, as it has every year since 2022, and its sponsors want a different result, the law they need to read is not RSA 100-A. It is this one.

Next: Law 14, on posing as a friend and working as a spy, tested against the three laws New Hampshire passed in 2025 to put its local police to work for federal immigration enforcement and keep the towns from saying no.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. No individual is accused of wrongdoing; the legislators and officials named are quoted or paraphrased from the sources listed, and the characterization of how each side framed its request is Granite State Report’s reading of the hearing coverage and bill text. Dollar figures are as appropriated or as stated in the cited fiscal notes and reports; the $68 million total is GSR arithmetic. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data. Granite State Report did not request comment from the N.H. Municipal Association, the N.H. Police Association, the Professional Fire Fighters of New Hampshire, or the legislators named for this piece; any of them may write to the address above and a response will be added with its date.