Sununu: Millennials wanted
Governor Christopher Sununu has issued another executive order. This time, it’s to establish the Governor’s Millennial Advisory Council, which will offer insight and policy recommendations to the governor regarding millennial issues in the Granite State. In announcing the order, Sununu said, quote:
“We have to ensure that New Hampshire remains the best place to live, work and raise a family for all Granite Staters, and the Millennial Advisory Council is a big step in the right direction. The Council will offer insights and policy recommendations to attract and retain a millennial workforce and work to address other issues that millennials face all across the Granite State.”
Sununu restricts membership on the committee, which will contain two people from each county, and two each from Manchester and Nashua, to those born between nineteen eighty and two thousand. Sununu will make all appointments to the committee.
Eversource: Improving the grid
Eversource is crowing about the success it says it’s having in improving the reliability of the electric grid. In a press release issued yesterday, the state’s largest utility said there were twenty five percent fewer power interruptions this spring and summer as compared to the same period a year ago. The utility credits its enhanced tree trimming and new equipment that has strengthened its power delivery system.
The leading cause of power outages in New Hampshire is trees and limbs falling onto power lines. Eversource has spent forty one million dollars tree trimming throughout the state this year to remove hazards. So far, tree crews have trimmed along more than one thousand fifteen hundred fifty miles of overhead power lines and plan to complete another twenty eight hundred miles before the end of the year.
Eversource: Upgrading grid
In addition to tree trimming, Eversource continues to modernize and harden the energy grid. This year, Eversource will invest more than a quarter of a billion dollars to upgrade the grid, including:
- Installing stronger, more durable poles and covered wires to make the system more resilient to severe weather
- Automating equipment at substations, which allows system operators to identify issues as soon as they occur and reroute power to customers
- Installing more than 200 smart switches, which are used to isolate trouble spots and reroute power to customers, reducing the duration of an outage and the number of customers impacted
- Reconfiguring and rebuilding power lines to create redundancy on the energy grid, enhancing systems operators’ ability to reroute power to customers during an outage.
Huh?
The Derry Town Council will hold a workshop on volunteer recruitments on September twenty sixth at six thirty in the third floor meeting room of the Municipal Center. We have no additional details as that was the entirety of the notice we received.
News from or own backyard continues after this.
NH Supremes: Rule again on RTK case involving Metzler
The New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled in another Right to Know case involving S A U Fifty Five. This one won’t make Right to Know advocates happy, but it should. The court upheld a Superior Court decision not to require that electronic documents be transmitted by email. It said the S A U’s policy of requiring the requester purchase a new thumb drive for the transfer of electronic data during regular office hours conformed to state law.
The case was brought by David Taylor after the S A U school board, which includes all members of the Timberlane Regional and Hampstead school boards, refused to release the minutes of a non-public session in which they evaluated Emperor, Earl Metzler. Taylor’s suit forced the board to correct violations it committed against the Right to Know Law and release the minutes of the discussion on Metzler’s evaluation.
Metzler: Impositions allowed
However, the court upheld the district’s policy refusing to email electronic data, requiring the purchase of a new thumb drive to transfer data, and charging for the copies transferred onto the drive.
In upholding the Superior Court’s decision, the Supreme Court laid out the statute so as to clearly demonstrate what needed to be done to change the law, which it basically said did not require what Taylor was asking for.
School board member Donna Green, whose successful Right to Know Supreme Court case was cited in the Taylor decision, reacted to the ruling in a blog post, saying, Quote:
Green: Blasts SAU
Your SAU went to the state’s Supreme Court simply because they did not want to forward one short email to Mr. Taylor, and instead insisted on charging him $7.49 for a thumb drive and requiring him to commute from his home in Durham to the Plaistow office to collect it. Your money is no object at SAU 55. For legal fees we have a bottomless ATM. Neither is the public’s convenience at the forefront of the SAU’s administration. (Please don’t think elected officials get treated any differently. I have a collection of thumb drives.)
Administrative interference
She went on saying quote:
Your elected representatives have the opportunity to correct this repugnant state of affairs at least in Timberlane. As chairman of Timberlane’s Policy Committee, I have introduced a policy on responding to Right to Know requests which requires the requested information to be posted on our public website, but the policy is being filibustered by the administration and no policies at all are moving out of Policy Committee. In fact, the administration has stonewalled policy meetings throughout the summer and even one that was supposed to occur tonight by not providing a quorum of administrators. Why are administrators on school board standing committees? Why do administrators hold the majority votes on all school board standing committees? Why are administrators setting policy when you elect representatives for that function? Ah, kind readers, this is Timberlane – the land where your elected officials are clutching a toy steering wheel while the superintendent pushes their baby carriage.
That’s NEWS from our own backyard! Girard at Large hour ___ is next
