Voting for Lebanon city and school offices will take place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 13, at Kilton Public Library in West Lebanon (Ward 1), United Methodist Church (Ward 2) and City Hall (Ward 3).
Lebanon
While five seats on the Council are up for grabs this year, the only race is in Ward 3, where two members of the Planning Board are running for the open seat.
The Lebanon School Board will also see four candidates running for three open seats.
Residents Carl Porter and Karen Zook are vying for the two-year City Council seat held by Sarah Welsch, who is stepping down from the nine-member body after a single term.
The district represents the northeast corner of the city, and includes Mount Support, downtown Lebanon and Route 4 to the Enfield border.
“I’m running for Council because I have a deep love of Lebanon. I think it’s a great place to live,” said Porter, vice chairman of the city’s Planning Board and a former city historian.
Porter, who also works at Jake’s Market and Deli, is a lifelong resident and lives on the last three acres of the former Cottage Hill Farm, which was operated by his grandparents until 1986.
He’s continued their tradition of farming and has developed an orchard on the property, which helps supply the jam and jelly business Porter runs alongside his wife, Maghan.
Porter said he’s considered running for City Council in the past, but wanted to wait until his life became more settled after the birth of his fourth child in 2014. The Porters also had twins in 2013.
“Having three born within a year, it’s a lot of work,” Porter said with a laugh.
Porter said he hopes to make Lebanon a more affordable and livable community, starting with efforts to ease residents’ tax burden.
“I don’t know if there’s any silver bullet to make is so that we can do necessary upgrades to our infrastructure without it impacting the tax base so much,” he said, “but the continual increases year after year, certainly it erodes the ability of young families to settle in Lebanon.”
Porter said he’s been disheartened to hear that so many of the city’s workforce commutes from elsewhere, partially because of a lack of available housing.
“These people are spending so much money on gas in a month that they would be spending in Lebanon if they lived in Lebanon,” he said.
The city should be promoting the development of new units, he said, adding it needs to sell surplus land and work harder to guide projects to completion.
Porter also called the recently completed visioning study of downtown “very ambitious.” However, he supports its calls for mixed-use development and growth in the downtown.
West Lebanon, and the Westboro Rail Yard, are also areas Porter hopes to improve, if elected to the Council.
“West Lebanon is long overdue for some attention,” he said.
Zook, a fellow Planning Board member, co-owns the downtown craft store Scratch.
A former teacher who attended Dartmouth College, Zook moved to Lebanon in 2016 and opened shop in the former Shoetorium space on the mall.
“This was my favorite place I’ve ever lived, so I wanted to come up here and actually do the business and settle,” she said.
Zook is also the founder of Art City New Hampshire, a nonprofit which aims to bring public art to downtown.
“If you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it right,” Zook said of her civic activity. “If you’re going to invest in the community, you just have to do it.”
Zook said she’s running for City Council on a platform of promoting small businesses, fostering community engagement and bringing economic revitalization to the area.
“We do spend so much time sitting here, and looking out at the mall and thinking what would be great for this,” she said during an interview at Scratch on Tuesday.
Lebanon needs more small businesses and affordable housing to attract young people, Zook said, adding most millennials would be hard pressed to afford the typical first month’s rent and security deposit for an apartment.
She also called for a more streamlined city approval process, and has discussed with officials the idea of developing a manual for developers and businesses new to Lebanon.
“People here are so great. We just have to give them the opportunity and the ability to participate as fully as they want to live their lives,” Zook said.
The downtown visioning study is also a “fantastic” model for a more walkable and pedestrian-friendly community, she said.
“Anything we can do to get more people out of their cars and participating in the community is great,” Zook said. “It’s New Hampshire, you need a car, but you don’t need to be in it to go from here to Lucky’s (Coffee Garage).”
West Lebanon is also a focus of Zook’s campaign. Art City New Hampshire hopes to help install Christmas lights there, she said, adding the community should also get its own visioning study.
“After the library closes, there’s no businesses, there’s no lights on and it looks dark and dead,” Zook said. “If you’re looking to move there, it’s kind of a downer.”
City Councilors Jim Winny, Bruce Bronner, Tim McNamara and Erling Heistad are also running to retain their seats unopposed on the municipal ballot.
School Board Candidates
On the School Board, four residents, including two incumbents, have filed to run for three seats, which will be taken by the top-three vote getters.
Incumbents Wendy Hall and Mary Davidson are running for another three-year term on the board, while Tom Harkins and Bill Sharp have also filed for the open seats.
Davidson said she’s running for another term to see through several initiatives that began during her tenure, including a strategic plan adopted to improve the district’s curriculum, culture and facilities.
She also wants to oversee Lebanon’s proposed $28.9 million plan to modernize school buildings. Whether to adopt the plan will be decided by voters on the ballot.
Davidson, who taught in Lebanon for 34 years, said the project is important to provide students with improved spaces, so that they “could some into the future with something to be proud of.”
She also hopes to help foster greater ties between the community and school district, potentially developing more ways children could interact with the city’s cultural institutions.
Hall, who owns Hanover Massage Therapy Clinic, is also running to continue progress made in recent years.
She’s lived in Lebanon for about 8 years and has two children in district schools.
“I really love that kind of service to to the community,” she said of the School Board. “I love thinking about complex things and how to resolve problems.”
Hall is chairwoman of the board’s Facilities and Finance Committee, and helped to develop the school district’s modernization plan. She also is a proponent of planned energy improvements in Lebanon schools.
Voters will decided on the ballot whether to approve a $4.7 million contract agreement with the energy consulting company Trane Building Advantage, which would install new equipment in Lebanon schools that are expected to pay for themselves in energy savings
“I feel (the projects) really come out of what the community is asking for,” Hall said, adding the resulting construction will help provide teachers and students with needed space.
Harkins, a Spanish teacher at the Lyme School, is hoping for his first term on the School Board.
He has two children who attend the Mount Lebanon School, and another who is approaching school age. It’s the drive to stay active in their lives and the greater Lebanon community that pushed him to enter the race, Harkins said.
The modernization proposal and its potential to improve the schools also interests Harkins, who is hoping to see the plan approved at the polls.
At Mount Lebanon specifically, he said, it would provide the funding needed to improve the kitchen so that hot meals can be served to students.
“When I learned that they can’t cook their own food that, to me, feels like that would be a very very big improvement for the school,” he said.
Harkins said his experience as a teacher could also be an asset to the board.
“I’ve been a teacher going on 20 years now, seeing how that works from the inside, any experience you can have with schools is going to be helpful,” he said.
Also running for the board is Sharp, the former Grafton County register of deeds from 2007-2010.
Sharp, a retired instrumental music teacher, said he hopes to foster an “adequate education,” one that properly prepares students for graduation by building self-esteem, work ethic, and a solid arts and sports education, “which come together to make a whole, healthy person.”
Sharp said current education of students is falling behind and often doesn’t meet the needs they require to enter the job market.
“How many people go down to McDonald’s and can’t make change if the register battery runs out?” he asked. “How many children can do their homework if they can’t plug their calculator in?”
He also suggested police sweep the schools more often with drug detecting dogs, and said he would be open to the idea of arming some teachers.
“Some teachers I wouldn’t trust to go in and feed my cat,” Sharp said, adding others might have the right mindset to take on training.
The notion of arming teachers runs counter to the Lebanon School Board’s policies, which prohibit faculty from carrying guns onto school grounds. Members of the current board on Wednesday also reiterated their support of an expanded policy that bans the public from carrying firearms on campus.
That policy is in conflict with a current state law, according to the Attorney General’s Office, but the board is hoping pending legislation might resolve an ongoing controversy over guns in schools.
Sharp has also drawn past criticism from his prior races for county office. In 2014, he made unsubstantiated claims that Barack Obama was using heroin and that his opponent was smoking marijuana.
“It’s an entirely different subject,” said Sharp, who as recently as 2016 claimed that Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya (his birth certificate proves he was born in Hawaii).
“I’m a straight shooter and have good moral upbringing,” Sharp said.
The Lebanon Area Chamber of Commerce will host a candidates night for both Lebanon school and city candidates from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the Lebanon Opera House.
The event will be taped and broadcast during the week on CATV for those unable to attend.
Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com or 603-727-3223.