CONCORD — As Dan Feltes remembers it, it was a tough time to be a legal aid lawyer. The foreclosure crisis of 2009-14 didn’t miss the Granite State. It swept it.
Homeowners, buried by mounting debt and sometimes skyrocketing interest rates, had little recourse to save their homes from flailing banks. Shaky mortgages overloaded with risk left many at the whim of a single abrupt change in fortune. Once foreclosures got underway, relief applications were often rejected.
For the network of staff attorneys at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, the legal battlefield was vast. The cast-out homeowners fit the classic client profile for NHLA, and lawyers at the organization took on as many cases as they could. But a cascade of budget cuts set in motion by the Legislature in 2011 after the Tea Party electoral wave hit NHLA as well. Everyone worked longer and harder.
“I saw two-thirds of my colleagues lose their jobs,” said the 41-year-old Feltes, a state senator from Concord and Democratic gubernatorial candidate. “At a moment when the need was greatest. Where people needed someone in their corner, (Former House Speaker) Bill O’Brien and Republicans cut the feet from under everybody.”
Funding challenges aside, NHLA was seeking legal wins — trailblazing cases that could set new behavioral models for how foreclosures were allowed to proceed. That’s when Carl and Pauline Johnson reached out.
The Loudon couple had moved from a trailer home in Concord to a dream bungalow in Loudon, but they’d done it under false promises of rosy financing from their bank. Now, in 2013, significant medical emergencies had caused them to fall behind, and the foreclosure process was underway.
Feltes and others on the NHLA housing team argued that the loan servicer — who had served the foreclosure notice — had improperly and illegally denied the Johnsons’ loan modification application. They argued it was in the mortgage holder’s interest to give the Johnson’s a second chance. And they won. A settlement with the bank allowed the Johnsons to keep the home of their dreams.
For Feltes, the experience was one of many in those years that solidified a conviction: New Hampshire was not structured to protect lower class and working families. The conviction would push him into politics. This year, it’s pushing him to make an attempt at becoming governor.
“So many people who were just doing the right thing, taking responsibility and working hard were being left out and left behind,” he said. “We’re seeing the same people … fall through the cracks now that fell through the cracks then.”
New Hampshire was not a part of Dan Feltes’s childhood, but labor issues were. Growing up in Dubuque, Iowa, the youngest of four siblings, Feltes (pronounced FEL-tis) was shaped by his parents’ working situation; his dad’s job at Flexsteel Industries plant, a recreational vehicle factory that just shut down this April, and his mom’s part-time gigs.
The elder Feltes worked for 45 years; for seven years in a row, he never missed a shift. But the experience that stuck with Dan the most was the period when his dad was not working: the strike.
The unionized employees were fighting for a fairer contract, and negotiations had broken down. The ensuing standoff and worker strike lasted for weeks.
Dan was 4, with little understanding of labor relations. But the stories growing up left a mark.
“It was like bread and cheese lines,” Feltes said. “It was literally that kind of a situation. But everyone hung together. The union hung together, families hung together, and eventually got a contract that made sense.”
He grew up blue collar, passing the time with football and baseball. His parents taught hard work and the virtues of community, Feltes says. They didn’t plant in him dreams of going into politics.
“Any kitchen table conversation was about working people and looking out for workers, literally,” he said. “… If political conversations came up, that’s what it invariably went back to.”
Though Iowa-grown, Feltes wasn’t tethered there long. He finished an undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa and jetted to Washington, D.C., for a Master’s degree in public policy. Then he jumped to law school back at the University of Iowa, with dreams of public interest law.
“The general momentum in law school is go make money, join a firm,” he said. “That’s the general track. But I just was never interested in it.”
Through law school, Feltes explored opportunities up and down the Midwest — in an internship in a Detroit legal aid organization and the Chicago Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Illinois Attorney General’s office.
In his third year of law school, he organized the University of Iowa’s part of the “Student Hurricane Network,” a nationwide effort to recruit law students to help after Hurricane Katrina. The group arrived in New Orleans for 10 days, splitting time between rebuilding houses and sorting out legal paperwork for displaced residents.
Studying law itself didn’t especially appeal to Feltes. But applying it on the ground did. In Detroit, he worked with community groups and organizers, helping stop eviction, fight redlining and clear abandoned properties for repurposing.
The relationships he could build meant more to Feltes than the briefs he might write, he said. And the location he did it in mattered less than the work itself.
“Working with people on the ground, it’s not just some tangential concept of academic policy,” Feltes said. “What is going on right now that’s impacting their lives? How do you solve a problem, get them from Point A to Point B by different mechanisms?”
That background would eventually inform his decisions years later, when he came to New Hampshire.
Moving to the Granite State wasn’t Feltes’ direct choice; he followed a girlfriend at the time, who had just accepted a public defense job there. Suddenly, Dan Feltes was applying for jobs in New Hampshire.
Again, Feltes had a choice. He had offers from private firms and an offer from New Hampshire Legal Aid. Again, he chose the non-lucrative path. That was 2006.
In New Hampshire, the state’s contradictions were appealing. “It’s an interesting mix of rugged individualism but also collective action,” Feltes said. It reminded him of his own upbringing, he added.
Starting as a lawyer at New Hampshire Legal Assistance Feltes, was confronted with the problems of the state and the people facing them. That included paltry unemployment insurance, clients with mental illness, job training efforts, domestic violence survivors, senior issues, veterans benefits, and energy customers. Later on, in his role as the director of the Housing Justice Project, Feltes saw housing disparities in New Hampshire that fell on people of color. The problems were personal, but they were defined by bigger shortcomings in the state.
“The people that we helped oftentimes had no one in their corner, ever,” he said. “It was a lot to reach out, ask for help.”
Solving the problems inevitably meant navigating the laws as they were written. Doing that enough times made Feltes interested in changing them.
As the years went by, Feltes became more active on the policy side, joining the army of lobbyists in orange badges to press for bills in the State House, in his case on behalf of Legal Assistance.
Feltes was happy in his role, preferring the satisfaction of direct impact to the remoteness of other areas of law.
About halfway through his time with New Hampshire Legal Assistance, the recession hit, and the urgency of the work grew.
Feltes’s entry into New Hampshire politics was almost as accidental as his entry into New Hampshire itself.
In June 2014, Sylvia Larsen, the 20-year Democratic senator and former Senate President from Concord, abruptly announced her retirement — seven days before the filing period for new candidates, setting off a mini-shockwave in capital city politics. Feltes considered it quickly, consulted his wife, Erin, and threw in his name.
Feltes, still a legal aid attorney with no political experience, was not a top pick for the seat. His name didn’t even make the shortlist of interested candidates reported by the Concord Monitor in the days after Larsen’s announcement. But he worked to make inroads, raise money and collect endorsements, and by September he had swept the primary for the seat.
Six years into his tenure at Senate District 15, the state senator argues he’s the candidate who’s kept the struggle of low-income families and homeowners most at the forefront of his career. That’s included efforts in recent years to pass a slew of energy policies, job training efforts, expansion to unemployment security, and of course, his paid family and medical leave bill — all of which have been unsuccessful in the face of Republican opposition and charges of “income tax.”
Feltes is in a primary with Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky, D-Concord, on Sept. 8, with the winner to face Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.
But with economic storm clouds ahead, Feltes says he’s the one to help the state manage because he’s done it before.
“That’s what this is all about to me,” he said. “That’s what this whole race is about to me. That’s what this next two years are going to be about. How are you going to get out of this mess, and what are you going to look out for in the rearview mirror?”