Amanda Loder was StateImpact’s multimedia reporter until the project merged with the New Hampshire Public Radio site in July 2013. She now serves as a reporter and Weekend Edition Host for NHPR. You can continue to follow her work at @AmandaLoderNHPR, at nhpr.org, and on New Hampshire Public Radio.
Flood control, town tax reimbursements, and tight state budgets have NH and Mass wrestling over back payments
Since the economy tanked and the legislature started slashing the budget, there’s been talk at the town level about so-called “down-shifting.” That’s when the state stops supporting local programs or making certain payments to towns, forcing localities to pick up the slack. Now, the legislature’s considering what to do when not only New Hampshire, but Massachusetts, has shifted costs.
At issue is the drily titled 1953 Merrimack River Valley Flood Control Compact. As Tricia Nadolny reports in the Concord Monitor, 18 New Hampshire communities agreed to give up a set amount of land for flood control. In exchange, Massachusetts would reimburse the state for 70 percent of the towns’ lost tax revenue each year. New Hampshire would pony-up the other 30 percent, and between the two states, the towns would get their lost tax funds.
But, Nadolny writes:
“About seven years ago, Massachusetts stopped covering its part, leading New Hampshire to pay the reimbursement in full. But in 2011 the state paid only its 30 percent share, and this year New Hampshire hasn’t covered even that much.” Continue Reading →
These are the posts you decided were most worth your time
Before you prepare to pack up and check out for the weekend, we’ve rounded up the top five posts that caught your collective eye. From obscure urbanization studies to electricity deregulation and women entrepreneurs, our Essential StateImpact posts make for a particularly motley crew this week.
Why Urban States Are More Productive Than Rural Ones (And New England’s A Case In Point): Credit Suisse put out a niche report looking at the effect of urbanization on emerging markets. What got it buzz in the American business press, though, was a graph linking US states’ productivity to urbanization. Besides just being a cool graph, it’s a great illustration of the northern/southern New England divide. We delve into the data and explain the Credit Suisse findings.
WiValley Battles Topography And Budgets To Connect Monadnocks: Swaths of New Hampshire are struggling with slow internet speeds in a high-speed innovation economy. For one guy, a frustrating telecommute morphed into an enterprise to bring broadband to the Monadnock Region. And he’s just one of several small operations hoping to bridge the so-called “last mile” of service. Continue Reading →
Using data from the federal stimulus-tracking website, Bosse ran some figures and determined that with $985.7 million in New Hampshire funding, only 845 full-time jobs have been created. That’s a cost of more than $1.1 million for each job. Bosse notes this is a sharp contrast to the Obama Administration’s original promise to “create or save” 16,000 jobs in the Granite State: Continue Reading →
“New Hampshire appears well on its way toward deregulating the price of retail telephone service and loosening most other aspects of a century of government oversight, although details about Internet-based voice communication remain to be worked out…
The bill will be discussed in a working session by the Science, Technology and Energy Committee, partly in response to some concerns from the Public Utilities Commission. But it appears headed to the floor of the House soon, where it has bipartisan support. It has already passed the state Senate.” Continue Reading →
Years after NH partially deregulated its electricity market, a company is challenging PSNH
More than a decade ago, the New Hampshire legislature partially deregulated its electricity market. The move was supposed to allow residential customers the chance to buy power from companies other than Public Service of New Hampshire, which dominates the state’s electricity market. But for a long time, nothing really happened.
Kim faced challenges from Nigerian Finance Minister and former World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and Colombian José Antonio Ocampo of the UN, who formerly worked with the Colombian Central Bank. But, Lowrey reports, they were long-shots. That’s because “Europe, the United States and Japan control about half of the voting shares.” Continue Reading →
Heavily urbanized states--like Massachusetts--tend to be more productive than their rural counterparts
A new report from Credit Suisse has been getting a fair bit of buzz in the business press, largely thanks to the graph below. The report focused on how urbanization affects developing economies. As an example of the differences between rural and urban productivity, researchers broke down government data on American GDP by state and by hour. Then they looked at how urbanized the states are. And they found that, by and large, the more urban the state, the more more productive it was on average. (The glaring exceptions to this rule being ultra-resource-rich Alaska and Wyoming.) Continue Reading →
The sovereign debt crisis has hurt the European economy and sparked unrest across the continent
To people not directly involved in fixing, analyzing, or monitoring the Eurozone crisis, it can take on the character of black magic. And it’s easy to think that the dark arts of the European Central Bank’s low-interest lending initiatives, national bond auctions, and bailout talk have little bearing on our daily lives.
In fact, they very much matter.
Economists say Europe’s ongoing sovereign debt difficulties could very well plunge the continent into a double-dip recession, if it hasn’t already. And, as America’s recent history demonstrates, when the economy’s on the downswing, not many people are anxious to buy anything. Those jitters ultimately hit the export economy…and when orders slow down, so does demand for workers to make the stuff we ship overseas. Although tiny New Hampshire isn’t exactly a Rustbelt-style manufacturing powerhouse, the state makes a lot of advanced, high-demand products, which means it’s heavily exposed to what’s going on in Europe. Continue Reading →
Refinery closures could trigger bigger gas price spikes
The quirky calculus of oil price economics is notoriously complex. What that often translates to, in terms of media coverage, is continual score-keeping. How much have prices risen over the past week? From this time a month ago? A year ago?
Foster’s Daily Democratis particularly good at keeping up with the flow of figures. For example, the newspaper noted New Hampshire saw an average price increase of 5.3 cents a gallon last week. The national average price spike was much lower, at only 1.4 cents per gallon. Foster’s reports:
“Including the change in gas prices in New Hampshire during the past week, prices Sunday were 21.7 cents per gallon higher than the same day one year ago and 15.4 cents per gallon higher than a month ago… Continue Reading →
“A developer is looking to build a sprawling warehouse operation on Integra Drive, off Manchester Street, that Concord officials say could employ 150 people.
But the name of the company that would use the proposed 350,000-square-foot facility seems a closely guarded secret. Land records provide few clues, and both City Manager Tom Aspell and Deputy City Manager for Development Carlos Baia said last week they don’t know who it is. Continue Reading →
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