By Patrick Adrian
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CLAREMONT — For state senatorial candidate Beatriz Pastor, strengthening Broadband accessibility and connectivity across New Hampshire is not only a top agenda priority but seemingly an underlying theme to her political worldview.
Pastor, a Dartmouth College professor and former three-term state representative, seeks to be the Democratic Party nominee on Tuesday, Sept. 8, for the District 5 seat in the New Hampshire Senate, to replace the retiring State Sen. Martha Hennessey. District 5 represents the communities of Claremont, Charlestown, Cornish, Canaan, Enfield, Hanover, Lebanon, Lyme and Plainfield. Pastor’s primary opponent is Sue Prentiss, a city councilor and former mayor in Lebanon.
In an interview with The Eagle Times on Monday, Pastor said she learned through experience that she could achieve far more for local communities by working at the state level.
“I realized there were a lot of things you can do from the legislature that you cannot do locally,” Pastor said. “It’s a different kind of agency and you have the ability that cannot be done at the community or town level.”
As a state legislator from 2008 to 2014, Pastor championed issues like energy efficiency, broadband connectivity, health care accessibility and education in ways to empower local communities through state and federal partnership. In 2010 Pastor sponsored the Property Assessed Clean Energy bill, which enables municipalities to create lending programs for property owners to make energy efficiency upgrades to their homes or buildings and repay the loan in installments equal to their calculated energy savings. Passed by the House in 2010, the bill was later signed into law by Gov. Maggie Hassan.
“I worked very closely with the municipalities,” Pastor said. “I didn’t want to create a law that would have to be administered top-down from Concord. I wanted something that the communities and municipalities would be able to administer themselves.
Pastor attempted a similar type of bill with focus on expanding broadband access in the state, though with less success. But in 2020, with a growing public recognition in the importance of broadband, Pastor is more optimistic about achieving results.
“That’s one thing I will return right back to [if elected],” Pastor said. “I don’t have to tell you how important Broadband is . . . It’s about being able to work from home, being able to do school from home. And it’s about economic growth, because if you have an area that’s really well connected, people are going to live there.”
The lack of Broadband access in many parts of New Hampshire has become even more glaring since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic, particularly in rural communities where a lack of broadband infrastructure posed numerous obstacles in transitioning to remote services.
For Pastor, internet connectivity and education are essential bridges to connect equitable opportunities for all New Hampshire communities, regardless of their location.
In respect to education, Pastor said that fixing New Hampshire’s education inequity will require an “radical restructuring of the state’s funding system, which ranks last nationwide in the state-level contribution amount to schools.
“Sixty-two percent of the financing of schools comes from the property taxes,” Pastor said. “All you have to do is look at the tax base of a town to know if it is a rich, power-based town or a poor one… If you are in an area that is not thriving, you have a real problem, because not only do you not have a lot of revenue to pay for your schools but you have to bring your taxes up.”
This education funding must also include the post-secondary institutions such as four-year colleges, community colleges and trade-education programs,” Pastor said.
“We need an education system that takes our young people all the way to being productive in the workforce, so they can stay [in New Hampshire],” Pastor said. “Because too many kids, if they go [out of state] to college, don’t come back.”
New Hampshire’s college tuitions are among the highest nationwide, which further discourages many youth from attending a four-year college or leave many in tremendous debt, Pastor said. She also believes New Hampshire needs to strengthen its post-secondary vocational paths.
As a Lyme resident, Pastor said she finds similar economic challenges in her northern part of the district as in southern communities like Charlestown.
In many ways the economic wealth and resources in Lebanon and Hanover are more “an anomaly” than the embodiment of District 5, Pastor said.
Lyme, despite its close proximity to Hanover, reminds Pastor more of Charlestown. Both are small, former agriculturally-centered towns that struggle with high property taxes and, as a result, a lack of resources to revitalize their economies.
“Lebanon and Hanover, with the college and the hospital, do pretty well,” Pastor said. “I need to do something to help everybody else, because the ‘everybody else’ are the people of the state who don’t get enough help.”
District 5 residents who wish to learn more about Pastor’s campaign may visit her website at https://www.beatrizpastor.org/.
The Eagle Times has also reached out to Prentiss and the Republican Party candidate for District 5 Tim O’Hearne for interviews.
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