News

Meet the Candidate: Sue Prentiss

By Patrick Adrian
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CLAREMONT — For state senatorial candidate Sue Prentiss, a run for elected office was never in her sights when 2020 began. But as unanticipated events unfolded — due in large part to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, circumstances would ultimately shape her decision to reconsider.

“It was a Monday night when COVID first broke out and [I learned that] Sen. Martha Hennessey had announced her retirement, and I thought about it,” Prentiss told the Eagle Times on Friday. “I’m a person who has been in public service, run a state agency and been a local elected official… so I just felt like I could take this unique experience from serving locally and at the state level and bring it to the state senate.”

Prentiss, a city councilor and former mayor of Lebanon, is vying to be the Democratic Party nominee for New Hampshire Senate District 5 to replace the retiring State Sen. Martha Hennessey. District 5 represents the communities of Claremont, Charlestown, Cornish, Canaan, Enfield, Hanover, Lebanon, Lyme and Plainfield. Prentiss’s primary opponent is Beatriz Pastor, a Dartmouth professor and former three-term state representative.

While Prentiss and Pastor share similar legislative priorities, including broadband access, renewable energy and equitable education funding, each candidate brings their own set of strengths and experiences.

Prentiss, a professional paramedic and health official, has worked directly in the Sullivan and Grafton communities that partly comprise District 5. In 1992 she served as a rural outreach coordinator at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where she helped local medical responders to provide needs such as training courses. She continued to build relationships with local selectmen when she took over as chief of Emergency Medical Services at the New Hampshire Department of Safety.

Prentiss said her time spent “on the ground” in Claremont and neighboring communities has helped her build personal connections to the communities and a first-hand understanding of these communities’ assets and needs.

“[Serving as a senator] is a new way of being on the ground,” Prentiss said. “It may be different from running a rural outreach health project, but what’s the same are the issues, having plans to address the issues, relationships with people and knowing who and where to go to get things done.”

Prentiss said the state legislature needs to take bolder steps to address climate change and renewable energy, as the state’s policies are lagging behind the surrounding states. As a municipal official, Prentiss supports New Hampshire’s use of tax incentives to encourage property owners to invest in renewable energy upgrades and policies that enable municipalities to pursue their own renewable projects. But Prentiss also said the state needs to consider initiative energy-efficient or energy-renewable regulations, as Maine and other New England states have pursued. Such regulations could include insulation standards or solar capability for new public buildings, she said.

“Sometimes there’s a little sticker shock, but we save money down the road,” Prentiss said. “There may be incentives that we need to tie to [a state energy plan], but we also have to help bring support to it.”

Prentiss believes the legislature must take similarly substantive action to raise the state minimum wage, create a state-run public option for health care, increase broadband capability statewide and overhaul the state’s education funding system,

“Historically we’ve held this line against a broad-based tax [to fund education],” Prentiss said. “But has the time come [to change]? Because opportunities are not fair from community to community, and I think a lot of that starts at our schools.”

In addition to wanting better funding for early education, Prentiss stressed bolstering support for workforce development programs and community colleges, to combat the loss of young people who leave the state to reside elsewhere.

“It’s going to take us awhile to right a ship,” Prentiss said. “It starts by bringing children into school and Pre-K; having a quality investment in curriculum, programs and activities across the state; and then what are the opportunities for the students coming out?”

Prentiss visited Claremont on Friday to participate in an interview with the Eagle Times. She later attended a meet-and-greet event hosted at Taverne on the Square.

The candidate said she is a regular visitor in Claremont and praised the city’s revitalization and growth downtown.

“When you reach the Makerspace on Main Street, you start to see this cone of success and movement that’s happening here,” she said.

The proposed Pleasant Street revitalization project, if coupled with the proposed apartment building in the Mill District and the existing additions of the Claremont Makerspace, Red River headquarters and The Common Man, Prentiss said “Claremont is really on the move.”

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