I was placed on the Children and Family law committee to get into the nitty gritty of the bills that would affect NH families. In that committee, issues arise that call for immediate action to remedy harm caused by our current laws. One which was brought to the forefront this year was the issue of the amount of parenting time not being a factor when calculating child support. We heard testimony from many parents who have been crushed by the current method of calculating child support. The current method has some parents paying 40% of their wages in child support to the other parent while trying to care for their child 40-50% of the time.

The struggles of these families really motivated me to advocate for movement on this issue, but we needed to get this legislation right because we don’t want to have unintended consequences ravaging other families by a rush to fix one problem. The legislation stalled in the House early this year with a bipartisan agreement to try to work on the issue and try to attach language to a Senate bill later in the year so that a full year of continuing damage would not be leveled on these families. However, the current crisis threw a wrench into that plan.

Over the last few months I have been in contact with legislators and people that have been victims of the current system trying to keep the pressure on for some movement on the issue so that we have something with wide support going into the next session. Using research from UNH and learning from what worked in other states, I believe we have a proposal which will help solve this problem.

I would be honored if you would vote this Nov 3rd to send me back to Concord to continue the work on issues like this.