Publications / Article

New Hampshire’s Success Story

DECENTRALISM FILE

Chris Sununu

Christopher T. Sununu (1974-   ) was born and raised in Salem NH, one of eleven children, and graduated from Thomas Jefferson School of Science and Technology in Virginia, while his father was Chief of Staff to President George H.W. Bush. His father had previously served as Governor of New Hampshire, and an older brother John served as a New Hampshire U.S. Senator.

For ten years, Sununu worked as an environmental engineer designing systems and solutions for cleaning up waste sites] under the supervision of licensed engineers. He specialized in soil and groundwater remediation, wastewater treatment plants, and landfill designs. From 2006 to 2010, Sununu was an owner and director of Sununu Enterprises, a family business and strategic consulting group in Exeter, New Hampshire. It focuses on local, national and international real estate development, venture technologies and business acquisitions

In 2010, Sununu led a group of investors in the buyout of Waterville Valley Resort, where he worked as Chief Executive Officer, employing over 700 people in the White Mountains region.

Sununu was a member of the New Hampshire Executive Council from 2011 to 2017. He was elected to the first of four two-year terms as Governor in 2016.

The excerpt below is from a talk Gov. Sununu gave at a Cato Institute event in Naples Florida in early February 2022.

New Hampshire’s Success Story

We have other sources of revenue [than the dividends and interest tax, that Gov. Sununu succeeded in repealing] in New Hampshire.. Most of tax you pay is property tax. We have pretty high property taxes, to be sure. But the beauty of that… well, I don’t want to say the beauty of a tax, but the beauty of that system.. is that I live in a town of 1,500 people. If I don’t like how my taxes are being spent, I know the first name and the cell phone number of every one of my town selectmen and my budget committee. And if I don’t like it, I’m going to see Art in aisle seven at the grocery store. And I’m going to give Art a piece of my mind for not passing the right budget and balancing it. So there’s great accountability in that. You know folks by first name in your community who are really controlling the bulk of your taxes. So it’s a very different system, but it allows the individuals and the families and the citizens to have so much say in that process. I believe very much as a governor, I shouldn’t be pulling in more power. I should be decentralizing power, and that’s a big part of what’s worked so well for New Hampshire.

Share: