Gov. Kelly Ayotte (Photo by Matthew Lomanno)
Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte takes office this month with a Republican trifecta of control in Concord, a history of working across the aisle, and a focus on workforce development and housing among her top priorities.
Ayotte emphasizes she spent her life in the state and says she looks forward to working hard on behalf of Granite State businesses and the people of NH. “Part of that is bringing people together around real challenges,” she says.
While she faces greater budget challenges than her predecessor, Gov. Chris Sununu, who served four terms and had access to billions of dollars in COVID funds, she comes into the office with a strongly Republican controlled Legislature and Executive Council whereas Sununu had to work with a closely divided Legislature in his final term that made getting any bills passed difficult.
Dante Scala, professor of political science and international affairs at the University of NH, says ample COVID funds and high state business tax revenues allowed Sununu to remain centrist on many issues. Ayotte, meanwhile, will have much tighter budgets. “[Ayotte] is a throwback, or an older version of the Republican party before Trump,” Scala says, explaining a distinction between Gov.-elect Ayotte and conservative activists in the state’s Legislature. “At some point though, she’ll look back on Sununu and be envious. Part of the reason for his success was that he always had a lot of money to play with and could always do this and that to get the budget to tack to the center. It might be more like it was for Lynch and Hassan, who had a more difficult set of choices than Sununu.”
Ayotte, though, knows the housing crisis and workforce shortage, as well as other challenges facing the state, will take more than the Legislature to solve. “I plan to partner with the private sector on these challenges, including small businesses which are the heart and soul of New Hampshire. I did this on the campaign trail and I’m going to do this as governor,” says Ayotte, who formerly served one term in the U.S. Senate and was the state’s first female attorney general.
Addressing NH’s Housing Crisis
Like many states, NH has a shrinking workforce. This is due to many factors, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute (NHFPI), including an aging population, lack of affordable child care, and limited and expensive housing.
Ayotte says housing and workforce were top concerns for the employers she met while traveling the state during her campaign. “We have an acute shortage of housing and as employers seek people to come to work for them, their employees need to be able to find housing to be able to live in the community,” she says.
More than half of renters in NH are cost burdened, meaning they are paying 30% or more of their income on rent and utilities. Rising housing costs, coupled with low vacancy rates and other significant cost of living increases like child care, are leading to greater inequality, according to NHFPI. The statewide median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in NH in 2024 was $1,833, up from $1,764 in 2023, and the vacancy rate was 0.6%, well below what is considered a balanced market for tenants and landlords.
With approximately 30% of all renters in the state under 35 years old, Ayotte worries young people might leave. “For our young people coming out of our universities, coming out of the community colleges, coming out of high school, they have to have a place to live,” Ayotte says. “The top priority, economically, is to work to address this housing issue.”
One way to address the housing crisis at the state level, Ayotte says, is to reform the permitting process. “One of the things I heard repeatedly on the campaign trail was the way things get hung up in one agency or another whether it’s DOT, DES or Fish and Game, perhaps other agencies,” she says. “Essentially, we’re going to apply what they do in the private sector—the lean process of figuring out where the hang ups are—to make it a 60-day permitting process. Because the reality is, if a project takes a year to get approval, financing can dry up or the project can cost a lot more and become not economically viable. Let’s have a fair and transparent process for the people of New Hampshire.”
Scala says housing challenges require zoning reform at the local level that could be difficult for the governor to untangle. “It will be interesting to see if Governor Ayotte is able to disentangle that mix of state and local authority,” he says, adding he is also curious if the new governor has an agenda to address cost of living issues more broadly. “How will she do anything to ease the situation for renters and build more housing stock? It will be interesting to see if she makes any progress. She might find bipartisan agreement but it’s going to be tricky.”
Ayotte says communities need to address restrictive zoning, which often favors large single-family homes. However, she says that should be done primarily through a local decision-making process. “I’m not going to interfere with the ability for local planning and zoning boards to decide what’s best for their community,” she says. “However, I do believe we can elevate this issue and the importance of it for communities.”
Ayotte cites the State Legislature’s creation of the Housing Appeals Board in 2020 as a positive step in streamlining zoning issues to provide developers and citizens with a more efficient forum to resolve disputes. The Housing Appeals Board was created out of growing concern that local control of planning was limiting the construction of homes and apartments and creating a supply crunch that spiked prices.
Focusing on the Trades
Another issue related to the workforce crunch that Ayotte says she will address is the skills gap. “Obviously, education is a very important component,” she says. “I recently had the opportunity to participate in what was called Tradeapalooza and it was a phenomenal event.”
Bring Back the Trades, which organized the Tradeapalooza event, is a nonprofit organization partnering with various NH businesses to promote the skilled trades as a viable career path. The organization’s primary mission is to empower post-secondary students by offering scholarships to pursue professional trades education at U.S.-based schools.
Last November, over 1,500 students attended the Tradeapalooza event featuring keynote speaker Mike Rowe of the television series “Dirty Jobs,”who was interviewed on stage by Ayotte. “This was a terrific event,” Ayotte says. “I want to champion the issue of the skills gap in the trades as governor and I want people to understand how important these jobs are. Without them we couldn’t do anything. Good luck trying to even have your household function without the trades.”
Finding Common Ground
Scala expects education to be another big issue for the governor. “Her ability to work with the Legislature could come into play on education issues, including the Parental Bill of Rights, which was defeated in 2023 and Education Freedom Accounts,” he says. “Also brewing are two big cases concerning education funding.”
Ayotte says she supports Education Freedom Accounts because they give parents the choice to put their child in an educational environment that fits their needs. “As I build my first budget, I’ll be looking at how we can continue to ensure each family has the best educational opportunity possible,” she says. “While per-pupil funding is at its highest-ever level, we need to do more to help our kids succeed. We need to improve core subject standards to ensure students have the fundamentals they need to succeed.”
Ayotte says supporting schools and teachers and making NH schools the best in the nation will be some of her key priorities. “I am proud to support our public schools and will continue to do so as Governor,” she says. “I’m a product of public schools, and so is my husband, Joe, who is now a middle school math teacher.”
When it comes to changes to the business tax structure, Scala says he doesn’t believe Ayotte will “be very inventive.”
When it comes to business taxes, Ayotte says her focus will be on making sure NH remains economically competitive in the region. “The question is, are we able to attract or are we detracting from our ability to attract good businesses here,” she says. “I think right now we’re very competitive and our tax structure is in a place where people are coming to New Hampshire because of it.”
While there are Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, Ayotte says there is a willingness to reach across the aisle and find fundamental common ground on many of the challenges facing NH. “The Legislature cares about housing and strengthening our mental health system. They want to address the skills gap and make sure we have a strong educational system,” she says. “I don’t think either party has a monopoly on good ideas. We may disagree sometimes on how we get there, but I believe we have so much in common on what we want to do for the state.”
Ayotte, who was given high marks for bipartisanship by her colleagues in Washington, was appointed by Republican Gov. Craig Benson in 2004 to be attorney general and was reappointed twice by Democratic Gov. John Lynch as attorney general before running for the U.S. Senate. “I was the third most bipartisan senator in the entire Senate,” Ayotte says of her years in the U.S. Senate. “I worked across the aisle with Jeanne Shaheen. I worked across the aisle with members of both sides and what I plan to do as governor is bring people together and to encourage creative thinking as we take on challenges.”
Undocumented Immigrants
Since 2000, there have been between 10,000 and 15,000 undocumented immigrants living in NH, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2021, they represented about 1.7% of the state’s workforce.
For over a year, President-elect Donald Trump has promised to reform the country’s immigration system, ending birthright citizenship, reviving border policies from his term in office and deporting millions of people through raids and detainment camps.
Ayotte says the state will be monitoring the incoming Trump administration’s policies on immigration as they unfold. “They’re not in office yet, but I come at this from the perspective of a prosecutor,” she says. “I was attorney general, and I expect we’ll certainly all work together on a state, local, and federal level to keep the state and the country safe. It strikes me that the priority is just focusing on people who present a danger to our communities or who present a danger to the country in some way.”
Back Into Politics
Following her time in the U.S. Senate, which ended in 2016 with a defeat by then Gov. Maggie Hassan, Ayotte was named to the boards of directors for a number of companies including Caterpillar Inc., News Corp., BAE Systems, and the Blackstone Group. Ayotte says her choice to reenter politics was a decision rooted in the love she has for NH. “I’ve spent my time in Washington, and I’ve really appreciated my time outside of politics for my family and my life, but I made the decision to get back in because I feel like this is where I can make the biggest difference,” she says. “I’m proud of the job that Governor Sununu did over the last eight years for the state of New Hampshire and would like to continue that good work and take on the challenges that we have to make the state even stronger."
