New Hampshire Budget Panel at Dartmouth - October 5, 2010 at 4:30 PM

Please join The Rockefeller Center and the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition at the upcoming New Hampshire Budget Panel.  The Panel, “Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is: New Hampshire's Priorities and Budget”, will take place on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 4:30 PM in 3 Rockefeller Center, on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, NH.
The panel moderator, Richard Winters, is the Remsen Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.  Panelists will include:
  • Merilynn Bourne, Executive Director of Listen Community Services
  • Steve Norton, Executive Director, NH Center for Public Policy Studies
  • Brian Walsh, Chairman, Hanover Board of Selectmen
 
Merilynn Bourne has been the Executive Director of Listen Community Services since 2000. Listen is a private non-profit service agency located in Lebanon, NH. Listen provides services and support to meet the critical needs of Upper Valley NH & VT individuals and families. Programs include rent and fuel assistance, Community Dinners, food pantry, budget counseling, teen life skills counseling and summer camp scholarships. Listen operates 4 area thrift stores which provide the agency with 80% of its annual funding needs.  Merilynn is a founding board member of MORE THAN WHEELS, a non-profit car loan and counseling agency and she is a member of the Upper Valley Nonprofit Roundtable. She served 4 years on the advisory board of The Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship at the Tuck School and was a board member for Twin Pines Housing Trust. Merilynn has lived in Cornish, NH since 1971 and served as Selectwoman from 2004 to 2010. She has also served on the Cornish Planning Board, PTO and Fair Association. Three of her four children live here in the Upper Valley with their families.
 
Steve Norton is the Executive Director of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, a private non-profit think-tank providing an unbiased source of fact-based information helping define major policy issues and offering innovative approaches to support resolution of those issues. The Center focuses on a variety of topics including state revenues and expenditures, corrections policy, health care finance, education quality and finance, data access and quality, local government finance, and data access and quality.  Prior to his current work, Steve focused much of his career on studying and managing the provision of social services. Between 1998 and 2005, Steve worked for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services in a variety of capacities, including as director of the State’s Medicaid program from 2003-2005. From 1990 to 1998, Steve worked as a Research Associate at the Urban Institute in Washington DC where he conducted health services research and published extensively on a variety of topics.  Steve lives in Concord, NH with his wife and their two children. He is an amateur triathlete and has coached high school Nordic skiing. He currently serves on the Concord Zoning Board, and on the Boards of the Maine Health Information Center, the NH Center for Non-Profits, and on the advisory council for the New England Public Policy Center.
 
Brian Walsh is Chairman of the Board of Selectmen in Hanover, New Hampshire and a Director of the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. Previously, he was a founder and original CEO of three successful technology start-ups. He has also served on the Planning Board in Hanover, and numerous boards  of private companies. Currently, Brian is Director of Americans for Campaign Reform and on the Advisory Board of the Upper Valley Region of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. As an artist, through his watercolor paintings, Brian seeks to portray the beauty of our earth’s special times and places: ten percent of  he proceeds from the sale of his works is donated to non-profit organizations working to protect the environment. Brian lives in Hanover with his wife Linda Patchett. Their five children have grown and fled the nest.
 
Richard F. Winters is the William Clinton Story Remsen Class of 1943 Professor of Government at Dartmouth. Winters received his B.A. from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, his M.A. for the University of Hawaii, and his 1972 Ph.D. from Stanford University.  Professor Winters was hired as an Instructor of Government at Dartmouth College in 1969 and has been on the faculty since that time.  He served as chair of the Department of Government at Dartmouth in 1982, again from 1989-1991, and a third term from July of 1999 until July of 2002. From 1986 to 1989, Winters served as Acting Director and Director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences at Dartmouth. He has served on several committees of the American Political Science Association. He also served a term as president of the section on State Politics and Policy, one of thirty organized sections of the American Political Science Association.  Professor Winters’ special fields of interest are American state politics, American political economy, social welfare politics, and the politics of the budgetary process. He is co-author of How America Is Ruled and his articles have appeared in various books of collected readings, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, American Politics Quarterly, Journal of Politics, and Polity.