State Rep. Charlie St. Clair appointed interim mayor

LACONIA — State Rep. Charlie St. Clair (D-Laconia) is the city’s new mayor. 

He’ll preside over the next city council meeting, his first in the position, at 7 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 8, at City Hall downtown, and will serve until a new mayor is popularly elected in November and takes office in January. 

“I feel fully confident that he can run the council meetings and will do an excellent job,” Mayor Pro tem Mark Haynes (Ward 4) said. 

The vote was unanimous.

“I am humbled,” St. Clair said. “Thank you very much.” 

St. Clair was chosen Thursday evening by city councilors over one other applicant, Matthew “Matty” Andrew Thomas, following brief interviews with both candidates.

Two others, former mayor and Executive Vice President at Bank of New Hampshire Michael J. Seymour and prosecutor Alexander Smeaton of the Belknap County Attorney’s Office, applied for the role, but apparently rescinded their applications before Thursday's meeting.

St. Clair, who owns a business in downtown Laconia and serves as the chair of the city’s Planning Board, as well as organizing Laconia Motorcycle Week, will be tasked with running council meetings over a period of about four months, or eight meetings. 

The mayor’s job is strictly limited, according to the city charter, to breaking ties among councilors if a vote is deadlocked. Other than that, it’s purely ceremonial — they typically act as a spokesperson for the city, and attend formal events like ribbon cuttings. 

Ward 1 Councilor Bruce Cheney asked St. Clair to assure the council he would not have any involvement with the potential sale of his downtown building, the Laconia Antique Center on Main Street, if he were elected as interim mayor. The building is adjacent to the city-owned Colonial Theatre.

“The longstanding joke is I already sold it to the city in July for $5 million,” St. Clair said. “That has come to a total halt in any event — I would have absolutely nothing to do with it.” 

At the Aug. 25 meeting of council, former Mayor Andrew Hosmer resigned his position and has since started work as city manager of Lebanon in Grafton County. His term expires Jan. 1, 2026, so a replacement had to be appointed. 

The city opened an application process for an interim mayor, and the period to apply ended on Aug. 28. Councilors, according to the charter, had 30 days after Hosmer resigned to fill his vacancy.

It was St. Clair’s experience in municipal government that put him over the edge. 

“I think that I could do a good job with my experience, running the planning board as the chair and other committees that I’ve been on in the city,” St. Clair said. “I have no agenda, except to keep things moving along for the next four months, and work with the city councilors on projects that we have going on right now in the city.

“This is strictly a moment in time where we need someone sitting in that chair to keep the meetings moving along with decorum and listen to the citizens of Laconia,” St. Clair said. “That’s pretty much it.”

St. Clair told councilors he’ll request a leave of absence from the planning board until his interim term is complete in January. 

Ward 5 Councilor Steven Bogert asked St. Clair if he’d move to create any ad hoc or “mayor’s” committees while serving in the interim, and St. Clair said he would not, unless all of the councilors asked him to do so. 

“One big challenge I think for the city, other than all these different topics that are constantly going through the mill, is communication,” St. Clair said. “It’s a tough thing to get people to know what’s going on with the city government, much as it is with the state government. That’s, at least in my mind, an issue, getting good-hearted information out to the citizens so they know what the city government is doing and they don’t listen to all of the misinformation of disinformation that’s out there — Lord knows there is so much of that.”