Council votes to move forward with appointments to Human Relations Committee

LACONIA — City councilors passed unanimously two changes to the ordinance defining and authorizing the Human Relations Committee, a council subcommittee around social issues, during their regular meeting on Monday night.

Council approval came after months of discussion regarding the point and purpose and, ultimately, fate of the committee, which has for more than 20 years met in the City of Laconia. The committee became a subject of frequent and sometimes intense political discourse leading into the 2025 Municipal Election, when voters selected two new councilors, and a new mayor.

The Human Relations Committee typically meets to discuss business, and sometimes organizes civic events — like an observation in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. each year, and this winter, a countywide public forum on homelessness, held in the auditorium at Laconia High School. 

The first change had to do with the bones of the committee: the number of members, and mechanism by which they’re appointed. 

From this point forward, excluding any future council amendments, the committee will comprise: seven members, six of whom will be appointed by the council and one who will be appointed by the mayor; the mayor’s appointment will be for a two-year term coinciding with the mayor’s term in office; the first appointments will be two each of one-year, two-year, and three-year terms. Those terms expire coinciding with their initial date of appointment.

Mayors in the city are elected to serve two-year terms.  

Councilors approved the appointments process with little discussion, despite significant public outcry on the matter over several months, following the public hearing Monday night. Only past committee member Patrick Wood addressed the council. 

“The purpose, in my mind, of the Human Relations Committee, that I’ve been on for the last few years, has been to help people understand each other, and to help them learn how to communicate with each other in effective ways,” Wood said. “Part of that means, also, that we’re listening to one another. In my experience, all of you care about the City of Laconia, and you care very much about the people of the city. It’s a unique situation. I think Laconia is not the average community in many ways, and I think that’s proved by the fact that for 25 years, we’ve had a Human Relations Committee that really did its best to help the community."

The committee’s statement of purpose was another item of political debate during the election, when some citizens criticized the subcommittee for working without a distinct purpose.

“I received a text this afternoon from someone who is running for Congress, and his text quoted a threat that he received from the chairperson of the Libertarian Party: ‘being hung in public is better than you deserve,’” Wood said. “That type of language is not acceptable to any of us, it’s not what we should be dealing with in any political situation.”

In reply to a tweet, posted by Moultonborough Democrat Christian Urrutia, who is running for the primary nomination in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, an X account associated with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire wrote: “You want to enslave millions of people. You threaten violence against New Hampshire Residents every day. Being hung in public is better than you deserve.”

“As we consider the purposes of this Human Relations Committee, I’d ask you to keep in mind that our goal is to try to reduce those types of responses and those types of threats,” Wood said. “That’s the purpose of the Human Relations Committee and, sometimes, it isn’t pleasant to have to deal with those things, but we do. We can’t have that as being the standard for political discussion.”

Councilors unanimously approved a purpose statement for the Human Relations Committee.

The statement reads: “The purpose of the Human Relations Committee is to organize and support ongoing community events, including Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Holocaust Remembrance event called Yom HaShoah. The committee also participates in Laconia’s Multicultural Festival and may undertake additional projects as approved by a majority vote of the city council.”

Councilors agreed to remove one section of the committee ordinance which authorized the city manager to approve public statements members of the subcommittee may wish to make, in the event something significant occurs and that committee must release a public statement before they’re able to receive council approval.