Gregg Hough: Objections to the Laconia Human Relations Committee

To The Daily Sun,

For months, Laconia residents have raised serious, substantive objections to the Human Relations Committee. Those objections have been grounded in logic, function, precedent, and the proper role of city government. Yet despite this, the city council has shown a clear unwillingness to dissolve the HRC or even pause the push to elevate it into a standing committee.

The facts are straightforward. No other city or town in New Hampshire operates a Human Relations Committee as a standing arm of municipal government. That alone should have triggered caution. Local government is not a laboratory for ideological experimentation; it is meant to deliver core services efficiently, lawfully and neutrally. The HRC does none of those things.

The committee has no authority, no regulatory function, and no operational necessity, yet. Civil rights protections already exist at the state and federal levels, with clear legal standards and due process. What it does add is political advocacy disguised as municipal purpose.

City government is required to be neutral. It serves all residents, regardless of political belief. Yet the language, focus, and activism surrounding the HRC reflect a distinctly partisan worldview. When a city body promotes ideological concepts instead of delivering services, it ceases to be governance and becomes politics.

Every functional argument against the HRC has been presented: redundancy, lack of authority, absence of precedent, and risk of politicization. Every logical concern has been raised. Citizens have petitioned, testified, and asked for restraint. Still, the council presses forward.

When all reasonable explanations have been exhausted, only one conclusion remains. The refusal to dissolve the HRC or halt its elevation is not about necessity or good governance it is about ideology. The city council’s actions reveal not neutrality, but partisanship, and not moderation, but a left-wing agenda imposed through city government.

Gregg Hough

Laconia