CONCORD, N.H — In late June, when the New Hampshire Legislature passed its two-year budget, it imposed a roughly $51 million cut to the Department of Health and Human Services. This week, the department told the Executive Council it would reduce several of its contracts by millions of dollars.
The “back-of-the-budget cut” mandated by the Legislature gave officials within the department the latitude to decide where operational cuts would be made.
On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Weaver received approval from the Executive Council to move forward with shrinking seven contracts in the first round of cuts.
The department is reducing its contract with NFI North in Contoocook, which provides mental health services to New Hampshire residents with serious or persistent mental illness, by $1 million from roughly $20.9 million to $19.9 million. NFI North will eliminate one personal care assistant, one licensed nursing aide, and two registered nurses from its staff as part of this contract amendment.
The department is also reducing its contract with Community Action Partnership of Strafford County, Granite VNA in Conway and Laconia, the Family Resource Center in Gorham, Waypoint in Manchester, TLC Family Resource Center in Claremont, and VNA at HCS in Keene by $2 million, collectively. The organizations provide home visits from nurses to pregnant women and families with young children that may be at risk for domestic abuse or other harms.
Relatedly, the department is cutting its contracts with Waypoint in Manchester and the Family Resource Center in Gorham by a combined $575,000. The contracts are meant to support programs attempting to intervene and assist families at risk of state intervention (via the Division for Children, Youth, and Families, New Hampshire’s child protective services agency) to prevent that outcome.
It also cut its contract with the University of New Hampshire to provide training for DCYF employees by $575,000.
It is also reducing its contract with Tri-County Community Action Program, which runs a cold-weather homeless shelter in Berlin using state funds, by $100,000. Health and Human Services reported that the organization plans to deal with this cut by centralizing its cold-weather shelter into its other emergency shelter and having one employee manage them both.
It also cut $80,000 from Granite Pathways’ Strength to Succeed program, a substance use disorder program in Manchester.
Finally, the department reduced the number of services it’s purchasing from the Tilton-based dentist who treats residents at the Sununu Youth Services Center, a juvenile detention facility in Manchester, by $24,000 over the months since the cut was implemented.
The first round of cuts add up to roughly $4.3 million. Several more rounds will be necessary for the department to meet its mandate of $51 million.
Weaver told councilors all of the contracts were underutilized. She said the state had used fewer services than were included in the contracts and that the reductions placed the department in line with the number of services the vendors actually provided. She said no families would lose services.
“We’ll still continue to serve families,” Weaver said during the meeting. “We just can’t expand beyond and keep going. We’re going to have a limit with how far we can go, but no existing family would be getting any cuts.”
Weaver declined to elaborate immediately after the meeting and did not respond to emailed questions.
“I certainly appreciate the difficult circumstances that you are in of having to make major cuts to programs and that you’re doing it in a very mindful and thoughtful way to mitigate as much harm as possible,” Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill, the council’s sole Democrat, said during the meeting. “But at some point, people are going to be harmed by these budget cuts.”
Gov. Kelly Ayotte, however, refuted that, pointing to Weaver’s testimony: “I think I just heard that no family is going to be harmed here or not served.”
Left-leaning advocacy groups in New Hampshire were quick to condemn the cuts.
“Instead of lowering costs, New Hampshire conservatives want to take dental care away from kids and let people in Grafton and Coos Counties freeze to death,” Lucas Meyer, founder of Our Economy Our Future, said in a statement arguing the cuts were meant to create space in the budget for recent tax cuts. “Instead of representing working families, they’re prioritizing tax cuts to a handful of out-of-state corporate CEOs who back their campaigns, rig the economy, and drive up property taxes for the rest of us.”
Christina Warriner Hamilton, New Hampshire state director for Reproductive Equity Now, said in a statement that the cuts “would be devastating for New Hampshire families” and “undo bipartisan progress and deny families the care they deserve.”
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