NH lawmakers on electric vehicles: very pro, very con

This is the season for New Hampshire’s vast lawmaking crowd (400 state representatives!) to propose bills in what are known as LSRs or legislative service requests. Basically they say “I’d like a law that does so-and-so” and then the staff tries to write a legal, coherent bill that actually does it, after which it goes through the whole committee/hearing/debate/vote process.

There are literally hundreds of LSRs (906 at last count). You can find almost anything before they start getting weeded out, combined, pursued or ignored. A quick look finds such gems as allowing payment in gold, making it legal to own a kangaroo, and an official pronunciation of “New Hampshire”. Look for yourself right here.

There are often proposed bills taking the exact opposite approach to something – here’s an example for electric vehicles:

• 2385 from a Manchester Republican, Mark Proulx, would prohibit electric vehicles from parking in parking garages. (Proulx is also proposing 2393 which would prohibit the state government from “buying or leasing fleet electric vehicles for 10 years.”)
• 2331 from a Swanzey Democrat, Barry Faulkner, would prohibit “ICE-ing” – a non-electric vehicle parking in an EV charging spot, an act that really pisses off the driving-on-electrons crowd.

I suspect neither of those will go anywhere, but you never know. The fact that the House is evenly balanced between the parties – the Republicans have an advantage of two or three seats but a couple are still open – makes it particularly hard to guess.