To understand today's New Hampshire Legislature, consider the paint can bill

Yahoo

08-05-2025

"Our state Legislature isn't exactly known for an abundance of impactful, no-brainer bills, but House Bill 451 is one of them." (Getty Images)
If nothing else, modern American politics has taught us that ideologues are often good at wooing the people but they always stink at serving them.
And that truism is on full display at the state level, too. Consider, for example, the saga of New Hampshire's paint can bill.
Our state Legislature isn't exactly known for an abundance of impactful, no-brainer bills, but House Bill 451 is one of them. The point of the bipartisan — if you can believe it — legislation is to help residents and businesses recycle paint cans and keep the environmentally unfriendly contents of those cans out of our landfills.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a basement or garage in New Hampshire that wasn't bulging with old paint cans — often bequeathed by previous owners — so for that reason alone my citizen homeowner vote would be a resounding, 'Yes, please!'
But the unceasing proliferation of cans is only part of it: A lot of paint contains PFAS — the harmful 'forever chemicals' linked to cancer, liver damage, and other health problems — and New Hampshire should be doing everything in its power to, you know, not poison people for eternity. If preferring that families not get sick from industrial chemicals seems too 'woke,' let me spin it another way: Cleanup of bad stuff is more expensive than not dumping the bad stuff to begin with.
For their own good reasons, House members were sold on the efficacy of the recycling legislation and passed it on a voice vote. So of course the Senate would get behind HB 451, too — right? — and maybe even whistle a little bit while dropping it on the governor's desk.
Well, no. This is New Hampshire after all, and that means you can always count on a hefty segment of the Legislature stepping forward at some point to proclaim — through action or inaction — that their allegiance is to an ideology not, silly goose, the well-being of the people who elected them.
But before I get to the heart of the bewildering opposition, which led to the bill being referred back to committee and most likely punted to the fall, it's important to understand how the program established by the bill would work.
Amateur and professional home remodelers would take their paint cans to their local participating retailer, who would accept them at no cost. Those same retailers could then arrange with PaintCare, the American Coatings Association's nonprofit that already operates the program in 10 states, to pick up the collected cans. To pay for the program, a fee would be added to new paint cans, ranging from 30 cents to $2.45 depending on the can's size. So, for one of those 5-gallon cans of interior paint that sell for $100 or more, we're talking a couple bucks added to the total cost. I know, I know — a buck's a buck and nobody wants to pay more than they have to. But what does that little extra get you in the end? For starters, a place for that soon-to-be forgotten container other than the corner of your garage. Also, the not-poisoning-people-forever thing.
To call this bill bipartisan doesn't do it justice. Here's a partial list of the strange bedfellows who also see HB 451 as a slam-dunk: Casella Waste Systems, the Conservation Law Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Aubuchon Hardware, and the Business and Industry Association. Oh, and the paint manufacturers themselves.
And here's the list of people who oppose it: Libertarian lawmakers who, if they close one eye and squint with the other, see an evil tax rather than a clear solution that everybody who has willingly chosen to exist near other people should be able to live with.
Among the opponents is Sen. Victoria Sullivan, a Manchester Republican who presumably arrives at the State House on session days via public roads paved and maintained thanks to funds we all contribute. But here's what she said of this no-brainer bill: It's 'a tax on every single can of paint that is purchased,' and 'the same paint tax that we've been fighting for years.'
Jeez, really? A tax? Not a refreshing agreement of responsibility between an industry and its consumers? That's some pretty hardcore adherence to a misanthropic philosophy about personal freedom, isn't it? I guess if you ask New Hampshire Senate Republicans, the old poet John Donne had it all wrong: Everybody is an island.
I understand that America is at a complicated moment in its political history, where the ruling party's most favored policies carry the taste of retribution against imagined enemies. But punting a sensible bill just because it veers from a rigid ideological blueprint doesn't look like governing to me.
It looks like a newly popular brand of inflexibility that's wholly incompatible with public service.