The case against Frank Guinta

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MANCHESTER EXPRESS, OPINION: Letters, Page 13, September 28 - October 4, 2009, Volume 4, No. 39

"The case against Guinta"

To the Editor,

Whether or not Frank Guinta could have been re-elected as mayor is now an academic subject. He has announced that he will not run for a third term as mayor and is now seeking a seat in the U.S. Congress. The basis of that candidacy is supposedly his record as the mayor of Manchester.

From my own perspective, he has very little to run on. The basis of that candidacy is supposedly his record as mayor. How odd. The record he has left is objectively speaking quite negative. As you may remember, Frank Guinta ran on four planks: 1) lower taxes; 2) smaller government; 3) better schools and 3) lower crime. Not one of those occurred.

Frank summed these up in his so called 5-5-5 program regarding education, crime and taxes. He has not met one of these targets. Before he came to office here were five underperforming schools-that figure is now 20 out of 22.

Municipal taxes dropped briefly from the level where they were before Frank Guinta became mayor but rose back up again by 8 percent over the past two years.

Unemployment in Manchester has more than doubled from 3.1 percent to over 7.4 percent (in July 2009) and is still climbing.

Crime has gone up by 6 percent since last year.

Year in and year out, the mayor has submitted budgets that were dead on arrival and firmly rejected by aldermen. That was hardly leadership, but Frank has then gone around saying that he “held the line” on city spending.

One if the reasons the city has had budget troubles is that he has done very little to attract companies to either the city or the state. One case in point is the Manchester Airport’s Free Trade Zone, which neither the city nor the state has supported.

Frank has a record to run on all right...a very weak one.

Let’s set the score honestly before the residents of New Hampshire make yet another and bigger mistake by foisting Frank Guinta on the country as a whole.

David Weston
Manchester, N.H.