Tedd Benson’s company has worked with the same Canadian supplier for over 20 years and uses a certain type of engineered wood to manufacture houses at its facilities in Keene and Walpole.

That long-standing relationship is now facing uncertainty.

Anticipating President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again threats of tariffs imposed on goods imported from Canada, Benson recently purchased a year’s supply of the timbers in advance. He told state senators of the Executive Departments and Administration Committee on Wednesday that it’s a “significant” but worthwhile financial investment because the engineered wood, and the practices used to produce it, fit his company’s mission of sustainability and affordability.

“There is simply no domestic equivalent that achieves all of these important criteria,” Benson said. “The tariff war on Canadian products, including lumber, is a direct threat to our business.”

A pair of bills introduced by Sen. Rebecca Perkins-Kwoka, a Portsmouth Democrat, seeks to quantify the impacts of the Trump administration’s policy decisions on New Hampshire.

Benson asked the committee to pass Senate Bill 304, directing the state Department of Business and Economic Affairs to prepare a public report on how tariffs may impact New Hampshire businesses. That would include direct and indirect cost increases, the number of jobs affected and revenue losses.

Jim Jalbert, who owns a Portsmouth-based bus company that runs from the Seacoast down to Boston and New York City, said the tariffs could cost him a million dollars this year. He has seven buses on order from a Canadian supplier and said he could be forced to pay extra simply because they hadn’t crossed the border before the tariffs went into effect.

“Even on the surface, for someone who doesn’t quite understand the tariff thing and this whole argument, it’s scaring the hell out of people,” Jalbert said. “We need to be leaders and say, ‘This is what it’s going to do to us, but this is how we’re going to fix it.’ … You can’t stick your head in the sand on this one. It’s for real.”

Republican senators who control the committee voted to kill the bill shortly after its hearing, as they did for a similar bill regarding the Department of Education. Sen. Bill Gannon, a Sandown Republican, said the legislation felt politically motivated and suggested another arm of the state could undertake this task.

“We have the Canadian Trade Council,” Gannon said. “They can bring these things up. They can go over the numbers.”

Education uncertainty

Democratic senators probed Frank Edelblut, the state’s Department of Education commissioner, on how changes at the federal level – like layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education – might affect New Hampshire schools and particularly their funding.

Edelblut said requiring him to compile a public report on how the dissolution of the federal agency would affect special education and school funding would be jumping the gun.

“No final determinations have been made, as far as we know, on the federal level,” Edelblut said. Still, he testified on SB 303 that he’s been preparing his department and talking with his federal counterparts about it for months.

Sen. Tara Reardon, a Concord Democrat, said that even if the U.S. Department of Education disappears, the federal laws governing education would likely still apply. With federal grants and other revenue sources in flux, she asked Edelblut whether the state could feasibly take over the financial support from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that New Hampshire is legally obligated to provide for its 35,000 special education students.

“We’ve got the regulatory schema to be able to do that,” Edelblut said. “That’s if IDEA were to go away. Again, with all my conversations with our federal counterparts, there’s been no discussion that that would be the case.”

When pressed by Reardon on whether the state could take on that financial strain, Edelblut said he’s prepared for that scenario. New Hampshire has existing funding mechanisms that distribute state funds to local school districts, he said, and the state could leverage those to distribute funds from the federal level.

“We can just leverage these existing tools that we have in our toolbox,” Edelblut said. “We don’t need to go create new tools.”

The committee chair, Sen. Howard Pearl from Loudon, took Edelblut’s comments as an assurance that he’s already gathering information about how Trump’s policies could impact New Hampshire. SB 303 was “a bit premature,” he said. The committee voted to recommend the full Senate reject the bill.

 

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.