CONCORD — Seeking to determine if Gov. Chris Sununu did any political business during his COVID-19 health care outreach visit to Kentucky on Monday, the New Hampshire Democratic Party lodged a broad request for records under the state’s Right-to-Know Law.
Party Chairman Raymond Buckley said the voters deserve to know whether “their tax dollars just funded a political trip to the Bluegrass State” — home to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has lobbied Sununu to run for the Senate in 2022.
“We are calling on the Sununu administration to release all documents related to this trip so that Granite Staters know what their governor was doing on the taxpayer’s time in Kentucky,” Buckley said.
Sununu’s chief spokesman said leading Democrats are the ones playing politics.
“For the Democrats to attempt to paint this fact-finding mission as some sort of political trip demonstrates a shocking disregard for the severity of this crisis,” Benjamin Vihstadt said in a statement about the COVID-19 threat.
“This is becoming a pattern for them following the refusal of their top, elected executive councilor (Cinde Warmington, D-Concord) to support our state’s initiative to educate vulnerable populations about the importance of getting the vaccine.”
The Union Leader obtained a copy of the request, which seeks email contacts between Sununu’s office and groups allied with the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee as well as all schedules, expense records and any taxpayer-paid reimbursement of costs during the one-day visit.
The request will likely go well beyond the scope of this latest visit since it asks for all email contact from last June 1 to the present which contains phrases such as “McConnell” “Bluegrass” and “Rick Scott.” Scott is the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and visited New Hampshire two weeks ago.
During that trip, Scott said he believed Sununu would decide to challenge Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who’s already announced she will seek a second term in the Senate next year.
Sununu has said he’s not likely to make up his mind until this winter.
The Bluegrass Committee is McConnell’s political action committee that’s supporting GOP Senate hopefuls.
“If any records are withheld or redacted, I request that you state the specific legal and factual grounds for withholding any documents or portions of documents,” Buckley wrote in his request sent to Sununu Chief of Staff Jayne Millerick, who joined the governor and six others on the Kentucky trip.
“Please identify each document that falls within the scope of this request but is withheld from release.”
Sununu said Monday he went to Kentucky because it’s a rural state in the midst of a dramatic jump in hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, most linked to the more contagious delta variant.
Bedford inventor Dean Kamen also went and supplied the use of his airplane at no cost to the state. Sununu brought with him two executives from hospitals in Plymouth and Portsmouth, along with Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette and other state officials.
Along with meeting Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at the State House, Sununu and the entourage toured and visited with officials at hospitals in Frankfort and Louisville.
Sununu said it helped inform the state delegation on how it should deal with our own health care staffing and resource challenges hitting these southern states hard.
“These are critical lessons to learn as New Hampshire prepares for a potential fall surge,” Vihstadt said.
Call with hospital CEOs
On Tuesday, Sununu and Shibinette hosted a conference call with the CEOs of all New Hampshire hospitals to share what they had learned from the visit and discuss strategies for dealing with any further increase in COVID-19 hospitalization here.
Shibinette said a key finding takeaway from the trip was to make greater use of monoclonal antibodies for hospital patients.
During earlier surges, New Hampshire reserved these antibodies for immunocompromised patients or those at much greater risk of serious illness from COVID-19 than others.
Federal disease control officials have since approved much wider use.
“In Kentucky, they are administering these in the emergency room for anyone who tests positive, and that’s one takeaway we’ve brought back to our hospital partners,” Shibinette said.
The visit offered tips on how to help hospitals here deal with any surge “internally” rather than having the state to stand up large, satellite care centers as the state did early on during the pandemic.
There was little need for those temporary beds in New Hampshire because at that time, the capacity in acute care hospitals wasn’t overrun.
For example, anyone visiting the Louisville hospital first goes into one of three large tents outside the facility to screen them for appropriate care, she said.
National Guard troops there are also being used to provide a variety of services inside the hospital walls from testing for COVID-19 and assisting with non-COVID 19 care to housekeeping.
“Our health care system and the team seemed to handle the past 17 months well, but what practices do we need to change or adjust to get it right the second time,” Shibinette said. “We got some great answers on this trip.”
The number of those hospitalized with COVID-19 has more than tripled in recent weeks, but Sununu and hospital officials have said the state’s bed capacity has not been stretched to the limit.
To contain further spread of the virus, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon have resumed limits on visitors to patients there while Memorial Hospital of North Conway has returned to “Code White” because the regional bed capacity is near its limit.klandrigan@unionleader.com
