Concord has precedent when it comes to removing elected officials

As the Concord mayor and city council seek to remove Stacey Brown from office, the city enters rare but not unprecedented territory of ousting an elected official.

Nearly 60 years ago, Mayor J. Herbert Quinn was forced out of his seat for actions that were deemed as misconduct in office.

Quinn is the most famous example of Concord elected leaders voting to unseat one of their own. He had long been at loggerheads with Concord Monitor Editor James Langley, and the police department reported that Quinn had tried to orchestrate a trap, directing an officer to wait for Langley as he left a bar for the evening, anticipating he would be intoxicated behind the wheel.

The dismissal of the city’s last “strong mayor” in 1967 was no clean break: it was a long-bubbling and deeply personal political feud that was settled by the state supreme court. It is documented at length in Quinn’s memoir – a volume of collected news clippings to which he added his own commentary – titled “Political Crucifixion.”

It’s a book that City Councilor Stacey Brown read over the summer.

“History repeats itself!” she wrote in her recommendation of the title in her monthly newsletter from July.

Brown, who represents Ward 5, has faced mounting criticism on the council for asking probing questions of staff about city finances and, in some cases, accusing them of appropriating money without council permission, which they have denied.

This year, Mayor Byron Champlin removed Brown from the committees she’s sat on in the past. In response, she tallied the attendance of other councilors who weren’t removed from their seats and lobbed accusations of ethical violations against At-Large Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton, who vehemently denied any impropriety.

The animosity has been more intense online.

By Tuesday, Champlin said he felt removing Brown from the council was warranted and that City Solicitor John Conforti had been instructed to explore options to remove Brown.

Concord history

Growing up in Concord with his grandparents and foster families in the Irish neighborhoods near the quarry, Quinn was cut from a different cloth than the white-collared, Protestant, Republican“notables” who had dominated city politics for decades. He thought them insular, accused them of rampant self-dealing and promised public transparency. He also came into politics as the head of the Concord Housing Authority, helping to bring affordable housing projects like the JFK apartments to the city – whose residents Langley, in editorials, called “paupers.”

Quinn edged out the incumbent Charles Davie in 1965 by just 33 votes, buoyed by his salt-of-the-earth pitch, brash manner and pledge to bring the public back into city hall, literally. In the days before New Hampshire’s Right to Know law, he tried to make city council budget deliberations and planning board meetings open to the public – which Langley praised him for – and tried to ensure that residents with wealth or sway had to pay to use city water, the same as everyone else. 

Being leery of the political class dominating city politics meant Quinn was aggressively skeptical of the City Hall that he led. He tried to consolidate all staff communication with the press through his office and investigated the police chief over a fund drawing on donated money. He openly accused city staff and officials of wrongdoing and conflicts of interest. It wasn’t only the “Langely incident” that his critics saw as an uncouth abuse of power.

This bent, though, meant Quinn had a loyal base of supporters who, as the Monitor reported when he died, “loved him, struck by his humble start and bare-knuckled fight for government transparency, and his penchant to help the poor and elderly in a city that sometimes ignored them.”

To his critics, that 2017 report continued, “he was a monkey wrench, a troublemaker, a burst of counterproductive energy running against the status quo, simply to make a name for himself.”

In addition to his memoir, Quinn’s tenure is documented in Crosscurrents of Change: Concord, N.H. in the 20th Century, a copy of which was bequeathed by the Concord Historical Society to each councilor at Monday’s meeting.

Quinn’s term and troubles bore a lasting impact on city government. It was the catalyst behind Concord’s switch back to a “weak mayor,” or mayor-manager, form of government. Only Nashua and Manchester today have “strong mayor” systems in New Hampshire. Many new department heads Quinn brought in served decades in their roles, including parks and recreation director John Keach, from whom both Keach Park and current Councilor Fred Keach get their names.

Some similarities exist between the politics leading up to Quinn’s removal and the hot water Brown is in. There are also important differences – in the actual details of the story, in the diversity of people at the council table, in the way city hall operates, and in the city itself.

When Quinn was removed from office, a crowd of around 150 people gathered at City Hall, jeering and yelling, per news reports at the time. A police escort home was waiting for the aldermen, who left out the back door.

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