'Heart and soul'

DOVER — Former Mayor Karen Weston vows she will continue to be involved in the city's most important issues despite the fact she's no longer serving on the City Council.

"I just left Janetos and I had a customer ask me, 'What are you going to do with all your spare time?' And I said, 'What spare time?" Weston said during an interview in City Hall.

Weston runs Janetos, a landmark community grocery store in Dover, with her family.

She served six years as mayor and six as a city councilor before she lost her re-election bid in November to new Mayor Robert Carrier, who had previously served as deputy mayor.

"It's going to be a period of adjustment but I still am totally involved with the city. You just can't have it end and not be involved," she said. "I'm going to stay involved. I'm still participating on a number of boards and commissions, and I'm going to continue to do that.

"I have always spoken for the people and I will continue to speak for them, and I mean that with all sincerity," she added.

Weston will serve on the city's 400th anniversary committee, the Dover Business and Industrial Development Authority and she plans to continue working to address the city's homeless problem.

She acknowledged being mayor can be an almost all-consuming job.

"I can tell you that there's many weeks out of the month that I was never home at night," she said. "There's weeks that I didn't have a night off and many things are starting to happen on Saturdays and Sundays, and again it's like you don't have weekends off, either."

Despite Dover's success over the last decade - it's now the fastest growing city in New Hampshire - Weston believes keeping the city affordable will be one of the toughest challenges moving forward.

"The city of Dover has two growing populations. One is the senior population, one is the millennials," she said. "When you have that kind of growing population we have got to remember who our senior citizens are."

She stressed the need to make sure that Dover's city budgets only grow "incrementally," otherwise seniors and others on fixed incomes could be priced out of the city.

"As mayor I always reminded councilors that all these senior folks don't get those 2 percent increases, and when some of us were just starting out we never thought about retirement and the same goes for them," she said.

Weston described herself as "particularly sensitive" to comments she's heard when people say if you can't afford to live in Dover you should leave.

"That shows no respect for that generation that's done so much," she said, adding "affordability is going to be a huge, huge challenge."

She pointed to the School Board's initial fiscal year 2021 budget, which, when presented in December, projected to be $2,030,352 over the estimated allowable city tax cap.

"Already we're seeing the school department coming out with $2 million over the tax cap that doesn't even include the city side of the budget," she said. "So there's a lot of unrest from many of these seniors who are afraid they can't live here."

The School Board passed a resolution on Tuesday to move $379,097 in grant money to use for salaries and wages into two of the school district's capital reserve funds.

That transfer means the proposed school district budget as it stands now would be about $1.6 million over the allowable city tax cap.

"Again they have a strategic plan, just like the city does but you can't institute every part of your strategic plan as presented, you may have to delay some things for a year or two," Weston said.

In terms of homelessness, Weston believes it's a problem every community has.

"Right now Dover has been very proactive on many things, and now we need to take care of these folks," she said.

She acknowledged it's difficult to estimate the city's homeless population, but said, "I know we have somewhere between 12 to 15 chronically homeless but those are numbers that we know that the police department deals with."

"We know who they are and where they are," she added.

But there's other people who might become homeless temporarily because they lose a job, get sick or get into some kind of trouble, she said.

"Folks don't understand that you can't just snap your fingers and solve it," she said.

Weston stressed that her accomplishments as mayor came about as a result of a "team effort."

She pointed to Dover's key role in filing a lawsuit against the state of New Hampshire challenging the state's education funding system as one of her biggest accomplishments.

"There's also the renewable energy, solar panels on the high school, which as huge because we have to be very concerned about our environment, and I think we're now seeing the ramifications of not taking care of our environment," she said.

Weston also worked to help create the Tri-City Coalition, a group that includes the mayors of Dover, Rochester and Somersworth.

The group is aimed at getting officials from the three cities to work together to address regional issues, she said.

Before her term ended, she held a meeting to introduce Carrier, who she went to high school with, to the other mayors in the coalition.

"I want that relationship to grow, and I told Bob anytime he needs anything to call me," she said. "If there's anything he needs I'll do it, I do not want him to fail I want him to succeed. We've known each other for a long time and that is not going to go away."

Asked how she wants people to remember her time as mayor, Weston paused and said, "That I put my heart and soul into the city, that everything that I tried to do was for the betterment of the city."

"Because of that that's why I will continue to stay involved and do whatever I can to make the city better," she said.