Freedom—October 20, 2024—Carroll District 2 Representative Anita Burroughs last week questioned Representative Mark McConkey’s claim to be an “environmentalist,” writing in a Conway Daily Sun op-ed that “the facts say otherwise.”

McConkey, a nine-term State Representative in District 8, is running against former State Representative Dr. Bill Marsh to succeed Jeb Bradley as State Senator in Senate District 3, which runs from Bretton Woods to Middleton and includes Ossipee Lake.

McConkey appears to have first raised his environmentalist claim at July’s Broad-Leavitt Bay Association candidates forum. He later amplified it in a campaign mailing that was publicly criticized last month by State Representative Rosemarie Rung.

Representative Burroughs’s op-ed called McConkey’s attitude toward drinking water protections “transactional,” and cited two cases in which she said his position was based on what was best for his “personal business interests.”

She pointed to McConkey’s successful effort to obtain relief from Effingham’s Groundwater Protection Ordinance so that his client, Conway developer Meena LLC, could build a gas station where the ordinance prohibits gas stations as a threat to the Ossipee Aquifer.

The gas station plan was opposed by abutters, conservation groups, and officials from neighboring towns. A noted geoscientist called the site the “worst possible location” for a gas station because a gas spill there would be “catastrophic.”

McConkey argued to Effingham officials that the gas station equipment would be “fail-proof,” and said his client would suffer financial hardship if a variance was denied. He asked the town to waive the requirement to provide a stormwater management plan for gas station runoff.

“Shamefully, the ZBA approved a variance,” Burroughs wrote, “and McConkey’s role in helping his client create a threat to the aquifer where one did not previously exist is now on his permanent record.”

Burroughs also cited a 2015 case in which McConkey conversely asked Ossipee officials to uphold the town’s Groundwater Protection Ordinance after the ZBA granted a variance for a competing gas station to be built less than a mile from McConkey’s gas station.

“The only hardship the new owner has is financial, and that is not an acceptable reason to grant him a variance,” McConkey wrote to Ossipee officials. His appeal was denied for being filed late.

The Burroughs editorial follows a letter in the Conway Daily Sun last month by Merrimack State Representative Rosemarie Rung, who was responding to a McConkey campaign mailer that called him a “bipartisan leader” in legislation to mitigate cyanobacteria blooms, a major state environmental issue.

“Let me set the record straight,” Rung wrote, saying much of what was in the McConkey mailer was misleading, and his claim that he was “a leader in the House” on the issue was “just plain false.”

Rung, a sponsor of several bipartisan bills to address cyanobacteria blooms, said that at no time did McConkey co-sponsor or testify in favor of the bills.

“He may have voted in favor of them, but so did hundreds of other legislators,” she wrote.