NH: Radfems attack bill to reduce CS payments for NCP's

There's a reply to the original article that was printed three (3) days
later following this..


http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/p.../1003/BUSINESS


Bill would reduce payments

Child-support plan prompts outcry
Committee, House approved changes

By ERIC MOSKOWITZ
Monitor staff

March 01. 2006 8:00AM
A bill that would significantly change child-support payments is being
criticized by family-practice lawyers and others who say it was crafted
prematurely and could harm children.

The bill received minimal opposition at a committee hearing and passed the
House by 40 votes. But now that it's headed to the Senate, critics have
started to take notice.

The bill would give divorced parents who pay child support credit for the
time they spend with their children, reducing their payments to the primary
parents. Rep. David Bickford, the bill's lone sponsor, said the state's
existing child-support guidelines are a relic from the days when divorces
often resulted in one parent gaining full custody of the children. The
system can penalize divorced parents who have partial custody, said
Bickford, a New Durham Republican.

Bickford's plan would pro-rate child support so that a parent who makes
payments would owe only for the days the other parent cares for the
children.

Opponents said the bill could provide the wrong motivation for divorcing
parents when negotiating time with their children.

"I think when parents' relationships with their kids get tied to how much
money they spend in supporting them that it's a really big recipe for
disaster," said Breckie Hayes-Snow, a staff attorney at the Legal Advice and
Referral Center of New Hampshire, which serves low-income residents.

Currently, child support is determined by a formula. The obligor -the parent
responsible for paying, under the terms of a child-support order - must pay
25 percent of his or her net income to the recipient parent if they have one
child. With two children, the payer owes 33 percent; with three children, 40
percent. In cases with four or more children, the obligor pays 45 percent of
his or her net income.
State law gives the court the ability to break from the formula guidelines
under "special circumstances," such as cases of extraordinary medical,
dental or education expenses or significantly high or low income on the part
of either parent.

Until last year, the law also gave courts the right to veer from the formula
guidelines when parents had "split or shared custody arrangements." That
meant the court could reduce or waive child support in cases in which both
divorced parents had custody.

But the courts "were all over the place" on whether shared custody meant a
50-50 split in parenting time, Bickford said. That made it difficult to
predict when courts would waive the formula.

Last year, the Legislature passed the Parental Rights and Responsibilities
Act in an effort to make sweeping changes to family law. The act, which took
effect Oct. 1, was designed to make divorce less acrimonious and to
encourage cooperative parenting.

Among other changes, the new laws require parents to work together to create
plans for where their children will live, go to school and spend holidays.
Lawmakers also dropped the "custody" language and replaced it with a
"parenting schedule."

The "parenting schedule" makes it easier for the courts to break from the
income formula in determining child support, said Honey Hastings, an Amherst
divorce lawyer and mediator who helped the Legislature draft the Parental
Rights and Responsibilities Act.

But Bickford and some other lawmakers felt the act didn't go far enough. He
has sponsored several bills that he says would reform the system in the
interest of fairness and accountability, including this child-support
change.

Lawmakers who oppose Bickford agree that the system is imperfect, but they
say that the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act needs time to be
observed before more changes are made.

"I think we need to not be so impatient," said Rep. Carolyn Gargasz, a
Hollis Republican who opposed Bickford's bill on the House floor.

The Parental Rights laws were the result of more than two years of work by a
Legislature-created study commission. Meanwhile, a separate study
commission - the Commission to Study Child Support and Related Child Custody
Issues - has looked specifically at child support.

Bickford served as an alternate on the first commission and is a full member
of the second, which is scheduled to return its final report to the
Legislature in December. But that commission's work has been stalled by a
failed attempt to hire an economist to determine the actual cost of raising
a child in New Hampshire.

Lawmakers passed a bill last year approving money to hire the economist. But
Gov. John Lynch halted the process last month when he learned that the
economist recommended by the commission and the Department of Health and
Human Services served jail time for failing to pay thousands of dollars in
support to his own children.

The contract is on hold and could be put out to bid again. The attorney
general is reviewing the bidding process that produced the recommendation to
hire R. Mark Rogers, the Georgia economist who had been jailed for failing
to pay child support - and who has been an advocate for reducing the child
support paid by non-custodial parents.

Bickford said his ultimate goal is to reform the New Hampshire child-support
formula so that it's based on the cost of raising a child, not the income of
divorced parents. Hiring the economist is the first step in that direction,
he said.

Bickford disagrees with those who want to wait - on both the economist's
study and on the effects of the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act -
before enacting new legislation. Bickford sees his child-support bill as an
interim fix.

"Wait and see how that statute works out? Well, maybe the Legislature should
just go on vacation for the next three years," Bickford said. "There's a lot
of work to be done yet."

Both Bickford and Gargasz serve on the House Children and Family Law
Committee, which held a hearing on the bill last month. The public testimony
was overwhelmingly supportive, but the crowd was not representative of the
general public, Gargasz said.

Those who testified were mostly people who felt frustrated by their divorce
terms, and they had all been divorced before the Parental Rights and
Responsibilities Act took effect, Gargasz said.

The committee endorsed the bill, 7-5, though six committee members missed
the vote. "There's no question in my mind" the vote would have gone the
other way if everyone was present, said Rep. Mary Stuart Gile, a Concord
Democrat who voted in the minority.

Instead, the bill went to the House floor with the committee's approval, and
it passed, 186-146. Gargasz said she hopes that vote and the possibility of
passage in the Senate - where the bill will have a hearing in the Ways and
Means Committee March 8 - will rally a more diverse group to testify. She
would like to hear from marital masters, child advocates, family lawyers and
others, she said.

The House victory for Bickford's bill sparked heated discussion on the New
Hampshire Bar Association's family law listserv, said Tom Cooper, the
Concord lawyer who serves as chairman of the state bar's Family Law Section.
Most respondents were strongly opposed to the bill.

Cooper said he thinks the creation of an additional formula would further
complicate the process for divorcing parents and strip the ability of judges
and marital masters to make decisions on an individual basis. "Each family,
as we all know, is very, very different," he said. "They have different
spending priorities and they have different teaching and learning
priorities."

Hastings said the bill would have a dramatic effect because it would affect
past divorces as well as future ones. Divorced parents can petition the
court for a review every three years. "Virtually every support-paying
person, unless he or she doesn't see the children at all, would be in for a
reduction," she said.

That could mean more litigation and hostility, Hastings said. And "what's
harmful to kids in divorce is hostility between the parents,"she said

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/p.../1003/BUSINESS

Child-support bill would treat fathers more fairly

By PAUL M. CLEMENTS

For the Monitor

March 04. 2006 8:00AM

It's really hard to believe that the child support bill you wrote about
("Child-support bill prompts outcry," March 1) could harm children. That's
just more feminist hyperbole.

If Dad gets a break from the impoverishing child support most dads are
ordered to pay, then he'd have more money to provide a nicer home for the
children when it's his turn to be the custodial parent. He would be better
able to provide for toys, games, books, educational outings and sports.

"Opponents say the bill could provide the wrong motivation for divorcing
parents when negotiating time with their children," you reported. Since when
do parents negotiate parenting time? The judge/marital master gives custody
to the mother in 75 percent of cases, and Dad gets two weekends a month
"visitation." No negotiation!

The biggest mistake in this article was to say that Dad has to pay 25
percent of his "net" income. The truth is, child support is based on
"gross"income, before taxes and Social Security are deducted. The effect on
the net, or take-home, pay, is more like 45 percent.

To add insult to injury, Mom is given a $20,000 disregard of income when
determining the percentage of total income. Dad gets not one cent for his
personal subsistence. With several children, a dad is likely to be made
homeless by the severity of the child support levy.

Certainly, the courts have the authority to break from the guidelines under
"special circumstances," but they never do. Because the federal government
pays the states for collecting child support, the courts and the collection
agency team up to maximize the take.
Another error was the allusion to HB 640, saying that it "requires" parents
to cooperate in the formulation of parenting plans. Not so! The mother is
given the domestic violence loophole. She can avoid both mediation and
cooperative parenting plans by accusing the poor dad of some form of abuse.
Or simply say she's "afraid."The case then goes to the judge, who is
guaranteed to rule in the mother's favor.

Rep. Carolyn Gargasz is quoted as saying, "I think we need to not be so
impatient." Fathers, who are most often by far the noncustodial parent, have
been waiting over 20 years for some kind of relief from the status quo of
sole mother custody and the onerous support payments that accompany that
decision.

Joining Gargasz in her criticism of the bill was the New Hampshire Bar
Association. Of course they oppose the bill. Lawyers make their money from
litigating conflicts. If the system were fair, their incomes would suffer.

Honey Hastings, a member of that bar association, apparently thinks fairness
is a bad thing, but she wants us to think it's bad for the kids, not the
lawyers. How can she possibly see a move toward fairness as creating more
litigation and hostility? Unless she's talking about the greedy mothers who
would fight to maintain the gravy train.

Paul M. Clements is president of Dads Against Divorce Discrimination-New
Hampshire

Lawmakers who oppose Bickford agree that the system is imperfect, but they
say that the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act needs time to be
observed before more changes are made.

How much more time do they need to see this is completely ****ed up?

"DB" wrote in message
. net...
Lawmakers who oppose Bickford agree that the system is imperfect, but
they say that the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act needs time to
be observed before more changes are made.

How much more time do they need to see this is completely ****ed up?

Considering that they've spent 20+ years sitting on their hands doing
nothing about it, I'm not at all surprised with the legislatures
laissez-faire attitude.

It sounds more like they need an incentive to get off their collective asses
and get to work for a change.. say, at the voting booth..

This is especially interesting to me, as I'm one of those dads who has
50/50 split custody. A couple of years ago, in a fiasco that involved
my spending a weekend in jail even though I've never missed a CS
payment, it was made clear to myself and my ex that if she demanded it,
the judge would order me to pay 90% of the standard amount of CS.

Like New Hampshire, there are no written guidelines for judges in Rhode
Island (my state) on how to handle shared custody arrangements in
regards to child support. CSE's lawyer and my own agreed that the judge
would use a "formula" that pretty much broke down to taking our 50%/50%
shared custody, lopping off 30% from my side and awarding it to her
(because "all NCPs have their kids 30% of the time in a standard
arrangement"), then taking all of the "neutral time" that my parents had
him (which we didn't consider as belonging to either of us when we
calculated time with our son) and awarding it to her. That left me with
a 10% "discount" on child support for a child that my ex had in her care
about 45% of the time, counting time he spent with my parents.

Now that he's in school, I presume they'd take all of the time he's in
school and gift it to her as well, which might bring my "discount" down
to 5% for a child I have exactly the same number of hours per week as
his mother does. Somehow the courts think it costs me $40 per month to
care for him, because that's how much I'd be saving as opposed to
choosing never to bother with him again. And then the state has the
gall to trumpet about how they're "encouraging fathers to spend more
time with their kids".

Please post anything else you find on this case here, Dusty, in case I
miss it. I'm very interested in seeing what happens.

- Ron ^*^



Dusty wrote:
There's a reply to the original article that was printed three (3) days
later following this..


http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/p.../1003/BUSINESS


Bill would reduce payments

Child-support plan prompts outcry
Committee, House approved changes

By ERIC MOSKOWITZ
Monitor staff

March 01. 2006 8:00AM
A bill that would significantly change child-support payments is being
criticized by family-practice lawyers and others who say it was crafted
prematurely and could harm children.

The bill received minimal opposition at a committee hearing and passed the
House by 40 votes. But now that it's headed to the Senate, critics have
started to take notice.

The bill would give divorced parents who pay child support credit for the
time they spend with their children, reducing their payments to the primary
parents. Rep. David Bickford, the bill's lone sponsor, said the state's
existing child-support guidelines are a relic from the days when divorces
often resulted in one parent gaining full custody of the children. The
system can penalize divorced parents who have partial custody, said
Bickford, a New Durham Republican.

Bickford's plan would pro-rate child support so that a parent who makes
payments would owe only for the days the other parent cares for the
children.

Opponents said the bill could provide the wrong motivation for divorcing
parents when negotiating time with their children.

"I think when parents' relationships with their kids get tied to how much
money they spend in supporting them that it's a really big recipe for
disaster," said Breckie Hayes-Snow, a staff attorney at the Legal Advice and
Referral Center of New Hampshire, which serves low-income residents.

Currently, child support is determined by a formula. The obligor -the parent
responsible for paying, under the terms of a child-support order - must pay
25 percent of his or her net income to the recipient parent if they have one
child. With two children, the payer owes 33 percent; with three children, 40
percent. In cases with four or more children, the obligor pays 45 percent of
his or her net income.
State law gives the court the ability to break from the formula guidelines
under "special circumstances," such as cases of extraordinary medical,
dental or education expenses or significantly high or low income on the part
of either parent.

Until last year, the law also gave courts the right to veer from the formula
guidelines when parents had "split or shared custody arrangements." That
meant the court could reduce or waive child support in cases in which both
divorced parents had custody.

But the courts "were all over the place" on whether shared custody meant a
50-50 split in parenting time, Bickford said. That made it difficult to
predict when courts would waive the formula.

Last year, the Legislature passed the Parental Rights and Responsibilities
Act in an effort to make sweeping changes to family law. The act, which took
effect Oct. 1, was designed to make divorce less acrimonious and to
encourage cooperative parenting.

Among other changes, the new laws require parents to work together to create
plans for where their children will live, go to school and spend holidays.
Lawmakers also dropped the "custody" language and replaced it with a
"parenting schedule."

The "parenting schedule" makes it easier for the courts to break from the
income formula in determining child support, said Honey Hastings, an Amherst
divorce lawyer and mediator who helped the Legislature draft the Parental
Rights and Responsibilities Act.

But Bickford and some other lawmakers felt the act didn't go far enough. He
has sponsored several bills that he says would reform the system in the
interest of fairness and accountability, including this child-support
change.

Lawmakers who oppose Bickford agree that the system is imperfect, but they
say that the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act needs time to be
observed before more changes are made.

"I think we need to not be so impatient," said Rep. Carolyn Gargasz, a
Hollis Republican who opposed Bickford's bill on the House floor.

The Parental Rights laws were the result of more than two years of work by a
Legislature-created study commission. Meanwhile, a separate study
commission - the Commission to Study Child Support and Related Child Custody
Issues - has looked specifically at child support.

Bickford served as an alternate on the first commission and is a full member
of the second, which is scheduled to return its final report to the
Legislature in December. But that commission's work has been stalled by a
failed attempt to hire an economist to determine the actual cost of raising
a child in New Hampshire.

Lawmakers passed a bill last year approving money to hire the economist. But
Gov. John Lynch halted the process last month when he learned that the
economist recommended by the commission and the Department of Health and
Human Services served jail time for failing to pay thousands of dollars in
support to his own children.

The contract is on hold and could be put out to bid again. The attorney
general is reviewing the bidding process that produced the recommendation to
hire R. Mark Rogers, the Georgia economist who had been jailed for failing
to pay child support - and who has been an advocate for reducing the child
support paid by non-custodial parents.

Bickford said his ultimate goal is to reform the New Hampshire child-support
formula so that it's based on the cost of raising a child, not the income of
divorced parents. Hiring the economist is the first step in that direction,
he said.

Bickford disagrees with those who want to wait - on both the economist's
study and on the effects of the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act -
before enacting new legislation. Bickford sees his child-support bill as an
interim fix.

"Wait and see how that statute works out? Well, maybe the Legislature should
just go on vacation for the next three years," Bickford said. "There's a lot
of work to be done yet."

Both Bickford and Gargasz serve on the House Children and Family Law
Committee, which held a hearing on the bill last month. The public testimony
was overwhelmingly supportive, but the crowd was not representative of the
general public, Gargasz said.

Those who testified were mostly people who felt frustrated by their divorce
terms, and they had all been divorced before the Parental Rights and
Responsibilities Act took effect, Gargasz said.

The committee endorsed the bill, 7-5, though six committee members missed
the vote. "There's no question in my mind" the vote would have gone the
other way if everyone was present, said Rep. Mary Stuart Gile, a Concord
Democrat who voted in the minority.

Instead, the bill went to the House floor with the committee's approval, and
it passed, 186-146. Gargasz said she hopes that vote and the possibility of
passage in the Senate - where the bill will have a hearing in the Ways and
Means Committee March 8 - will rally a more diverse group to testify. She
would like to hear from marital masters, child advocates, family lawyers and
others, she said.

The House victory for Bickford's bill sparked heated discussion on the New
Hampshire Bar Association's family law listserv, said Tom Cooper, the
Concord lawyer who serves as chairman of the state bar's Family Law Section.
Most respondents were strongly opposed to the bill.

Cooper said he thinks the creation of an additional formula would further
complicate the process for divorcing parents and strip the ability of judges
and marital masters to make decisions on an individual basis. "Each family,
as we all know, is very, very different," he said. "They have different
spending priorities and they have different teaching and learning
priorities."

Hastings said the bill would have a dramatic effect because it would affect
past divorces as well as future ones. Divorced parents can petition the
court for a review every three years. "Virtually every support-paying
person, unless he or she doesn't see the children at all, would be in for a
reduction," she said.

That could mean more litigation and hostility, Hastings said. And "what's
harmful to kids in divorce is hostility between the parents,"she said

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/p.../1003/BUSINESS

Child-support bill would treat fathers more fairly

By PAUL M. CLEMENTS

For the Monitor

March 04. 2006 8:00AM

It's really hard to believe that the child support bill you wrote about
("Child-support bill prompts outcry," March 1) could harm children. That's
just more feminist hyperbole.

If Dad gets a break from the impoverishing child support most dads are
ordered to pay, then he'd have more money to provide a nicer home for the
children when it's his turn to be the custodial parent. He would be better
able to provide for toys, games, books, educational outings and sports.

"Opponents say the bill could provide the wrong motivation for divorcing
parents when negotiating time with their children," you reported. Since when
do parents negotiate parenting time? The judge/marital master gives custody
to the mother in 75 percent of cases, and Dad gets two weekends a month
"visitation." No negotiation!

The biggest mistake in this article was to say that Dad has to pay 25
percent of his "net" income. The truth is, child support is based on
"gross"income, before taxes and Social Security are deducted. The effect on
the net, or take-home, pay, is more like 45 percent.

To add insult to injury, Mom is given a $20,000 disregard of income when
determining the percentage of total income. Dad gets not one cent for his
personal subsistence. With several children, a dad is likely to be made
homeless by the severity of the child support levy.

Certainly, the courts have the authority to break from the guidelines under
"special circumstances," but they never do. Because the federal government
pays the states for collecting child support, the courts and the collection
agency team up to maximize the take.
Another error was the allusion to HB 640, saying that it "requires" parents
to cooperate in the formulation of parenting plans. Not so! The mother is
given the domestic violence loophole. She can avoid both mediation and
cooperative parenting plans by accusing the poor dad of some form of abuse.
Or simply say she's "afraid."The case then goes to the judge, who is
guaranteed to rule in the mother's favor.

Rep. Carolyn Gargasz is quoted as saying, "I think we need to not be so
impatient." Fathers, who are most often by far the noncustodial parent, have
been waiting over 20 years for some kind of relief from the status quo of
sole mother custody and the onerous support payments that accompany that
decision.

Joining Gargasz in her criticism of the bill was the New Hampshire Bar
Association. Of course they oppose the bill. Lawyers make their money from
litigating conflicts. If the system were fair, their incomes would suffer.

Honey Hastings, a member of that bar association, apparently thinks fairness
is a bad thing, but she wants us to think it's bad for the kids, not the
lawyers. How can she possibly see a move toward fairness as creating more
litigation and hostility? Unless she's talking about the greedy mothers who
would fight to maintain the gravy train.

Paul M. Clements is president of Dads Against Divorce Discrimination-New
Hampshire

"Werebat" wrote in message
news:hpCOf.135141$0G.82888@dukeread10...

This is especially interesting to me, as I'm one of those dads who has
50/50 split custody. A couple of years ago, in a fiasco that involved my
spending a weekend in jail even though I've never missed a CS payment, it
was made clear to myself and my ex that if she demanded it, the judge
would order me to pay 90% of the standard amount of CS.

Like New Hampshire, there are no written guidelines for judges in Rhode
Island (my state) on how to handle shared custody arrangements in regards
to child support. CSE's lawyer and my own agreed that the judge would use
a "formula" that pretty much broke down to taking our 50%/50% shared
custody, lopping off 30% from my side and awarding it to her (because "all
NCPs have their kids 30% of the time in a standard arrangement"), then
taking all of the "neutral time" that my parents had him (which we didn't
consider as belonging to either of us when we calculated time with our
son) and awarding it to her. That left me with a 10% "discount" on child
support for a child that my ex had in her care about 45% of the time,
counting time he spent with my parents.

Now that he's in school, I presume they'd take all of the time he's in
school and gift it to her as well, which might bring my "discount" down to
5% for a child I have exactly the same number of hours per week as his
mother does. Somehow the courts think it costs me $40 per month to care
for him, because that's how much I'd be saving as opposed to choosing
never to bother with him again. And then the state has the gall to
trumpet about how they're "encouraging fathers to spend more time with
their kids".

Please post anything else you find on this case here, Dusty, in case I
miss it. I'm very interested in seeing what happens.

- Ron ^*^

Indeed I shall, Sir!

Dusty wrote:

Hastings said the bill would have a dramatic effect because it would affect
past divorces as well as future ones. Divorced parents can petition the
court for a review every three years. "Virtually every support-paying
person, unless he or she doesn't see the children at all, would be in for a
reduction," she said.

That could mean more litigation and hostility, Hastings said. And "what's
harmful to kids in divorce is hostility between the parents,"she said

That's a pretty big leap, and assumes the hostility arises because the
CP isn't getting enough money. I guess Hastings never thought that maybe
some of the hostility comes from fathers being forced to give up their
time with the children, having to pay a significant chunk of their
income to pay for the time the children are not with him, and not reap
any tax benefits for supporting the children.

This bill sounds like a step in the right direction, IMO. It's nice to
see someone at least attempting to change the situation. If nothing
else, perhaps it will raise awareness to a point where an even better
solution is proposed.