Ruais will seek second term as Manchester’s mayor

MANCHESTER, NH – Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais on Thursday announced he will seek a second term in this fall’s municipal election during a campaign kick-off event.

The announcement was made at the GOAT restaurant on Old Granite Street, the location of now New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte’s campaign kickoff announcement a year earlier. Ayotte joked that Ruais’ event on Thursday had more people in attendance than her event and thanked him for his efforts on issues such as bail reform. She was joined in introducing Ruais by Executive Councilor John Stephen, with Stephen joking that as a Republican he could not get the endorsement of his father, long-time State Senator Bobby Stephen (D-Manchester) even though Ruais could.

In turn, Ruais thanked Stephen and Ayotte on their partnership in seeking to help the city, also thanking the three Aldermen in attendance: Chris Morgan (Ward 1), Norm Vincent (Ward 11) and Kelly Thomas (Ward 12) and the board as a whole.  Ruais also joined Ayotte and Stephen’s humorous approach, joking that the event was moved to Thursday due to line dancing at the GOAT on Wednesday, showing where the true priorities of GOAT patrons lied.

All kidding aside, Ruais repeated a number of points he mentions frequently at the beginning of his monthly town hall meetings, such as the auction of surplus city properties to fund the city’s affordable housing trust, the drop in year-over-year opioid deaths and overdoses in the city, the anti-camping ordinance update, the ongoing zoning ordinance rewrite aimed at facilitating new housing and the efforts to house the city’s homeless veteran population among other initiatives. Ruais stated that as of Thursday, 30 homeless veterans have been housed as part of the city’s partnership with HarborCare.

While Ruais said that he was proud of the efforts made over the first 13 months of his tenure, he believes that there is more left to be done and asked those in attendance to help him in his goal of seeking consensus-based solutions to the city’s problems.

“I want to listen to what people’s cares are, their concerns are, how we can work together as Republicans, Democrats and Independents to get this solved, to get problems solved for the residents here,” he said. “Manchester is such an extraordinarily important part of this state that when Manchester does well, New Hampshire is doing well.”