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CONCORD: All New Hampshire adults will be eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in a matter of weeks, Gov. Chris Sununu said. “We don’t have a firm date on that, but it really is just weeks away that any adult citizen in the state of New Hampshire will be able to go to VINI and sign up for their vaccine,” he said. VINI is the state’s new vaccine registration system.

CONCORD: The New Hampshire Senate has given preliminary approval to a school voucher bill that supporters say would especially benefit children who have struggled during the coronavirus pandemic. Opponents argued it would drain money from struggling public schools. The Senate voted 14-10 along party lines in favor of the bill, then tabled it. It’s similar to a House measure, but the Senate version limits eligibility to families with income up to 300% of the federal poverty line.

CONCORD: The Republican-led New Hampshire Senate has voted 14- 10 along party lines to reject a bill that would have raised the state’s minimum wage to $10 per hour starting in January and then increased it to $12 two years later. New Hampshire currently doesn’t set its own minimum wage. Instead, the state follows the federal minimum which is $7.25 per hour. Democrats passed minimum wage bills the last two years when they controlled the Legislature, but the measures were vetoed by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.

CONCORD: Sales of single-family homes February were up 10.2% from a year earlier, according to the New Hampshire Association of Realtors. Prices rose 23.5%, and the median price for a single-family home was $357,400 — nearly $70,000 more than pre-pandemic levels. There were 1,062 homes for sale in February, about a third of the number that were on the market in February 2020. That means inventory would last 0.7 of a month a little more than 20 days.

CONCORD: New Hampshire’s preliminary seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for February 2021 was 3.3%, New Hampshire Employment Security reported Tuesday. It represented a decrease of 0.3 percentage points from the January rate, which remained at 3.6% after revision. The February 2020 seasonally adjusted rate was 2.6%. New Hampshire’s unemployment rate rose to over 17% last year after the pandemic hit but has since recovered and is now among the lowest in the country.

NASHUA: The Nashua Planning Board has approved the second phase of the Renaissance Downtowns Bridge Street Revitalization project, which calls for 177 new apartments on Bridge Street. The project includes construction of three five-story buildings at the site of an empty field where the Johns Manville industrial plant was located. The first phase of the project, Residences at Riverside Landing, has 159 units. Once completed the entire project would result in 750 apartments.

BERLIN: Brookfield Renewable Energy has presented a plan to build a 14-megawatt battery storage project in Berlin on 3.8 acres of city land behind the district courthouse on Main Street. The eight batteries would be enclosed in individual metal airconditioned modular containers on a slab foundation. A 7-foot-high chain link fence around the containers will provide security. The Berlin Sun reported that the company said the batteries would harness energy that would otherwise be curtailed or unused from the company’s five hydroelectric plants on the Androscoggin River between Dummer and Shelburne.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Democratic U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire has joined with 33 other members of the U.S. House and Senate in introducing the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which authorizes over $94 billion to ensure unserved and under-served communities have affordable high-speed internet access. She said that “it has never been more important” to have a reliable high-speed internet connection. The bill’s chief sponsors are House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

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