LEBANON — City Council candidate Lori Key is facing a write-in challenge for the open seat to represent Ward 3.

Karen Zook, who currently holds the seat, is not running this year. She was first elected in 2018.

Key’s second consecutive attempt to secure a council seat looked to be certain when she was the only candidate to file for the race by deadline, but Max Terzano has thrown his hat in the ring with a write-in campaign.

Lori Key

Key, 70, is retired from a career as a retired nurse and associate chief quality officer at Dartmouth Health. She has spent the past year organizing around affordability in Lebanon, including spearheading a successful effort to establish a finance advisory committee and petitioning to include an article to cap city budget increases on the March ballot.

Lori Key (Courtesy photograph)

Key made an unsuccessful bid for the seat last year with an eye toward decreasing the cost of living in Lebanon, especially reducing property taxes. One of her goals if elected would have been to start a finance committee; she now hopes to help the committee take shape as a member of the council.

“I think it’s really possible for somebody to really want to watch the budget and be very careful about how we spend money and still also take care of people in need,” Key said.

Key supports updating the city’s building code to make construction easier, seeking contributions from other communities to cover the cost of social services in Lebanon, renegotiating Lebanon’s relationship with Dartmouth Health either through an existing payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement or by compelling the network to contribute to the city in other ways and doing more strategic planning for the city.

Max Terzano

Terzano, 35, has never held an elected position before. He decided to mount a write-in campaign after seeing that, in his opinion, Key “really cared about property taxes.”

Max Terzano (Courtesy photograph)

About half of Lebanon’s population is made up of renters, according to census data, and Terzano, a renter who has lived in Lebanon for six years, is worried that tenants are being left out of the affordability conversation in the city.

He also believes that there is more to the high cost of living than just property taxes. He would like to see more affordable housing built in Lebanon rather than luxury apartments.

Terzano believes he is uniquely positioned to evaluate Lebanon’s finances and the cost of living. He currently works in the finance division of the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. Previously, he worked for the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., and performed constituent liaison work in North Carolina. He was a member of the Air Force and is a “proud union member.”

“I’m not running because I think it’ll be fun. I’m running because I have the experience in dealing with these issues from federal all the way down, and I want to represent all of Lebanon, not just folks who own their homes.”

Ward 3 voting will be by ballot on Tuesday, March 10 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in City Council chambers, 51 North Park St., Floor 1.