CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – The debate over Executive Councilor Ray Burton’s hiring of a convicted sex offender with ties to Maine has brought long-simmering resentments to the surface.

Residents of the rural and economically weak North Country say the state’s prosperous south usually ignores them, and should keep doing so in Burton’s case.

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wayne King is the latest to chime in, telling officials south of the notches to “shut up and let us decide.”

When they’re running for office, politicians “drape themselves in the mystique and character of the North Country,” King wrote in an Op-Ed piece in Monday’s New Hampshire Union Leader.

“However, as soon as the election is over, they develop a strange case of northern amnesia and suddenly we don’t seem to matter a whole lot.”

When North Country bridge and road projects get approved, “chances are that Ray Burton is somewhere in the equation,” wrote King, publisher of a tourism magazine in Rumney. “When a family is getting the runaround from a state agency and suddenly they are being treated with the respect and dignity that every citizen of this state deserves, chances are that Ray Burton has given a bureaucrat a quick lesson in governance and courtesy.”

Burton is a Republican who has spent nearly three decades on the five-member council, which approves contracts and appointments. As King’s support indicates, he has strong support among North Country residents of all political stripes.

Despite calls from the all-GOP congressional delegation, Democratic Gov. John Lynch and others for him to resign, Burton says he won’t, and that he looks forward to running for another two-year term next year.

The congressional delegation and newspapers including Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Union Leader say Burton should resign for repeatedly hiring Mark Seidensticker as a campaign aide despite being aware of some of Seidensticker’s criminal record. Seidensticker has homes in Concord, and in Ogunquit, Maine.

Burton’s supporters say that lapse in judgment does not warrant Burton’s removal, especially because Burton said he will no longer employ Seidensticker after the aide’s most recent arrest.

Critics say employing Seidensticker was more than a temporary lapse, however.

“For 13 years nearly half of his tenure on the council he knowingly allowed a man convicted of a violent sexual assault against a boy to travel with him all over the North Country,” the Union Leader said in a recent editorial. “Despite knowing that the man had three times been arrested for failing to register as a sex offender, Burton continued to provide him with credibility and contacts.”

Burton has had only token opposition in some elections, but that could change. He has angered some in the southwestern part of his sprawling district by supporting Mount Sunapee in the ski area’s disputes with environmentalists.

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