There’s a lot of news coming from our neck of the woods here in Central New Hampshire– not all of it good. Most major newspapers in the state reported Wednesday that the Belknap County Administrator/Finance Director has been placed on unpaid leave. According to the Citizen (Laconia),
Nancy Cook, who has been the Belknap County administrator and finance officer for a decade, has been placed on unpaid administrative leave and the circumstances behind her suspension are being investigated by the New Hampshire Attorney General.
Belknap County Commission Chairman Philip "Bud" Daigneault confirmed on Tuesday that Cook had been placed on leave effective March 28 and that on the same day, the commission asked Attorney General Kelly Ayotte to look into the circumstances that led up to the commission’s action.
Regular ‘Grok readers might recall that this is the same person I refered to in a prior post about the flawed budget process (which I’ll explain in a moment):
Despite pleas from taxpayers and officials calling attention to fiscal belt-tightening in their own towns and school systems, the Bizarro characters that are the county’s “leaders” and the head administrator would hear none of it. Instead of accepting the input with genuine interest and courtesy, they insulted and sniped at members of the public that dared speak their concerns.
I noted on the Saturday MTNP radio program of March 8th that, after watching the administrator in action and her treatment of the public, if I were a County Commissioner, she would no longer have a job. And now, lo and behold, less than a month later, she’s on the verge of losing it, and then some.
This is not the only big news to come from Belknap County today, as it was also revealed during a County Convention meeting that they have failed to properly follow the law in passing a budget, thereby triggering a "default budget"– the Commissioners’ original proposed budget– resulting in nearly a half million dollars less in spending!
(Of course they’ll "fix" this at some point with a supplemental appropriation, but we can have yet another discussion at the time of trying to cut spending, so it won’t be all bad!)
For those of you that might be interested, here is my column as written for Thursday’s (04/03)Laconia Daily Sun with a more complete roundup of Belknap County’s woes, lawmakers turned lawbreakers, and how New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know laws help ordinary citizens take back their government:
Exercising the First
by Doug Lambert
Today’s Menu: Crow
I really don’t like to gloat or otherwise dwell on certain instances where the activism in which I am involved proves to be successful, but for today’s column, I will make an exception.
As many readers know, former Laconia Mayor Tom Tardif and I have been deeply involved with the goings-on at the county level of our government. Starting with the closed-door process involving the appointment of the replacement Sheriff, and leading into the budgeting and borrowing methods employed, we discovered that in many instances, the relevant laws were not being followed. That in and of itself is bad enough, but the overarching apparent reason for this continued pattern is even more troublesome as every instance seemed to have the same goal in common: to thwart the ability of ordinary citizens to gain insight and understanding as to what was taking place. That is unacceptable.
I won’t belabor the Sheriff’s appointment again, as most readers already know the basic story of what the Belknap County Convention, comprised of the 18 elected NH House members from the county, has done in this regard: First they wrongfully went behind closed doors, without having a legally allowable reason. Then they made a secret ballot vote in a public meeting (for which they have been found in violation). They capped it all off by denying us access to the documents used in the process that are mentioned in the minutes of the meetings, which were never sealed.
As we await a final ruling from the NH Supreme Court on this, we have already been vindicated in that the Convention has since appointed a replacement County Registrar of Deeds in an open public meeting with a fully transparent process. Had they thought they could get away with it otherwise, I’m sure they would have tried. See what a little “sunshine” can do?
In the course of using NH’s Right to Know law in our research on the Sheriff matter, we began to cast an eye towards the budgeting process as it began to unfold early last December. As we studied the relevant laws (RSAs), we created a timeline of events that must legally happen in the presentation and creation of the county’s budget and the related borrowing that regularly occurs in its ongoing operations. What we found was that in both instances (budget and borrowing), what was happening in practice did not conform to the legal timeline as constructed. With more study, and more Right to Know requests, we became convinced that there was a big problem that needed be fixed. At every turn, we made all of our findings known to all concerned. This culminated in an eleventh hour “public hearing” on March 4th in an attempt to make things right, but unfortunately for them, it was too late.
On Tuesday of this week, special meetings were convened by the Belknap County Commissioners, the Belknap County Convention, and the convention’s Executive Committee. At each respective meeting, special resolutions were made and passed to undo budget and borrowing actions taken at meetings in March, February, and last December. Oh sure, the politicians made a point to say that they didn’t think we were correct in our assertions, but under the advice of their bond counsel (who was present in the room) they followed the letter of the law as outlined by Tom and I in correspondence with his law firm, the NH Attorney General’s office, the NH Department of Revenue and the County Treasurer. In other words, this time, they would follow the law.
During Tuesday’s meeting we further learned that, as we contended in the same aforementioned correspondence, the Belknap County Convention and Commissioners have acknowledged (for the first time publicly) that they had failed to legally pass a budget for the county when they did not conduct a proper public hearing on December 10th as required by law. This means that the Commissioners’ original proposed budget, nearly half a million dollars LESS than what the Convention thought they approved on March 4th, will take effect! Can anybody ever remember that happening prior to this instance? This is what happens when lawmakers have little to no familiarity with the laws that they themselves pass.
At a meeting of the Gilford Republican Committee last week, Convention member Frank Tilton told me that had he been the chairman of the Convention during the four-hour long March 4th “public hearing” on the now defunct budget, he would have had me and Tom physically removed from the meeting, Joe Hoffman style. He further told me that, thanks to our actions, our credibility was completely destroyed. Really? Why? Because we were right and exposed him and the rest as “having no clothes?” Our questions were specific to the budget, and being a member of the Gilford Budget Committee, I feel as though they were well qualified and reasonable—much the same as what is the norm when reviewing the town budget. It wasn’t my fault that the county’s chief administrator and financial director was apparently clueless when it came to explaining and defending a budget that she herself had a hand in preparing.
Now that we’ve learned she has been suspended without pay under a cloud of suspicion, it is somewhat more understandable why she treated Tom and me so shabbily when making requests to view financial records under her direct supervision. Could we have been getting too close to something she didn’t want us to see? Perhaps next time Rep. Tilton, instead of drilling down on citizens exercising their legal rights under the law, will actually conduct the oversight he and his political comrades are themselves supposed to be doing on our behalf.
In a letter to the Daily Sun on March 3rd, the current Sheriff (who most likely will get removed from office if the Supreme Court rules as we believe they will) wrote, “While inundating the county’s administrative staff with endless Right-to Know requests, Mr. Lambert has received volumes of information, some of which he has either not read, or chooses to ignore.” Oh really? Perhaps he wishes it would have been so!
Doug Lambert’s column appears in the Daily Sun every week. He has an opinion on almost everything. For more, visit online at www.granitegrok.com and www.gilfordgrok.com. Hear him on the radio Saturdays from 9 to 11 on 1490AM, WEMJ.