Prying documents out of school districts in New Hampshire is not like pulling teeth. It’s worse.
A recent example of this is the ongoing struggle for more transparency from Manchester city boards and committees. Contracts for the Superintendent, Asst. Super, and Business administrator for the Manchester School District were amended at the end of July but repeated attempts by the public or local media to obtain them went unfulfilled.
Was the Manchester Board of School Committee willing and ready to vote on them without a single taxpayer seeing a word of what was in those contracts?
Yes or no, Rich Girard tried to shine a flashlight or two…
Following that (July 29th) vote (on amendments), Girard at Large filed a request for the contracts. At first, we were told that the contracts would be presented to the board at its regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, August 10, 2015. However, after our email reply to (Debra) Livingston’s assertion, she wrote she was “working on our request.” Subsequent follow emails in search of the information were ignored.
Well because!
Because Superintendent Livingston eventually announced that she had no intention of accepting any contract with a pay raise after Mayor Gatsas vetoed the teacher’s contract. And Ground beef is on sale at Hannaford!
I don’t get the connection between revealing details regarding how the taxpayers will compensate you for your services, which I am willing to bet do not include hiding public documents, and your refusal to “accept a raise” no one else knows about because you are hiding public documents.
Your discomfiture with regard to the arrangements for your compensation do not entitle you or your advocates hiding public information or pretending it doesn’t exist in a form suitable for public consumption.
School district attorney Matthew Upton, in response to Mayor Gatsas, who questioned whether or not he’d directed the district not to release the contracts prior to a board vote, said that the contracts did not exist in written form until just before the meeting, and therefore were not available for dissemination to the public.
He also said that inasmuch as the contracts had been given to a quorum of the board, they were public documents that were open to the public. Upton did not address how the committee could vote on proposals on contracts that supposedly did not exist, nor did he answer why Livingston sent the contracts “under confidential cover” to the school board with their agenda packets on August 7th, denying inquiries from both Girard at Large and the Union Leader for them prior to the meeting on August 10.
Any chance these were actually on Hillary’s wiped server and only recently “recovered”? Did you have to wait for State and the DoJ to redact them for you?
Just asking.
Livingston has finally released the contracts, per the title of the post,to the Girard at Large Radio Show, and you can find them linked at the bottom of this article.
Rich is (by the way) running for a spot on the Manchester Board of School Committee. Perhaps, when elected, he can help the people of Manchester with the problem of voting on contracts no one has seen the way our good friend Ken Eyring helped the people of Windham, New Hampshire –or with the burning commitment to transparency (in the face of overwhelming opposition) pursed by Donna Green of Sandown.
