Mayor Jim Donchess vented at a recent Nashua Board of Aldermen meeting to justify the new legal manager positions to process Right-to-Know requests. He came down hard on myself and another citizen who are simply requesting public documents to understand what is happening in our city government.
Related: Do We Need A Right-To-Know Manager in the Legal Office?
We’d like to thank Laura Colquhoun for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
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The mayor sounded scared and threatened. He made many statements that were not fact-based. As a lawyer, he came across uninformed.
Here are a few facts. The Nashua legal office is unwilling to work with citizens to clarify requests to help reduce the city’s burden. Citizens simply do not understand how our documents are maintained, city data is stored, and what is involved in accessing the information. We often do not know the names of public reports. I have never been called by the legal office to ask for clarification on any of my requests, but rest assured, I have been denied a great deal of information because the legal office applies “unreasonably described” to deny the documents.
The legal office is documenting all general communication from myself and Ms. Laurie Ortolano and creating a table for general questions. These are not Right-to-Know requests, and most were not sent to the legal office. They are general inquiries that any citizen might ask in City Hall. Why do our lawyers have to spend their time on this? The legal clerk expounded in the meeting about how much work cataloging this information has been.
The mayor brought this position to the board three weeks ago. He claims the city has received a “deluge” of requests for two years. Corporate Counsel Steve Bolton told the Personnel Committee that this had been a growing problem for the last four or five years.
Why wasn’t this position placed in the 2021 budget and fully vetted during the budget season?
The Board of Aldermen approved it without even having a job description. This issue did not just creep up on the city.
Maybe there is some validity to Ms. Ortolano’s Right-to-Know lawsuit, and the city feels like it’s time to look proactive. Good.
Will placing a Right-to-Know manager in a legal office that has stonewalled and backstopped the release of public documents open the door to responsive access? Let’s see.
Before the mayor appointed Kim Kleiner as the administrative services director, residents could easily access documents. The building, tax, and assessing departments all made documents easily available.
However, as soon as Ms. Kleiner came on the scene, public records were locked down, and there has been nothing but problems. This is what happens when the mayor and aldermen appoint unqualified insiders to high-level city positions.
The mayor is just wasting more taxpayer money. If he got rid of Ms. Kleiner and had the city go back to how they were handling the Right-to-Know requests and restore honest dialogue, the residents would not have a problem.
That would be a true cost-saving for Nashua.
