Nicole Clay: The New Jesse Neuman?

Laurie sent a couple of emails over and it looks like the City of Nashua has hired a replacement for Jesse Neumann, filling the job of Right To Know Coordinator:

This is the new RTK Coordinator hired by Nashua. Resume attached. Nicole Clay – former Nashua Police Dept. officer, turned lawyer. Read the stuff I sent to <redacted> below.

I got the resume today for the woman hired to be the new RTK coordinator. This woman was not hired to be a right to know coordinator. I asked the City to now give me her job description and salary.

This next part absolutely floored me:

The Mayor told a member of the school board that this lady will be much tougher on citizen requests. I don’t know why the Mayor would advertise this.

Beats the heck out of me why Nashua Mayor Jim Donchuss would make this announcement unless he was SO sure that he now has “it in the bag” when it comes to those pesky and irritating Nashua residents whose only sin is trying to find out what their elected representatives are doing.

What DOES he have in mind?

Well, when I read “this lady will be much tougher on citizen requests” all I could think of was former NH State Rep Cynthia Chase who famously said:

Progressive NH State Rep Cynthia Chase (D): (concerning the Free State Project having chosen NH as their destination state, even as Chase did the same as a R.I. transplant): “What we can do is make the environment here so unwelcoming that some will choose not to come, and some may actually leave. One way is to pass measures that will restrict freedoms that they think they will find here.

So, Nicole Clay has been hired to make the City of Nashua’s “questioners” feel so unwelcome so as to not go to City Hall?

If you look at her resume, she’s dropping down from being a lawyer in the NH Attorney General’s office to an RTK clerk?

Not to take away anything from her (yet) – she has definitely improved her skills and herself. But I think Laurie is correct – something isn’t sniffing right here. This isn’t a sideways or lateral move – this is a move down.

It doesn’t take a J.D. to do this job – it is little more than one where you know where all the data is located.

Unless your job is to NOT know where it is – I’ll leave it to the reader to guess and Ms. Clay to prove my hypothesis.

(H/T: Laurie)