Concord Monitor: “The New Hampshire Municipal Association helped Cahill draft the bill at the request of its members.” This would have been HB1611:
AN ACT allowing a public body or agency to charge a fee for costs of retrieving public records under the right-to-know law.
And “Cahill” is Newmarket Democrat Michael Cahill (Rockingham District 10) who introduced the bill. I’m late on finally reporting on this (emphasis mine):
A Newmarket lawmaker has withdrawn a bill that would have added as much as a $15 hourly charge to search for, redact, and provide public records requested under the state’s right-to-know law. Currently the law allows public offices to charge only for copying records.
Several groups, from the ACLU of New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Press Association to the libertarian conservative group Americans for Prosperity, opposed the bill, saying it could cost the public hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get public records.
Democratic Rep. Michael Cahill said the opposition from such a broad group of organizations concerned enough lawmakers that he withdrew the bill. He previously withdrew another bill that would have limited right-to-know requests to New Hampshire residents.
Again, all I had to hear was the NHMA and knew exactly what this was all about. Anyone that has read GraniteGrok for any amount of time knows that I write a lot of Right-To-Know requests and that I have specific purposes for doing so. Also, Laurie Ortolano has done marvelous work in Nashua in discovering malfeasance in the City’s Assessment office and in having to continue to issue RTKs along the way simply because the City refuses, at times, to follow the Law. Just like I am finding out with School Districts in demanding their book card catalog of books in their District school libraries (to mention one project).
Frankly, I’d have to stop. Full stop. Being retired, I don’t have the cash flow to go after towns and schools where I believe there is malfeasance or failing that, a need to bring a Big Flashlight to let people know what things are afoot in their town or district.
And that’s what its purpose was – to keep people like us out of the Dark Corners that do need flashlights.
And remember, the NH Municipal Association is funded with your property tax dollars as your town or city pay their “dues”. We’re always told “oh, we get free advice and training and this and that”…but never talk about their lobbying efforts in Concord. Often times, it runs COUNTER to what people want (like my budget process correction bill that was to make sure that when budget committee members zeroed out an spending account, and the voters approved it, that snaky Selectmen or Town Administrators could spend that money anyways due to the loophole that the NH Dept of Revenue created with its forms) at which the NHMA lobbied against it under the rubric it would make things too hard for them. They turn your town into a Special Interest against you, the voter/taxpayer. But I digress.
Of COURSE the NHMA help craft their bill – they were protecting their “bread and butter” customers. Against hundreds of people like Laurie and I that are only seeking the truth of what is going on (i.e., “if there’s smoke…”).
Yes, there can be abuses of RSA 91-A:
- Governor Wentworth School District has posted the nearly 25 right-to-know requests it’s received since 2021. In several cases, the person who filed the request did not pick up the documents. That includes one person who asked for all course materials used by one fifth grade teacher, “including curricula, reading lists, and copies of all posters, pictures, or other items that are present on the walls, desks, and bookshelves, or otherwise present in (the) classroom.”
- Natch Greyes, government affairs counsel for New Hampshire Municipal Association, cited a case in Claremont where the city spent four months fulfilling a request for six months of emails between the city manager and eight of the nine city councilors. Collecting the nearly 8,000 emails and attachments and hiring a law firm to redact them cost the town nearly $30,000, Greyes said.
- It sought “all email threads from 2015 to present – across the @dover.k12.nh.us email domain.” Even after the person who submitted the request narrowed the scope, it generated 18,000 pages of documents, all of which had to be carefully reviewed to protect student and employee confidentiality, Greyes said. The city had spent a year on it when the person withdrew the request.
Yes, a bit much (kindly said) but sometimes you need a lot of info to figure out the “lines to follow” and in tracing who is doing what with whom and when”. I’ve done email requests – and yes, you can find things out. But that person asking for all the curriculum and then not picking it up is out of bounds.
But you can’t punish everyone for the antics of a few. What should have happened is that the reciever of the RTK could have asked “can you do this in smaller, more targeted chunks to make this go a bit faster?”. Or something similar. I’m always happy to consider it because I DO know that these can be time-consuming.
But necessary. But it also works the other way. I’ve been asking for the public school card catalogs from several districts. The information can be generated by one push of a button in their computerized library management systems. When school districts hire lawyers to stymie that request (that would take 5 minutes to go to that “button” and generated the spreadsheet and then another 5-10 minutes to email it to me, it shows that “the other side” can be doing the same thing.
Shouldn’t that mean, if that bill had passed, that I could retro-bill them for the time I had to spend in getting the information from them?
If such a bill did both, to even things out, I could be good with it. After all, from the difficulties I’ve been having with some RTKs (that I know were simple to respond to), it would be to my benefit for having an even and level playing field.
It should work both ways.
Anyways, congrats to those that put a spotlight on Cahill’s bill. And I will say thank you, Rep. Cahill, for realizing that this was a jerk move and in pulling it.
Just don’t try to do it again.
(H/T: Concord Monitor, NH Bulletin)
