OK, here are the two last videos from the hearing last week. First is that of NH State Rep Travis O’Hara, followed by the follow-up/ending of the hearing. As I have on our GraniteGrok YouTube Channel (PLEASE, SUBSCRIBE!):
This past Friday, 5/26, was my hearing at the NH Legislative Ethics Committee. I had brought NH State Reps Harry Bean and Travis O’Hara to the Committee as they willfully and knowingly broke NH RSA 91-A (NH’s Right To Know law) and NH RSA 24:9-c & D (which governs how County Delegations (all of the NH State Reps from a given county) how to act. Both laws make it mandatory that all meetings of such public bodies MUST be publicly noticed (ad in the local paper, noticed on their website, et al) with specific “days ahead of the meeting” announcements (2 day vs 7 day notice) as well as who is entitled to call emergency meetings (he did but wasn’t entitled to in trying to “meld” the two together).
Gosh, can we “normal” people do that same thing to the laws that he passes that we must obey or go to prison?
This is Travis O’Hara’s testimony which was, if you boil it down, somebody else was supposed to do that noticing, not my job (a common theme among those I issued complaints against) even as he is the Clerk of the Belknap County Delegation and part of his responsibility is to make sure proper noticing is done according to RSA 24:9-d.
Takeaways:
And the end of the hearing:
I also received from the Ethics Committee (under an RTK, ‘natch) what the defendants had sent in response to my complaint. Well, actually, not THEIR actual responses but their common (to Bean and O’Hara) lawyer: Paul Fitzgerald. As we found out during Rep. Bean’s testimony, Fitzgerald is not only Bean’s personal lawyer but also “the lawyer of record” for Belknap County. 1) Conflict of interest (Bean’s protestations aside), and 2) Nice to see, once again, that my tax dollars are being used against my self-interest in trying to, according to Article 8 of the NH Constitution, hold my elected representatives accountable for what they do – or what they have chosen not to do.
