The world will always be full of problems in your state or county, town, neighborhood, and perhaps even your household. They might not all be as onerous as figuring out dinner every night for the rest of your life. Some will, but most won’t.
And most won’t require the government to get involved.
This one, sadly, must. It can’t be avoided. The problem of public records. They are public. You have the right to see them. But towns and cities are often disinclined to hand them over without what, in divorce court, would be defined as mental cruelty. They’ll spend thousands, even hundreds of thousands, in court to fight that right or to argue they aren’t public or simply can’t be provided rather than just pay someone to find and deliver them.
Court challenges are a huge investment in other people’s money, and it would be fair to wonder if that was to hide misfeasance, malfeasance, common, ordinary, incompetence, fraud, and corruption.
Enter HB1002, which “establishes parameters for when a public body may charge a fee for records provided under RSA 91-A.” Fourteen Republicans sponsored this thing. (Prime) Kuttab (R), Michael Cahill (D), Ball (R), Maggiore (D), Ankarberg (R), DeSimone (R), Dunn (R), Nelson (R), Bill Boyd (R), Edwards (R), Grassie (D), Carson (R), Gannon (R), Watters (D), Lang (R), Avard (R). Its purpose is to assess a tax to access public records, euphemistically referred to as a fee. One that, in the event that the time required to assemble the requested material exceeds ten hours – as if you’d let them figure that out and assume it is both accurate and just – you will be quoted a labor cost for access. Things could, sorry, WILL, get costly and quickly.
Right to know requests as a revenue stream. What could go wrong?
Sadly, I didn’t hear about this bill until after the public hearing, which I do not have time to watch – but I understand that there was a lot of pushback, as there should have been. These are public records. Public employees exist to fetch them when requested. They get paid to do it. If the number of requests seems excessive, too bad. How about paying another staffer instead of lawyers to sue citizens to keep them from accessing … public records? I bet you’d save the taxpayers some money.
Take Nashua, for example. They have wasted hundreds of thousands, losing 91-A records cases in court. It’s gotten so bad that suing seems to be the only way to separate the city from public documents.
One resident informed me that Nashua, to defend its refusal to provide public records, hires outside legal help. For one case, they are paying five lawyers to fight a pro se citizen with a tab that has to be approaching half a million dollars. One case. Public records. How many hours of looking for records, using the 25.00 fee rule in HB1002, does that equal?
For a 25.00 tax “Citizen A” can get ten hours of looking for whatever they requested. In the half-a-million example, you get 200,000 hours. 500,000/25.00 x 10 hours.
There are 8,760 hours in a year, so Nashua has spent the equivalent of 22 years’ worth of Right to Know request “fines” as proposed in HB1002 – to prevent one citizen from accessing some emails or other public documents.
If one city can afford to waste that sort of time and other people’s money to keep public documents private, imagine what the sum would be if we included Rochester, Londonderry, and any of the other cities and towns that are getting to be like or worse than Nashua. Wouldn’t the public interest be better served if that time was used to obtain public records?
The obstruction and lawfare are not about cost or time or labor, but if that is still a sticking point, rather than turn a government impedeiment into a revenue stream, why not create RTK donor towns? Nashua has time and cash to burn. Smaller bergs and villages could be reimbursed for the cost of locals fulfilling 91-A requests so that residents are not required to pay a tax to see a document they already paid for. It’s a very popular scheme with education funding, and making rich cities pay for poor towns sounds a lot like equity to me. I’m sure the Democrats will find a reason to complain, but this fits nicely in their ideological wheelhouse.
Or, we could trash HB1002 and go back to business as usual, which – in an increasing number of towns – means wasting small fortunes to keep public documents from the public.
If they’ve got that kind of time to waste, and time is money, the problem isn’t burdensome public inquiry. It’s town and city government, and taxing citizens to access public documents is only going to make that problem worse.
