$39,721.24, and the Records Nashua Still Hasn’t Produced
A new Right-to-Know lawsuit raises questions about figures presented to Nashua’s Board of Aldermen and why the records needed to verify them remain outstanding.
TL;DR:
- Matthew Sullican and Community Development
- The $40,000.00 Question?
- Taking the Numbers to the Board
- A Calculation to the Penny Comes From Somewhere
- Asking Again/And It Isn’t Just One Request
- When Does Delay Become Gamesmanship?
If you do not follow Nashua government closely, you may not know the name Matthew Sullivan. Sullivan is Nashua’s Director of Community Development, a department with a broad reach over City government. Community Development oversees building and permitting functions, planning and zoning, conservation matters, and federally funded housing and HUD grant programs. It also administers Nashua’s Lead Hazard Control program.
That background matters because Sullivan and his department are now at the center of a Right-to-Know lawsuit filed September 11 in Hillsborough County Superior Court. Sullivan is named in his official capacity as Director of Community Development, the department maintaining many of the records at issue. He also personally presented an approximately $40,000 expenditure to the Board of Aldermen that is now the focus of one count of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is narrower than the surrounding controversy might suggest. It does not ask the court to decide whether Nashua violated HUD regulations, whether federal grant funds were improperly administered, or whether any City employee engaged in misconduct. The central question is far more basic: Did the City conduct reasonable searches and timely produce existing governmental records, or lawfully explain why it did not?
The chronology behind one of those requests makes that question particularly interesting.
The $40,000 Question
On July 27, Sullivan presented an approximately $40,000 expenditure to Nashua’s Budget Review Committee in connection with Resolution R-26-048. Two days later, on July 29, I filed Right-to-Know Request 26-556 seeking the records supporting that figure, including payroll information, the calculation used to derive the amount and an employee-by-employee breakdown.
This should not have required an archaeological expedition through City Hall. If the City was asking elected officials to appropriate roughly $40,000 based upon a calculation, it was reasonable to expect that records existed showing how the number was calculated.
On August 5, the City closed my request after producing three paycheck records totaling approximately $8,899. The calculation supporting the approximately $40,000 figure was not produced, nor was the requested employee-by-employee breakdown. According to the petition, the closure also did not state that no additional records existed or identify an exemption for withholding them.
Then, four days later, something remarkable happened.
On August 9, Sullivan and Finance Manager Lyn Tripp issued a memorandum calculating the expenditure at exactly $39,721.24. Not approximately $40,000. Not roughly $39,700. The calculation went all the way to the penny.
That chronology is difficult to ignore. The public asked for the calculation. The City closed the request without producing it. Four days later, Sullivan had a calculation to the penny. Apparently, the calculation was difficult to locate when a citizen requested it, but considerably easier to assemble when City Hall needed it.
Taking the Numbers to the Board
On August 11, Sullivan presented the justification for the expenditure to the Board of Aldermen. During that presentation, he represented that the Lead Program Manager was being paid $3,000 per week.
The City’s payroll record raises an obvious question about that representation. According to the records cited in the petition, the employee received $1,507.57 for 40 hours of administrative pay, at approximately $37.69 per hour. The same paycheck separately included $4,164.67 for 110.5 hours of earned-time payout.
Those figures are materially different. A normal 40-hour paycheck does not become a $3,000 weekly salary simply because accumulated earned time was also paid when an employee separated from employment. Yet the $3,000-per-week representation was made to Nashua’s elected legislative body while Sullivan was explaining the expenditure, and the Board subsequently approved R-26-048.
According to the petition, a Board member specifically questioned whether the figures involved misrepresentation or fraud, and Sullivan denied that they did. That denial may ultimately prove entirely correct. But there is a remarkably simple way to settle the matter: produce the underlying records.
A Calculation to the Penny Comes From Somewhere
Sullivan’s August 9 memorandum was not a casual estimate. It contained specific expenses, dollar amounts, date ranges and employee percentages. The petition therefore alleges that a calculation this precise necessarily relied upon underlying source information, payroll records, accounting records, allocation records, worksheets or comparable material.
That does not mean the City must create a new record simply because a citizen asks for one. It means that if existing governmental records were used to develop the $39,721.24 calculation, those records are legitimate subjects of a Right-to-Know request.
There are only so many possibilities. If the source records exist and are public, produce them. If they exist but the City contends they are exempt, identify the exemption. If the City maintains that no such records exist, then someone should explain how a calculation involving salaries, benefits, percentages and date ranges arrived at exactly $39,721.24 without underlying source material.
The memorandum raises still more questions. For example, it identifies $3,016.53 as a salary expense for May 11 through May 15, 2026, while the payroll record cited in the lawsuit shows $1,507.57 for 40 hours of administrative pay for the pay period ending May 16. There may be a perfectly legitimate accounting explanation for the difference. If so, the records should make that explanation easy to see.
The same is true of a 30 percent employee allocation connected with the Lead grant. The City’s Grant Narrative identifies the Project Director position as 30 percent FTE, but states that only 10 percent of the position is charged to the grant, with another 20 percent treated as match through CDBG. The document identifies Sullivan as interim Project Director.
Again, there may be an explanation. That is precisely why the public asks for records instead of being expected to guess.
Asking Again
On August 12, I filed another Right-to-Know request seeking the Grant Narrative, staffing budget, key-personnel records, the basis for the 30 percent allocation, records supporting a $3,590.52 conference expense, HUD correspondence and the source accounting records behind Sullivan’s memorandum.
By September 10, according to the petition, records substantiating the 30 percent allocation, conference expense and source accounting still had not been produced.
That is what makes this more difficult to dismiss as an ordinary bureaucratic delay. The outstanding records are not peripheral to the controversy. They are the very records capable of determining whether the representations already made to the Board were accurate.
And It Isn’t Just One Request
If the $39,721.24 dispute were the only records problem involving Community Development, it might reasonably be dismissed as an isolated disagreement over one complicated request. The lawsuit alleges otherwise.
An April Right-to-Know request sought records involving HUD-funded lead work at 14 Mulberry Street. The City repeatedly extended the response period – ten times. Finance completed its search. Corporation Counsel completed its search. Community Development, the department administering the Lead program, remained outstanding.
The petition identifies the location of the project records as a Community Development folder for the Lead 2020 program, under “Projects Completed,” with a folder specifically named 14 Mulberry.
After months of extensions, it becomes reasonable to wonder just how long it should take to search a folder named for the property being requested.
Another Right-to-Know request sought HUD correspondence concerning Nashua’s grant-compliance status and records involving repayment of federal funds. That request also received extensions, with Community Development remaining the unresolved department.
Yet the lawsuit identifies a September 8, 2025 HUD communication addressed directly to Sullivan concerning grant de-obligation and closeout. An attached amendment reflected a $111,802.99 de-obligation. The petition also identifies a September 2025 HUD memorandum seeking a High-Risk Designation concerning Nashua’s current grant. Both documents fell within the requested timeframe, and the petition alleges that neither was produced in response to the request.
When Does Delay Become Gamesmanship?
This is where the larger problem comes into focus. This is no longer about one questionable number, one delayed Right-to-Know request or one missing worksheet. Nor is it enough simply to wave away every delay as the inevitable machinery of municipal government.
The sequence matters. Records are requested. Only part of the information is produced. A request is closed. Days later, Sullivan produces a detailed calculation using information underlying the very subject of that request. Figures are then presented to the Board, those figures raise additional questions, and citizens request the supporting documentation. The records capable of answering those questions remain outstanding.
At what point does administrative delay begin to look like gamesmanship?
That question does not require anyone to pretend to know what Sullivan was thinking. Motive is ultimately a matter for evidence, and allegations in a lawsuit are not judicial findings. But the public does not need to diagnose anyone’s state of mind to examine a chronology and ask whether government is functioning as it should.
Was the $3,000-per-week statement an innocent mistake? Was there a legitimate accounting basis for the 30 percent allocation? What explains the $3,016.53 salary figure? What source information was used to calculate $39,721.24 only four days after the City closed the request seeking the calculation?
Those questions can be answered without speculation. They can be answered with documents.
And perhaps that is the most frustrating part of this entire controversy: the City possesses the ability to end most of the debate. If Sullivan’s figures are correct, the documents will vindicate him. If a statement was simply mistaken, the records can explain the mistake. If the accounting is legitimate, the accounting records should demonstrate it. And if months of delay were genuinely necessary, the City can document why.
What government should not be able to do is present numbers to elected officials, spend public money based upon those numbers, and then expect citizens to stop asking questions when the records underlying those representations remain somewhere behind the curtain.
Public officials exercise public authority, administer public programs and spend public money. The records documenting those activities belong to the public unless the law provides otherwise.
So perhaps the answer is simpler than all of the explanations, extensions and arguments that have accumulated around this dispute.
Produce the records and let the public see for itself.
