O P I N I O N
THE SOAPBOX
Stand up. Speak up. It’s Your Turn.
The battle for public transparency in Nashua has been relentless, with the city’s persistent resistance at its core. A significant barrier is the prevailing culture in City Hall, which asserts that the city, not the citizens, owns the records.
The city’s failure to address its issues by establishing clear, uniformly applied, publicly available policies significantly contributes to the problem. Instead, it has chosen to deflect attention from its shortcomings by casting aspersions on those seeking records, a disheartening reflection of our current acrimonious political climate. The old Democratic Party “Big Tent” has collapsed in Nashua, and leaders are using fear and divisiveness to stifle civic-minded citizens.
What is Nashua doing that obstructs public access?
The city hired an RTK Administrator who sits behind a locked door that is inaccessible to the public. Relying only on email to create proper record requests, rather than permitting communication between the requester and coordinator to reduce the burden, is awkward, inefficient, and contrary to the responsiveness we are entitled to under the NH Constitution.
In June of 2023, the court strongly urged the city to create written policies and post them on the city website, or litigation would continue. In recent depositions for a federal lawsuit, city attorneys admitted that written policies are not the most important thing and that employees don’t need written policies to do their jobs. The city has yet to write policies to help solve the RTK chaos. Nashua leaders are committed to staying in a litigious pattern and playing the blame game and victim.
Finally, the city stores public records in a locked City Economic Development Office. These records include hundreds of millions of dollars in spending, a matter of another August 2022 RTK lawsuit. That lawsuit involved hotly-debated public interest issues around [1] changing our downtown roads from four lanes to two lanes to accommodate outdoor dining, the [2] construction of Nashua’s Performing Arts Center and the acceptance of federal money.
The city’s misuse of funds in the RTK lawsuit is a clear example of its mismanagement. The city engaged two top-tier legal firms and city attorneys to form a team of five to conquer one pro se litigant. This excessive use of resources, squandering over $650,000 in fees for outside legal counsel, could have been avoided. The city could have opened the Economic Development Office to the public, corrected mistakes, and established policies. Nashua’s legal office operates on emotion rather than applying law, common sense, and civility.
It took two years to bring that RTK lawsuit to a court order, and the outcome was positive. The court found that city officials were deliberately hiding meetings from the public. The court ordered costs for these bad faith acts and enjoined the city from failing to notice meetings again. Right-to-Know NH (RTKNH) has a full write-up on their blog site.
Laurie Ortolano lives in Nashua and is the 2023 Nackey Loeb First Amendment Honoree.
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