and expected contractor delays has prevented the opening of the office with no reopening date
determined. Additionally, the Mayor has City Hall completely shut down to the public with no
opening date insite.
Posting the applications online would cut the workload for multiple employees of the city. If they
are not easily made publicly available, here is the current process:
1. aright to request has to be submitted daily or weekly to receive email copies of abatement
applications and documentation that are received by the city. As you know the deadline for
abatement applications is March 1st.
2. The assessing office sends the request to the legal office.
The City Attorney has to respond in 5 business days.
4, The Attorney is requiring a full month just to obtain the documents. (the legal office is not
saying the public will receive the documents within the month, only that it will take them a
month to get them). Shockingly, this is the time the new RTK legal coordinator responded to
Ms. Colquhoun to obtain the applications received by the city as of December 18, 2020. Her
email and city response is attached.*
5. Because the legal office is processing the request, once they receive the documents they will
then have to redact any personal information.
6. Ifthe applications are posted online by the assessing office, no redactions are required
(consistent with how other boards are handling applications)
7. Ms. Perry, the legal clerk, has to create a tracking number for the RTK
8. Ms. Perry is then required to log the request in an excel spreadsheet and document the RTK
details across about 10 excel fields.
9. As in the case of Ms. Colquhouns request, and typical for RTK's that are being processed by
the legal office, the attorney writes another letter to state that redactions must be done and
they will need "X" more time.
10. Ms. Perry must update the excel spreadsheet with the updated letter and response time.
11. The legal office then delivers the responsive documents along with another letter written by
the attorney informing you that the responsive documents are provided.
12. Ms. Perry must update the excel spreadsheet with the letter sent by the legal office and
documents that the responsive documents were delivered. Sometimes a new RTK number
must be generated and an entirely new spreadsheet entry must be created.
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* Please note to add insult to injury, the legal office will not accept a request for all future
applications received for the March 1st deadline. In other words, the requester has to
continually write RTK's to obtain the application because the legal office will not hold a right-to-
know for future documents received because RSA 91-A does not require them to produce
documents that are not in their possession.
However, Ms. Colquhoun and I requested the email! copies of the Board of Assessor public packets
and the Assessing clerk sends those to us without requiring that we submit bi-weekly requests for
the information. In other words, the assessing office is willing to accept a predated request for
future information and fill the request. But because the request for the public abatement
applications and documents are being forwarded to legal, they will not accept a request for future
documents.
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