Board of Aldermen 09-22-2020 Page 5
Also, Madam President, | wanted to the request for the transfer to fund a Right to Know Coordinator. Now
this going to take a little discussion because there’s some detail here and people have asked some
questions which | think we need to answer. Just for members of the public, the Right to Know Law says
that anytime a citizen requests any documents or any number of documents, the City must respond and
produce those documents with certain limited exceptions, no matter howlarge the volume, no matter how
many requests are received, no matter how many employees are working part time or half time or no
matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars it is taking for the City to respond to these requests.
So about two years ago, we began receiving a deluge of Right to Know Requests regarding -— first
Assessing then other departments. Back in the summer of 2019 | believe, early summer, we had already
produced 34,000 documents in response to hundreds of Right to Know Request. At that point, the Legal
Department got involved because we didn’t want people just working full time on Right to Know Requests.
There is other work to do in City Hall believe it or not and | know you know that very well. So the Legal
Department began to handle them and since that time there have been hundreds more Right to Know
Requests. We estimate, and we’ve got two employees here on the meeting tonight, but we estimate that
there, well we know that there are four employees who are spending about half their time for the last two
years on Right to Know Requests from one or two individuals. And if you count up what the staff time and
the benefits are, that’s around $200,000.00 a year. That doesn’t count Attorney Bolton and Administrative
Services Director Kleiner and others who spend significant time but not half time. Frankly, and you can
hear from two of them, and we’ve got Manuela Perry from the Legal Department and Karina Ochoa from
Administrative Services on the call who can tell you a little about wnat they’ve gone through. But they need
some relief, people are getting burned out from just working on Right to Know Requests so much, so we
need a Right to Know Coordinator to help do all this work.
Now the question | think we need to answer is, well why don’t the Departments just go ahead and answer
these things. The first answer which was some time ago when the Legal Department was involved, it was
that the volume was So great and we basically get at least one every day on average and one
communication can include many requests which can requesthundreds of documents. Sometimes there
will be a period of three days and there will be many, many Right to Know Requests coming in all at the
same time. So the first answer was well we can’t have people just working full time on Right to Know
Requests, because that could definitely happen under these circumstances. But the other answer is that
there have been — this is | don’t think well understood — many legal complaints brought regarding against
the City and its employees. For example, there have been criminal complaints lodged against the
volunteer members of the Board of Assessing, criminal complaints against those volunteers. Criminal
complaint against City employees in the Assessing Department. A multi-count litigation against the City
regarding what are alleged to be Right to Know violations, you know, kind of cherry picking out of these
many hundreds and thousands of documents, five, ten differentinstances when a lawyer can sort of allege
that there was some kind of technical violation. And there are numerous complaints that have been lodged
against City employees in the Assessing Department and elsewhere in agencies in Concord against these
employees seeking significant discipline against those employees. So we need to retain some degree of
confidentiality there so | won't get into that in any more depth.
The point being that any time, if any employee just responds but somehow makes an error because they
are not a lawyer, because they and [ll give you an example. They are nota lawyer, they are not schooled
in allthis, the law behind the Right to Know, the case law and exactly wnat is permissible and what's not, if
anyone slips up or at least arguably a little bit, let’s say they do it right 99 times but the 100" time there’s
some little error, they get sued. And the lawsuit that’s pending against the City requests legal fees which
purportedly already are $100,000.00. So they are seeking money damages against the taxpayers of the
City of Nashua. Now let me give you an example of the kind of case that I'm talking about, the kind of
claim, this is just one of many claims. After a criminal complaint was filed against one of the Assessors
which turned out, of course, to be groundless.
The Police Department though did a full investigation, interviewed everybody, spent a lot of time on this
criminal investigation. At the end of that, wen it was all over and no charges, of course, were brought,
