Nashua's Malicious Email Game
Late in the fall of 2023, the Supreme Court issued mandates which ordered the City of Nashua to follow the trial court's order in two Right-to-Know (RTK) Petitions and produce emails stored on backup tape. The email records requested were for two months of specific records within Nashua’s assessing office.
Nashua lacks written policies for handling record requests and is uncooperative in reducing the burden. Until eighteen months ago, emails were provided without attachments, and requesters were only informed of email volume, not including attachments.
The City hired Attorney Russ Hilliard 18 months ago for Right to Know (RTK) legal challenges. At this time, the City decided to review each page, page number, redact as needed, and insert all attachments into records before providing them to requesters. Requesters were not informed of this new process. An email request with 1000 emails could have 20,000 pages of attachments. Citizens may not want staff to review voluminous attachments that are already public records. For instance, Nashua's assessing office has a data disk with 3400 pages of numbers which is already a public record on their website.
The City began producing the Court ordered email records in December of 2023. The city was being evasive and uncooperative in specifying the number of pages of documents involved. The City began providing all the attachments, primarily public records, without communicating with the requester. Of course, the requester informed the City that she did not want the attachments.
The city informed her that they would continue to review, number, insert, and redact all those records regardless of her request not to receive the attachments. It turns out that this is causing a long delay in the delivery of the records. It appears the city will need about 15 months to deliver the records. However, the city is unwilling to provide a timeframe for completion. The City refuses to provide the attachment page volume even though they have this answer. This City operates with malicious compliance.
The requester reopened both lawsuits, filed a protective order, a contempt order and an RTK lawsuit. The hearing is on April 22, 2024 at Nashua Superior Court.
The City hypocritically advocates for the State to amend the RTK law to charge fees for voluminous requests while working to increase the volume of the documents by adding unwanted attachments thereby increasing fees to be charged to citizens. All this while complaining of burdensome citizens making unreasonable demands. In reality, the burden and inflated costs are created by hostile City leaders to discourage and delay documents. Nashua City leaders work tirelessly to marginalize citizens who do not echo their message.
A Win is never a Win in Nashua