Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Your Right to Know: A Working Guide to RSA 91-A — and the Empty Chair Meant to Enforce It

Any person. Five business days. No press pass required. New Hampshire’s open-records law is one of the strongest tools a citizen owns, if you know how to swing it and what happens when a town says no.

Walk into any town hall in New Hampshire and ask for a record — the police overtime ledger, the select board’s legal bills, the emails behind a zoning decision — and the law is on your side before you say another word. RSA 91-A, the state’s Right-to-Know Law, gives every person the right to inspect governmental records and to sit in on nearly every public meeting. You do not need a reason. You do not need a lawyer. You do not need a press pass.

That is the promise on paper. The machinery behind it is another story. The state office built to referee records disputes has sat empty for more than a year, its funding cut to $30,000, its pending cases dismissed, and the state’s own notice warning that nothing filed there will move until a new ombudsman exists.

This is a working guide: what it covers, how the five-day clock runs, what government can lawfully withhold, the court fights that sharpened it, and what to do when an agency stalls. It is also an accounting of the one piece of RSA 91-A that failed, and who let it fail.

The promise on paper

New Hampshire wrote openness into its constitution before it wrote it into statute. Part I, Article 8 declares every officer of government the people’s agent, answerable to them at all times, and commands that government be “open, accessible, accountable and responsive.” The statute that put teeth on that command arrived in 1967, one year after the federal Freedom of Information Act. Its preamble wastes no words: “Openness in the conduct of public business is essential to a democratic society.”

The state Supreme Court has told judges to read the law broadly in favor of disclosure and its exemptions narrowly. The default is open. The burden of proving otherwise belongs to the government, not to you.

What the law reaches

“Governmental records” means what a public body creates or keeps in the conduct of the public’s business: minutes, contracts, budgets, payroll, reports, and the emails and electronic files behind them. Since 2008 the statute has treated electronic records like paper ones. They must be produced on request, they must be kept as long as their paper equivalents, and a public body may not conduct official business over email in place of a meeting.

The meetings side is just as blunt. When a quorum of a public body convenes to discuss public business, that is a meeting. It requires advance public notice, it must be open, and its minutes must be available within five business days. A board may go behind closed doors only for the specific reasons the statute lists, personnel matters and pending litigation among them, and even then the nonpublic minutes must be released within 72 hours unless two-thirds of the members present vote, on the record, to seal them.

One boundary to know: the Right-to-Know Law does not reach court case records. The judicial branch runs public access to its own files under separate rules grounded in the constitution, a limit the Attorney General’s memorandum spells out. The 2024 edition of that memorandum is the best free manual on this law.

The five-day clock

File a request and the clock starts. If the records are not handed over on the spot, RSA 91-A:4, IV gives the body five business days to do one of exactly three things: make the records available, deny the request in writing with reasons, or acknowledge the request in writing with a statement of the time reasonably needed to decide. A voicemail saying “we got it” does not satisfy the statute. Neither does silence.

The courts have allowed one soft spot. An agency may be justifiably unable to produce records on the spot when it is short-staffed or swamped, a point the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press flags in its guide to New Hampshire’s response deadlines. That forgives speed, not the written answer; the five-day letter still has to come.

On cost: ask for records in electronic form. Producing an existing file costs a town nothing, and it keeps copying charges off the table. Before paying anything, make the agency cite the statute that authorizes the charge.

The RSA 91-A clock, from request to courtroom. (Granite State Report graphic)

What they can withhold

RSA 91-A:5 carries the exemptions. Personnel files, medical and welfare records, grand jury materials, public school exam questions, and records whose release would be an invasion of privacy are the ones a requester meets most often, and the privacy language does the heaviest lifting.

An exemption claim is where fights start, and the courts have built a clear frame for them: identify the privacy interest at stake, then weigh it against the public’s interest in disclosure. The record comes out unless privacy wins that balance. Blanket secrecy rarely survives the test anymore.

Two more limits. Drafts, notes, and other materials made for personal use with no official purpose sit outside the law. And an agency is not required to build new records to answer you; under RSA 91-A:4, VII, the statute reaches what exists, not what you wish existed.

The cases that opened the files

For 27 years the biggest hole in the law had a name: Union Leader Corp. v. Fenniman. In 1993 the state Supreme Court read the exemption for “internal personnel practices” so broadly that police internal-investigation records were walled off by category, with no balancing test and no look inside.

It took a fired Portsmouth officer’s $2.7 million inheritance scandal to break it. When Seacoast Newspapers asked for the arbitration decision on Aaron Goodwin’s termination, the city pointed at Fenniman. On May 29, 2020, the court overruled it. Writing in Seacoast Newspapers, Inc. v. City of Portsmouth, Justice Patrick Donovan called the law, together with Article 8, “the crown jewel of government transparency in New Hampshire,” and shrank that exemption down to an agency’s internal rules for running itself.

The same day, in Union Leader Corp. v. Town of Salem, the court held that an outside audit of the Salem Police Department could not be hidden by category either. Privacy claims now face the balancing test, case by case. Those two rulings restored the presumption the preamble promised.

What the law delivered in the past year

This is not an abstraction. In October, New Hampshire Public Radio used Right-to-Know requests to obtain payroll records and a whistleblower complaint behind a nearly $50,000 payout to a top judicial branch official: records showing she was laid off for 48 hours, rehired, and allowed to cash out benefits while the court system pleaded poverty. The whistleblower alleged the chief justice helped arrange the move; the Judicial Branch declined to answer NHPR’s questions, and NHPR noted it is not clear any law or rule was broken.

In February, the ACLU of New Hampshire pried loose the state records that confirmed federal plans to turn a Merrimack warehouse into an ICE detention site, plans that had been rumor until a Right-to-Know request produced the letter, and that the New Hampshire Bulletin reports have since been scrapped after local pushback. The Bulletin itself leaned on the law for a November series documenting abuse and neglect inside the state’s disability care system.

The empty chair

Which brings us to the referee. In 2022 the Legislature created the Office of the Right-to-Know Ombudsman as a cheaper, faster alternative to suing your own town. Attorney Thomas F. Kehr was appointed on January 27, 2023, for a term running through July 1, 2025.

Then came the 2025 budget. Lawmakers debated killing the office outright and settled on starving it: the roughly $105,000 line for salary and operations fell to $30,000, the job went part-time, and the office was shuffled from the Secretary of State into the new Office of State and Public Sector Labor Relations, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported. Kehr quit when the cuts took effect. Every case still pending on June 30, 2025 was dismissed, the host board’s executive director told the Concord Monitor.

A year later the chair is still empty. Gov. Kelly Ayotte has nominated no one. Her office told the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in March that no one had even applied, and it did not answer the Bulletin’s questions this month about whether the $30,000 part-time structure is the reason. The state’s own notice is blunt: no filing will be acted on “unless and until there is a new Right to Know Ombudsman.”

Some records lawyers never loved the office. Concord media-law attorney William Chapman told the Bulletin the ombudsman’s rulings bind no one, so a town that loses can take the fight to superior court anyway, adding weeks for nothing. “The pressure ought to be on the front end of the process,” he said: shorter response deadlines and a fast court date. He may be right about the design. But the Legislature did not fix the design. It defunded the referee and walked away, and the governor has let the vacancy ride into a second year.

Concord’s answer so far

The 2026 session’s energy went elsewhere. Senate Bill 626, led by Sandown Republican Sen. Bill Gannon, would have limited Right-to-Know requests to New Hampshire residents, with a carve-out for out-of-state news organizations; the Senate tabled it in March without a vote. Gov. Ayotte’s Commission on Government Efficiency recommended in December that the state start prioritizing requests from residents and New Hampshire organizations. Read those two moves together and the direction is plain: the appetite in Concord runs toward narrowing who may ask, not toward restoring the office that answers.

How to use it Monday morning

Write it down. A short letter or email works. Name the records with dates and keywords, cite RSA 91-A, ask for electronic copies, and ask that any claimed exemption be identified in writing with the specific statutory provision. Date it and keep a copy.

Mark day five on your calendar. If what comes back is silence, or a friendly acknowledgment that never ripens into records or a written denial, send a follow-up citing RSA 91-A:4, IV and stating that continued silence will be treated as a denial.

If the denial holds, the road runs through superior court. RSA 91-A:7 lets any aggrieved person petition for injunctive relief, orders the courts to give these cases high priority on the calendar, and lets you appear without a lawyer; the petition is sufficient if it states facts showing a violation. Under RSA 91-A:8, if the court finds the body knew or should have known it was breaking the law, it can order the body to pay your costs and fees. The ombudsman lane stays closed until the seat is filled; check its status before you plan around it.

To watch the people who do this for a living work the law, see InDepthNH.org’s Sunshine Week seminar below: filing, exemptions, and the fights that follow, with InDepthNH founder Nancy West and attorney Rick Gagliuso, who argued Seacoast Newspapers.

Video: “Understanding the NH Right-To-Know RSA 91a Law,” InDepthNH.org, streamed March 18, 2025. If the player does not load, watch it on YouTube.

Granite State Report files these requests as part of its regular work, most recently on police records and body-camera footage; the related coverage is linked below. The tip card at the bottom is where your documents land.

The bottom line

RSA 91-A is not a courtesy the state extends. It is a command the people wrote, first into their constitution and then into statute, and the Supreme Court spent the last several years restoring its edge. What Concord has not restored is the cheap, fast enforcement lane it promised in 2022. Until the governor signs a nomination and the Legislature funds the office, the honest advice for a New Hampshire citizen is the advice in this guide: know the clock, put everything in writing, and be ready to walk into superior court — because right now, that court is the only referee on duty.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against a primary source or attributed to the named outlet before publication; see the fact-check table. Statute links point to the General Court’s official text. The Attorney General’s memorandum is the state’s reference guide, not legal advice, and neither is this article. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.