Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Ombudsman Seat Has Been Empty 13 Months. The Law Still Sends People There.

Lawmakers cut the office to $30,000 and wrote a pay scale no qualified attorney would take. One whole category of records dispute now has no forum at all.

New Hampshire built a cheap way to fight a records denial without hiring a lawyer, then took it apart. The Office of the Right-to-Know Ombudsman has had no ombudsman since July 1, 2025. That is thirteen months. Governor Kelly Ayotte has not nominated a replacement. The office cannot act on a single filing, and every case still pending when the seat went dark was dismissed.

That much has been reported. Here is what has not. When lawmakers rewrote the records-fee rules in 2024, they routed an entire category of dispute to the ombudsman and named no alternative. Read RSA 91-A:4, VIII against RSA 91-A:7-b and the hole is sitting there in the text. The Legislature wrote a protection for the people least able to pay for records, then closed the only office authorized to deliver it.

A $25 door, and the $285 one that’s left

Since January 2023, a person denied public records in New Hampshire has had two roads. Road one is a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7, I. Road two was a signed written complaint to the ombudsman with a $25 fee, waivable on a finding of inability to pay.

RSA 91-A:7-b set the whole schedule. The agency gets 20 calendar days to answer and to state its legal justification for any refusal or delay. The ombudsman can compel delivery of the records within 14 to 30 days, read them privately, compel interviews, order hearings, and draw negative inferences against a party that stonewalls the process. A ruling is due within 30 calendar days of the submission deadline. Expedited complaints get 10 business days. The ombudsman can order any remedy a court could order under RSA 91-A:8. If nobody appeals, the New Hampshire Judicial Branch registers the ruling in Merrimack County Superior Court as an enforceable judgment.

The entry fee for a civil action in superior court is $285 under Superior Court Rule 201. So the ombudsman was the difference between $25 and $285 as the price of asserting a right the state constitution already guarantees you. For a retiree fighting a school district over a bullying file, or a resident who wants the invoice behind a no-bid contract, that gap is the entire question of whether the law is usable.

The court route carries a catch people learn too late. Under RSA 91-A:8, I, a judge awards attorney’s fees only after finding the suit was necessary to force compliance and that the agency knew or should have known it was breaking the law. Win the records and you can still eat your own costs.

The pay scale answers the question

Ayotte’s office told the Concord Monitor in March that nobody had applied for the job. That is presented as a mystery. It is not a mystery. It is arithmetic, and the numbers are in the statute.

The 2025 budget trailer bill rewrote RSA 91-A:7-a. The ombudsman now draws a $200 stipend each biweekly payroll cycle for work outside scheduled sessions, $400 for each day devoted to the work of the office, and $50 per hour for time spent drafting final decisions, plus reimbursement for travel and professional development. Reporting puts the appropriation behind those rates at $30,000, down from a full-time salaried office.

Run it. Twenty-six pay cycles of $200 is $5,200. That leaves roughly $24,800, or about 62 days at $400 a day, and out of that same pot come the $50-an-hour drafting time, the travel, and the continuing education the statute requires. Call it a day and a quarter a week.

For that, the state wants a member of the New Hampshire bar with five years of practice who will read exempt records in camera, run hearings, weigh privacy against disclosure, and write findings that a superior court judge may later review. Fifty dollars an hour is roughly a third of what a mid-career New Hampshire attorney bills. The job also carries no staff. Kehr was the office.

There is a difference between deciding an office should not exist and pricing it so nobody will take it. The first is a policy choice a legislature is entitled to make in public. The second is the same result reached quietly, with the statute left standing so the state can say the option is still on the books.

The remedy with nowhere to file

Here is the part nobody has written about. In 2024, the Legislature amended RSA 91-A:4 to let agencies charge for large batches of electronic communications, up to a dollar apiece past the first 250. Along with that charge, lawmakers built a check on it.

Paragraph VIII says a requester who believes the estimated cost is unreasonable, or that a fee waiver under paragraph IX was improperly denied, “may seek relief according to RSA 91-A:7-b.” The burden sits on the public body to show its cost is reasonable. A determination is due within 10 business days.

RSA 91-A:7-b is the ombudsman complaint process. It is the only forum that sentence names. With the seat vacant, the 10-business-day determination cannot happen, the burden-shift cannot be applied, and paragraph IX’s waivers — the ones written for indigent requesters and for disclosures that would meaningfully inform the public about how government operates — run through a channel with nobody in it.

A requester could still take a fee fight to superior court. RSA 91-A:7, I is broad, and RSA 91-A:7-b, VII preserves the court route. But the fast, burden-shifted, ten-day procedure the Legislature wrote in 2024 exists only in front of an officer who does not exist. That protection is two years old and has never had a working forum for a full year of its life.

Twenty-nine cases, then nothing

A case status report dated March 9, 2025 showed 29 active matters and 51 closed since the office started taking complaints in January 2023. The cases came from municipalities, state agencies, school districts, county governments, and a college. Everything unresolved as of June 30, 2025 was dismissed, the executive director of the Public Employee Labor Relations Board told the Concord Monitor.

One of them belonged to Larry Brown of Lancaster, who had filed over access to records about a bullying situation in his school district. “It just fell apart,” he told the Monitor. He got his documents anyway, months later, because a new superintendent decided to hand them over. That is not a system. That is luck.

Meanwhile the Secretary of State’s ombudsman page still walks a reader through the complaint process. Its notice says no action can be taken on filings “unless and until” there is a new ombudsman, and it lists the office’s contact as a temporary phone line care of the labor board’s executive director. RSA 91-A:7, II still tells any aggrieved person they may file with the ombudsman instead of going to court. Paragraphs III and IV of that section still warn that picking one road forecloses the other. Someone reading the statute cold sees two doors. One of them is bricked up and the sign above it is still lit.

The governor moves fast when she wants to

The ombudsman is nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Executive Council. Ayotte has held the office since January 2025. Her staff told the Monitor in March that no one had applied and would not say whether she is recruiting or whether she wants the position to survive. In July, her office did not answer the New Hampshire Bulletin’s questions about the vacancy at all.

Ayotte’s hiring freeze gets cited as the reason. Her office can waive it case by case, and she has kept filling senior posts. On July 24 she named former Manchester police chief Allen Aldenberg as acting child advocate, and the Executive Council is scheduled to act on that nomination today. That is a full-time salaried job and not an equivalent one, so the comparison is about attention, not pay grade. A governor who wanted a records referee could call a retired judge or a semi-retired member of the bar in an afternoon, or ask the Legislature for money that would make the job worth taking. Thirteen months in, neither has happened.

The Legislature is no help until winter. The 2026 session adjourned in June and does not return until January. What it did consider pointed the other way: Senate Bill 626, from Sandown Republican Bill Gannon, would have limited records requests to New Hampshire residents with a carve-out for out-of-state news organizations. It was tabled in March. The governor’s own Commission on Government Efficiency recommended prioritizing requests from in-state residents and organizations. The direction of travel in Concord is toward narrowing access, not restoring the machinery that enforces it.

Was the office worth keeping?

Not everyone thinks so, and the strongest objection deserves to be on the page. William Chapman, a Concord attorney who has represented New Hampshire news organizations in records fights for decades, told the Bulletin the ombudsman was “an unnecessary step.” His reasoning is sound: the rulings are appealable, so a town that dislikes the outcome can take it to superior court anyway, and the requester has burned weeks to arrive where they started. He would rather see the Legislature shorten agency response deadlines and force courts to set an early hearing date.

He is right that the ombudsman is not a substitute for a fast court. He is wrong that it was useless. Most towns are not going to spend legal budget appealing a well-reasoned order over a police log or a set of invoices, and an unappealed ruling registers as an enforceable judgment. Fifty-one closed cases in roughly two years is fifty-one disputes that did not consume a courtroom.

His fix and the office he criticizes need the same thing: a Legislature willing to act. Neither is on the calendar. New Hampshire has landed on the worst arrangement available, with no ombudsman, no shortened deadlines, no faster hearings, and a statute that still advertises a service the state cannot provide.

What honest looks like

Ayotte should nominate someone before the Executive Council’s next meeting, or say out loud that she wants the office gone. Either answer is defensible. Silence for thirteen months is not.

If the administration wants it dead, the honest move is a repeal bill in January, argued in a committee room where the public can show up. Leaving the statute standing while the seat rots costs the state nothing and costs a resident with a denied request everything, because the law keeps pointing at a door that does not open.

And the Legislature has a specific thing to fix regardless. RSA 91-A:4, VIII should name superior court as an alternative forum for fee disputes, so the 2024 cost protections do not depend on whether a single appointment happens to be filled.

New Hampshire’s constitution, Part I, Article 8, is not shy about this. Government “should be open, accessible, accountable and responsive,” and the public’s right of access to records “shall not be unreasonably restricted.” A right you cannot afford to enforce is a courtesy. Right now access is restricted by a vacancy, and the vacancy is a decision somebody is making every day by not making it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every statutory claim above was read against the current text of RSA 91-A on the New Hampshire General Court site before publication; see the fact-check table. Fee and procedure figures come from the New Hampshire Judicial Branch. The New Hampshire Bulletin and the Concord Monitor report different pre-cut budget figures for the office ($105,000 and $170,000); this article reports the $30,000 figure both agree on and adopts neither prior-year number. The vacancy was re-verified against the Secretary of State’s Office of the Right to Know Ombudsman notice on the morning of publication; no nomination had been made. Governor Ayotte’s office has declined or not responded to questions about this vacancy from the Concord Monitor in March and the New Hampshire Bulletin in July. Granite State Report did not independently seek comment before publication and states that plainly rather than implying otherwise. This piece rests on the text of RSA 91-A and on published reporting, both identified in the table above. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.