Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Conceal Your Intentions

Greene’s third law says give people no purpose to read and they cannot defend themselves. New Hampshire answered that law with a statute. RSA 91-A:3 does not forbid a public body from closing the door. It makes the body sign for it.

Disclosure: Granite State Report files Right-to-Know requests as a routine part of its reporting, and I have Right-to-Know matters pending with New Hampshire public bodies. This piece argues for stronger enforcement of a law I use.

Somewhere in New Hampshire tonight, a board will vote to go behind a closed door. It will happen quickly, usually near the end, often with a motion read off a laminated card. Most of the room will not catch the citation. Almost nobody will write it down.

That motion is the most revealing thirty seconds in New Hampshire local government, and the Legislature designed it that way.

Robert Greene’s third law of power says to conceal your intentions. Give people no purpose to read, and they cannot mount a defense against you. Part One of this series looked at what happens to a servant who shines too brightly, and Part Two at what a governor’s friends cost her. This one is different, because on Law 3 the reader is not the servant. The reader is the one being kept in the dark.

New Hampshire does not prohibit concealment. It prices it. RSA 91-A:3 lets any public body close a door, and then makes it pay in disclosure for every minute behind it. The trouble is not the price. The trouble is that the state stopped collecting.

The four things a board owes you before the door shuts

Read that as a transaction and it makes sense. A board gets privacy. The public gets a receipt: a stated reason, a named vote, a written record, and a 72-hour clock. Concealment is legal in New Hampshire, and it is supposed to be expensive.

Note how short that clock is. Minutes of an ordinary public meeting are due within five business days. Minutes of the secret part are due in three days. The Legislature made the closed session the faster disclosure, which tells you what it was worried about.

Boards fail this constantly, and rarely from malice. The motion cites “RSA 91-A:3, II” with no letter after it, which satisfies nothing, because paragraph II is a list and the statute demands the specific item. The vote goes by voice instead of roll call. Minutes get withheld without the two-thirds vote ever being taken, which under the law means they were never withheld at all and were due in 72 hours. The New Hampshire Municipal Association, which advises the towns rather than the requesters, tells its own members plainly that there is no such thing as sealing minutes indefinitely.

The door that isn’t a door

Here is the part most residents never learn, and it matters more than everything above.

A nonpublic session is the regulated form of secrecy. There is an unregulated form, and it is easier to use.

Under RSA 91-A:2, I, certain gatherings are not meetings at all. Consultation with legal counsel is one. Strategy or negotiations on collective bargaining is another. These are called nonmeetings, and because they fall outside the definition of a meeting, they carry no notice requirement, no minutes requirement, no roll call, no motion citing an exemption, and no 72-hour clock. Nothing is created, so nothing can be requested.

A board intent on following Greene’s advice has no reason to touch RSA 91-A:3 at all. It calls its attorney.

That is not an abuse of the statute. It is the statute working as written, and there are real reasons for it. But a resident who learns to watch nonpublic motions and never learns to watch the word “nonmeeting” on an agenda is monitoring the wrong door.

Ten years

Suppose a board does everything correctly. Proper motion, proper roll call, proper two-thirds vote to withhold. When does the public find out?

Withheld minutes stay withheld until a majority of the body decides the circumstances no longer apply. A body may adopt its own procedure for reviewing them. If it has not adopted one, RSA 91-A:3, IV sets the outer limit: the review must happen no more than ten years after the last vote to withhold.

Ten years. Two full terms for most local offices. Long enough that the members who voted to withhold are frequently gone before anyone is obligated to look again, and the people who would have to defend the decision are not the people who made it.

The referee left in July 2025

Say your board got it wrong. Say the motion named no exemption, or the minutes never appeared, or the reason offered was not one the statute allows. What do you do?

Until recently there was a cheap answer. The Legislature created the Office of the Right to Know Ombudsman in 2022 to settle these disputes without a lawsuit. Thomas Kehr, appointed by Chris Sununu in late 2022, was the first and so far only person to hold it.

The Legislature then cut the position’s salary and spending budget from $105,000 to $30,000. Kehr resigned in July 2025. Cases still unresolved when the cuts took effect were dismissed. The office’s own public notice says no action can be taken on any filing until there is a new ombudsman.

Fourteen months later the seat is still empty. Ayotte has nominated nobody. In March her office said no one had applied. The Bulletin reported in July that the governor’s office did not answer its questions about why.

The remaining route is a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7, with the possibility of costs and fees under RSA 91-A:8 where a body knew or should have known it was violating the law. That is a real remedy. It is also a lawsuit, which is precisely what the ombudsman was built to spare people.

One detail closes the circle on this series. The ombudsman is nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Executive Council. The body Part Two was about, the one that meets twice a month and reviews every contract over $10,000, has had no transparency referee to confirm for fourteen months, and has not made a public issue of it.

The one thing New Hampshire punishes fast

There is a striking asymmetry buried in all of this, and it is worth holding next to the empty ombudsman’s office.

If a board properly closes a door and properly withholds the minutes, and then one member decides the public deserves to know and says so publicly, that member has a problem. Under RSA 42:1-a, disclosing information learned in a properly sealed nonpublic session can constitute a violation of the officer’s oath of office when the information would invade privacy, damage the reputation of someone other than a board member, or render municipal action ineffective. The remedy is removal from office by petition to the superior court.

Set the two side by side. A local official who reveals too much can be removed from office. A board that conceals too much, with a defective motion and minutes that never appear, faces a citizen who must hire a lawyer and file in superior court to get a ruling that the board should have done what the statute already required.

That is not an argument against RSA 42:1-a. Confidentiality obligations are real, and an employee whose discipline gets discussed behind a closed door has a genuine interest in it staying there. It is an argument about where New Hampshire chose to put its teeth. The enforcement exists. It points at the leaker, not the concealer.

What Greene gets right, and what it costs him

Give the man his due. Law 3 describes something real and the Legislature agreed with him, which is why RSA 91-A:3 exists at all. You do not write four procedural safeguards around a door unless you expect people to want through it for bad reasons.

Where Greene fails is the same place he failed in Parts One and Two. He writes as though power is a contest between individuals with different amounts of cunning. New Hampshire keeps demonstrating that it is a contest between procedures and the willingness to fund them. The select board that hides something is not more cunning than the one that does not. It is operating in a state that removed the consequence.

How to watch this yourself

Three things, none of which require a lawyer.

Write the motion down. When a board moves to nonpublic session, record the exact words and the exact time. If the motion did not name a specific lettered exemption, that is a defect on its face and you have it in your own notes.

Start the clock. Note whether a two-thirds recorded vote to withhold was taken at all. If it was not, the minutes were due 72 hours later. Ask for them on hour 73, in writing.

Ask for the list. Municipal guidance now directs bodies to maintain a running list of minutes being withheld, identifying the body, the date and time of the session, and the exemption relied on. Ask your town for that list, and ask when each entry was last reviewed. It is the single request that shows you what a board would rather you did not look for, and it costs nothing to send.

Greene wrote a manual for the person closing the door. New Hampshire wrote the rules for everyone standing outside it. The rules are better than the manual. They are just not being enforced, and that is a decision somebody made, in a budget, on the record.

Next: Law 4, on saying less than necessary, and what a town counsel’s “no comment” is doing for the town.

Fact check

Editor’s note: This is commentary and analysis, not legal advice. I am not a lawyer. It quotes no part of Robert Greene’s book beyond the title of Law 3, and every argument and conclusion here is original work by Granite State Report. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data. Statutory language is quoted from RSA 91-A; readers should confirm current text at the General Court’s website before relying on it in a filing.