The Attorney General’s Right-to-Know Manual Leaves Out the Part Where You Get the Records

New Hampshire’s official RSA 91-A guidance drops a statutory duty, drops a “not” that reverses an exemption, and has gone two and a half years without an update. Read line by line against the statute, here is what it gets wrong.

New Hampshire’s official manual on the Right-to-Know Law tells public officials they have two ways to answer a records request inside five business days. Deny it in writing. Or write and say when the records might show up. The statute gives them three. The one the manual leaves out is handing over the records.

Full disclosure: Granite State Report routinely files RSA 91-A requests with New Hampshire agencies, including law enforcement agencies that rely on the document reviewed here, and has had requests denied, delayed, or answered with a letter instead of records. That is the reason I read all 158 pages.

That sentence sits on page 69 of the Attorney General’s Memorandum on New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law, the reference every police department, select board, and school district in this state reaches for when a resident asks to see a file. Attorney General John Formella published it during Sunshine Week in March 2024 and called it a significant update on the previous edition. It is still the current edition.

The manual is a serious piece of work. Superior Court judges have cited it approvingly. Its synthesis of the case law on privacy balancing and law enforcement records is better than anything else available to a New Hampshire citizen for free. None of that is in dispute here.

What is in dispute is whether it matches the law it explains. In seventeen specific places, it does not. And the misses are not scattered. Where the manual drifts from the statutory text, it drifts in the government’s direction nearly every time.

The five-day rule, minus a step

RSA 91-A:4, IV(b) is short, and it is a list. When an agency cannot produce a record immediately, then within five business days it shall do one of three things.

The manual’s operative instruction collapses that to two. Under a heading that reads “Timing is important!” page 69 tells officials that within five business days the entity must “either deny the request in writing, with reasons,” or notify the requestor when the records will be available. Production inside five days is simply gone from the sentence.

The document does not agree with itself on this. The very next subsection quotes the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in ATV Watch for the rule that records producible in five days must be produced in five days. Correct. But that appears as case commentary. The numbered, bolded instruction a busy town clerk will read says the five-day obligation is an obligation to correspond.

You can watch the consequence in the field. An agency that believes a letter discharges the five-day duty sends a letter, then another letter, and the clock the Legislature set never runs out on anything.

The missing word

RSA 91-A:5, XIII exempts records of the youth development center claims administration and the YDC settlement fund. It then carves two categories back out. Settlement agreements, which stay subject to RSA 91-A:4, VI. And, once a claim is finally resolved, other records whose release would not violate other law or unwarrantedly invade a claimant’s privacy.

That “not” is the entire carve-out. It is the clause that moves post-resolution YDC records into public hands.

The manual’s restatement on page 48 drops it. In the manual, the exception reaches records whose release “would constitute a violation” of other law or an unwarranted invasion of a claimant’s privacy. Read as written, the manual says the exception to the exemption consists of the records that have to be withheld. That is not a coherent sentence, and it is not the statute.

Two more slips ride along in the same clause. Where the statute says “exception,” the manual says “exemption.” Where the statute routes settlement agreements to RSA 91-A:4, VI, the paragraph requiring settlements be kept on file and open to the public for ten years, the manual routes them to RSA 91-A:4, IV, the response-timeline paragraph.

Two and a half years, seven amendments

The manual is dated March 2024. The Legislature has been busy since. The Attorney General’s office has published nothing.

HB 1002, signed June 14, 2024, enacted as Chapter 49 and effective that August 13, rewrote how records get paid for. It created RSA 91-A:4, VIII and IX: a per-electronic-communication charge capped at one dollar, no charge for the first 250 communications, rules defining what counts as a single communication, a requirement that every public body adopt a written charging policy that is transparent, uniform, and consistent, a waiver for indigent requestors and public-interest disclosures, a ten-business-day clock on cost disputes, and the burden on the agency to show its charge is reasonable. The same act added paragraphs IV(e) and IV(f) and folded the itemized cost estimate into the five-day response.

Search the manual for any of it. Paragraph VIII appears nowhere in 158 pages. Neither does paragraph IX. Neither does “per electronic communication,” nor “indigent,” nor paragraph IX’s defined class of news organizations. The entire fee architecture that now governs every large records request in New Hampshire is absent from the state’s official explanation of the law.

Then there is RSA 91-A:2-c, effective September 1, 2024, which requires county commissions and delegations to allow public comment and to give every county resident who wants to speak at least three minutes. On page 26 the manual tells public bodies the reverse, that comment periods are voluntary “even though this is not required by the Right-to-Know law.” For county bodies that has been wrong for two years, and it is the kind of wrong a chairman quotes at a resident holding a microphone.

Also missing: the 2025 amendment to RSA 91-A:2, the new RSA 91-A:5-b, and the budget action that cut the Right-to-Know Ombudsman to a part-time post funded at $30,000. The manual devotes several pages to that office as a working forum. Thomas Kehr resigned, the seat has sat empty since July 1, 2025, and the New Hampshire Bulletin reported during Sunshine Week 2026 that it was still empty. A citizen who follows Section VII today is walked to a door that does not open.

The newest one landed sixteen days ago

On August 31, 2026, HB 164 took effect as Chapter 206 and rewrote RSA 91-A:4, IV(a), the sentence that opens the production duty. An agency answering a request for a record already posted online may now provide the domain name of the website. Not a link to the record. The domain name.

The same act added RSA 33-A:5-a, III, which lets a municipality keep its electronic records on a state-designated public website and hold no local copy at all, so long as the public has at least one free way to reach that site.

Put those two sentences beside each other and the meaning of producing a record in this state has moved. A town can hold nothing, name a domain, and be finished. Whether that works depends entirely on how it gets administered, and no guidance on administering it exists anywhere. The manual is silent because the manual is two and a half years older than the law.

It is silent on RSA 91-A:5, V too, which as of July 2, 2026 exempts educator certification records where it used to say teacher.

Count them. The fee structure. County public comment. The 2025 change to the meetings section. The Ombudsman’s restructuring. Lottery-winner anonymity. The certification exemption. The domain-name provision. Seven changes to this chapter since the manual was published, and it reflects none of them. The newest one lands in RSA 91-A:4, IV, the same paragraph the manual already gets wrong on page 69.

For contrast: the New Hampshire Municipal Association, a private association that answers to towns rather than to the public, published a four-page HB 1002 advisory with a model fee policy in July 2024, a month before the law took effect. The Attorney General has had two and a half years.

The wordplay

Some of what is wrong here does not read like error. It reads like emphasis, and it runs one direction.

Open questions declared closed

Section IV is titled “Entities Not Subject to the Right-to-Know Law.” Its first line states flatly that the law does not apply to the Governor’s Office. The supporting authority is a 2020 Superior Court order. The Supreme Court divided evenly on appeal, which, as the manual itself then concedes, leaves that affirmance with no precedential weight. The Judicial Branch exclusion rests on one unpublished 2018 Superior Court order. The manual’s own introduction says Superior Court orders are not binding precedent. Two contested questions, written as settled, both resolved toward not producing.

Verbs doing more work than the statute allows

RSA 91-A:5, XI exempts records whose release “would make public security details that would aid” a security breach. The manual’s page 47 version exempts records whose public release “could aid” an attempted breach. Would becomes could, and the requirement that the record expose security details at all vanishes. That is a materially wider exemption than the one the Legislature wrote.

Compression that broadens

The statute’s caucus exclusion is narrow on purpose. It covers a caucus of elected members of a public body of the same political party, elected on a partisan basis at a state general election, or in a town or city that has adopted a partisan ballot system under RSA 669:12 or RSA 44:2. The manual reduces all of that to a caucus of “officials elected on a partisan basis at a state or municipal general election.” Gone: the same-party requirement, the public-body membership requirement, and the adopted-ballot-system requirement. Most New Hampshire towns have not adopted one. Local officials working from the manual’s version will conclude they may caucus privately in places the statute says they may not.

The nonpublic-session exemption for correctional security gets scrambled the other way, dropping state facilities and the Corrections commissioner while widening “security personnel” to “personnel.” And on page 31 the manual cites “RSA 91-A:2, III(b); VI(d)” for emergency meetings. RSA 91-A:2 has no paragraph VI.

The no-fee rule, narrowed

RSA 91-A:4, IV(d) bars any cost or fee for inspection or delivery without copying, of records “whether in paper, electronic, or other form.” The manual’s page 67 version says there can be no charge for records “maintained in electronic format that are provided electronically without copying.” Paper drops out. Inspection drops out. A clerk following the manual could reasonably decide that looking at a paper file carries a charge. Under the statute it does not.

The forms are worse than the text

Appendices are where guidance becomes practice, and these are the weakest pages in the document.

Appendix B, the five-day letter template, gives an agency three boxes to check: no responsive records, here are the records, or we need more time. There is no box for a denial, even though denial is one of the statute’s three five-day options and RSA 91-A:4, IV(c) requires a denial to name the specific exemption and explain how it applies to the record withheld. Neither Appendix B nor Appendix C carries the itemized cost estimate the law has required since August 2024.

Page 63 also tells agencies twice that a withholding explanation may be given by category rather than record by record. Courts have allowed category-level justification where the document set is large, so this is not invented. But RSA 91-A:4, IV(c) asks for the exemption authorizing the withholding of the record and an explanation of how it applies to the record withheld, and the manual states the categorical rule flatly without ever showing a reader the narrower words the statute uses.

Appendix D is an index for fully redacted pages. Its footnote informs requestors that the State reserves the right to assert additional legal authority for withholding should non-disclosure be challenged. Nothing in RSA 91-A permits an agency to hold exemptions in reserve. Paragraph IV(c) requires the specific one up front, so a requestor can judge it. A reservation-of-rights clause printed on a public form is a litigating posture wearing a customer service uniform.

The contradiction

On page 68 the manual states the rule cleanly and correctly. A citizen need not give a reason. Motive is irrelevant. The question is whether the public should have the information, not whether this particular requestor should.

Two pages later it tells agencies they are expected not to divert unreasonable quantities of public resources to satisfy “the interests of a single person that are not common to others.”

No such provision exists in RSA 91-A. There is no proportionality test, no single-requestor test, no common-interest test anywhere in the chapter. That paragraph invites the precise inquiry the page before it forbids. Anyone who has been told their request is burdensome, and unlike what ordinary residents ask for, has heard page 70 read back to them.

Three more, all leaning the same way

A temporary seal, described as permanent

When a public body votes to seal the minutes of a nonpublic session, RSA 91-A:3, III lets it withhold them only until, in the opinion of a majority of members, the circumstances that justified sealing no longer apply. Paragraph IV puts a clock on that judgment. The body has to revisit it, and minutes sealed before the provision took effect that go unreviewed for ten years become public with no vote at all.

Page 51 of the manual files sealed minutes under a heading that reads “Other Exceptions to Disclosure” and describes them as exempt from disclosure once two-thirds of the members vote. No until. No review duty. No automatic release.

The office knows better, because page 33 of the same document states the review requirement correctly. A select board that reads the exemptions chapter and not the meetings chapter will believe one vote buries a record forever. It does not.

A deadline an agency can wait out

RSA 91-A:7-b, V gives the Right-to-Know Ombudsman thirty calendar days to rule, running from the deadline for receipt of the parties’ submissions.

Page 73 of the manual runs it from receipt of the parties’ submissions. Two words dropped.

That phrasing is the whole point of writing a deadline this way. Under the statute the clock starts on a fixed date whether or not the agency filed anything. Under the manual, an agency that files nothing never starts it. The office sitting vacant does not make the drafting harmless. It means nobody is positioned to catch it before it carries into the next edition.

A duty only towns are told about

RSA 91-A:4, VI requires that every agreement settling a lawsuit, threatened lawsuit, or other claim, entered into by any political subdivision or its insurer, be kept on file and open to the public for at least ten years.

Political subdivision covers counties, school districts, school administrative units, and village districts. Page 40 of the manual says the law requires municipalities to do this.

School boards settle claims. So do counties. A school district working from the manual has no reason to think the ten-year public file reaches it, and a resident who asks for that file gets the manual quoted back.

The grade

Command of doctrine: strong. The treatment of the Murray factors, the three-step privacy balance, nonpublic session mechanics, and minutes obligations is careful and well sourced. Call it an A-minus.

Fidelity to statutory text: poor. When the manual paraphrases rather than quotes, words go missing, and the missing words are load-bearing. A dropped production duty, a dropped negative, a wrong subsection, a phantom paragraph, a broadened caucus exclusion, a softened cyber exemption, a narrowed no-fee rule, a temporary seal called permanent, a deadline unmoored from its fixed date, and a duty three classes of public body are never told they have. D-plus.

Currency: failing. Three legislative sessions, an overhauled fee regime, a new mandatory public comment right, and a collapsed enforcement office, none of it reflected. A trade association did the work in a month. F.

Neutrality: below average. Unsettled exclusions written as settled. A resource-diversion paragraph with no statutory hook. A reservation-of-rights clause on a citizen-facing form. C-minus.

Usefulness to a citizen: middling. It is written for agency counsel, and it reads that way. The templates hand an agency three ways to say wait and no clean way to say yes. C.

Composite: C, 2.0 on a 4.0 scale. The office knows this law. That is what makes the result frustrating rather than merely disappointing. A current edition with the paraphrases checked against the enacted text would be a B-plus document tomorrow. The Attorney General does not have to litigate anything, lobby anyone, or wait for a court. He has to open the statute, open his manual, and fix the sentences that no longer match.

Until he does, every agency in New Hampshire is working from a rulebook that tells them the five-day clock is satisfied by a letter, that a caucus is private in towns where it is not, and that inspection of a paper file might cost you something. And the citizen on the other side of the counter is arguing against a document with the Attorney General’s name on the cover.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

#	Claim	Status	Source
1	The Attorney General’s Right-to-Know memorandum was published March 2024 and remains the current edition	VERIFIED	PDF creation date 3/14/2024; NH DOJ announcement of the 2024 edition; NH Law Library research guide still citing the 2024 edition
2	RSA 91-A:4, IV(b) gives three five-business-day options, the first being to make the record available	VERIFIED	Statutory text, gc.nh.gov RSA 91-A merged chapter
3	The memorandum’s page 69 instruction states only two five-day options, both written notices	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section VI.L.3(b)
4	RSA 91-A:5, XIII excepts post-resolution YDC records whose release “would not” violate other law or invade privacy	VERIFIED	Statutory text, gc.nh.gov
5	The memorandum omits “not,” writes “exemption” for “exception,” and cites RSA 91-A:4, IV where the statute says VI	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section VI.F.2(r), page 48
6	HB 1002 was signed June 14, 2024, enacted as Chapter 49, effective August 13, 2024, creating RSA 91-A:4, VIII and IX and adding IV(e) and IV(f)	VERIFIED	Enacted text of HB 1002, New Hampshire General Court
7	The memorandum contains no reference to paragraph VIII, paragraph IX, “per electronic communication,” “indigent,” or the paragraph IX news-organization definition	VERIFIED	Full-text search of all 158 pages
8	RSA 91-A:2-c, effective September 1, 2024, requires county commissions and delegations to allow public comment and grant each resident at least 3 minutes	VERIFIED	Statutory text, gc.nh.gov; source note 2024, 109:1
9	The memorandum tells public bodies that public comment periods are not required by the Right-to-Know Law	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section V.D.4(d), page 26
10	The Ombudsman post was reduced to part-time and funded at $30,000; Thomas Kehr resigned; the seat has been vacant since July 1, 2025 and remained vacant in March 2026	ATTRIBUTED	New Hampshire Bulletin, March 20, 2026; Conway Daily Sun, reporting the seat still unfilled a year after the first ombudsman resigned; statutory source note for RSA 91-A:7-a shows 2025, 141:206, eff. July 1, 2025
11	The New Hampshire Municipal Association issued a four-page HB 1002 advisory with a model fee policy in July 2024	VERIFIED	NHMA advisory, “Changes to the Right-to-Know Law in 2024,” July 2024
12	The memorandum states the law does not apply to the Governor’s Office, then concedes the Supreme Court divided evenly and the order carries no precedential weight	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section IV.A, page 12
13	RSA 91-A:5, XI reads “would make public security details that would aid”; the memorandum reads “could aid”	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section VI.F.2(p), page 47
14	RSA 91-A:2, I(c) limits the caucus exclusion to same-party elected members and to municipalities that adopted a partisan ballot system under RSA 669:12 or RSA 44:2	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section V.B.3, page 16
15	The memorandum cites “RSA 91-A:2, III(b); VI(d)” although RSA 91-A:2 has no paragraph VI	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section V.D.6(a), page 31; statutory text runs I through IV
16	RSA 91-A:4, IV(d) bars fees for inspection or delivery without copying of records in paper, electronic, or other form; the memorandum limits this to electronic records delivered electronically	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section VI.K.4(e), page 67
17	The Appendix B five-day template offers no denial option, and neither Appendix B nor C includes an itemized cost estimate	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Appendices B and C, pages 92 and 94
18	Appendix D’s footnote states the State reserves the right to assert additional legal authority for withholding if challenged	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Appendix D, page 96
19	The memorandum states motive is irrelevant, then two pages later warns against diverting resources to a single person’s interests	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Sections VI.K.4(l) and VI.M.2, pages 68 and 70
20	RSA 91-A contains no proportionality, single-requestor, or common-interest limitation	VERIFIED	Full text of RSA 91-A, gc.nh.gov
21	John Formella is the Attorney General of New Hampshire and was renominated by Gov. Kelly Ayotte in 2025	VERIFIED	New Hampshire Bulletin, August 2025; National Association of Attorneys General profile
22	Superior Court judges have cited the memorandum approvingly	ATTRIBUTED	New Hampshire Municipal Association court update summarizing a Superior Court RSA 91-A decision
24	RSA 91-A:3, III permits withholding sealed nonpublic minutes only until a majority finds the circumstances no longer apply, and IV requires review; the memorandum calls them exempt from disclosure with no such limit	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section VI.H.2, page 51
25	The memorandum states the review requirement correctly at page 33, contradicting its own page 51	VERIFIED	Memorandum, Section V.E, page 33
26	RSA 91-A:7-b, V runs the ombudsman’s 30-day ruling clock from the deadline for receipt of submissions; the memorandum runs it from receipt	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section VII.A.2(d)(1), page 73
28	HB 164 (2026), Chapter 206, section 5, effective August 31, 2026, amended RSA 91-A:4, IV(a) to let an agency provide the domain name of a website for a record uploaded under RSA 33-A:5-a, III	VERIFIED	Current statutory text and source note “2026, 206:5, eff. Aug. 31, 2026”; enacted text of HB 164
29	The same act added RSA 33-A:5-a, III, under which no additional copy need be kept by a municipality that stores electronic records on the designated website and provides one cost-free method of access	VERIFIED	Enacted text of HB 164 (2026), section 206:4
30	RSA 91-A:5, V was amended effective July 2, 2026 to read “educator certification records” in place of “teacher certification records”	VERIFIED	Current statutory text and source note “2026, 269:6, eff. July 2, 2026”
31	The memorandum contains no reference to RSA 33-A:5-a, “domain name,” or “educator”	VERIFIED	Full-text search of all 158 pages
27	RSA 91-A:4, VI applies to any political subdivision; the memorandum states the duty as applying to municipalities	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section VI.E.1, page 40
23	RSA 91-A:3, II(g) covers county or state correctional facilities and the Corrections commissioner; the memorandum names only county facilities and superintendents, and widens “security personnel” to “personnel”	VERIFIED	Statutory text vs. Memorandum, Section V.D.5(d)(6), page 29

Editor’s note. Every statutory quotation in this article was checked against the current text of RSA 91-A at the New Hampshire General Court, and every characterization of the Attorney General’s memorandum was checked against the 2024 edition itself. Page numbers refer to the printed page numbers inside the memorandum. The New Hampshire Department of Justice is invited to respond to any finding in this article, and any response it provides will be published in full. This article analyzes a published document and is not legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.