Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Access Is Already Yours. The Attention Is What’s Missing.

New Hampshire law hands every resident the keys to every public meeting and every public record in the state. A 1999 movie explains why almost nobody picks them up.

Disclosure: I run Granite State Report. An outlet like mine benefits when people pay attention to local government, so read the closing argument with that in mind.

Morpheus walks Neo down a simulated city street, tells him to pay attention, and then waits for him to fail. A woman in a red dress goes by. Neo turns his head. When he turns back, the program has stopped and one of the people on that sidewalk is holding a gun to his face. Morpheus built that entire street to teach one thing, and the woman was only the bait. What he was showing Neo in that scene from The Matrix is how cheaply a man can be moved off the thing that matters.

I think about that scene every time someone tells me New Hampshire government is secretive. Mostly it isn’t. This state has one of the plainest open-government statutes in the country, and it binds every board, committee, and subcommittee in all 234 cities and towns. Meetings get posted. Minutes get published. You are allowed to walk in with a camera. A bad local decision in this state almost never survives behind a locked door. It survives in an empty room.

The law is already on your side

New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law opens with a line most statutes would never risk putting in writing.

That is the preamble, and the sections under it are not decorative. A public body has to post notice of the time and place of a meeting in two appropriate places, one of which may be its own website, at least 24 hours ahead, not counting Sundays and holidays. Minutes have to be open for inspection within five business days. Any person may record the proceeding. If you want a document rather than a seat, RSA 91-A:4 gives you the right to inspect and copy governmental records, and it puts the agency on a five-business-day clock to produce the record, deny the request, or tell you in writing how long it will take and what it will cost.

The enforcement side has teeth, and it is built for people without lawyers. You can petition superior court, or you can file a written complaint with the Right-to-Know ombudsman for a $25 fee that the ombudsman can waive if you cannot pay it. If a court finds an official violated the law in bad faith, the penalty runs from $250 to $2,000, and the official can be ordered to sit through remedial training on his own dime.

The ombudsman route deserves more attention than it gets, because it was built for exactly the person who cannot hire anyone. File the complaint and the public body has 20 calendar days to answer it. The ombudsman, who has to be a member of the New Hampshire bar, can order the records delivered, and a ruling is due within 30 calendar days after the filings close, faster on a showing of good cause. If you lose and want to appeal to superior court, a citizen-initiated appeal carries no filing fee. That is a real enforcement path that costs a resident twenty-five dollars and a stamp.

The law also anticipates the obvious dodge. A board cannot slip into nonpublic session because the topic is awkward. It has to move, second, and take a roll-call vote, and the motion has to state on its face which exemption in RSA 91-A:3, II it is relying on. Whatever gets decided behind that door has to be disclosed publicly within 72 hours unless two thirds of the members present vote, in open session, to keep it sealed. Even then the body must keep a running list of what it withheld and when, and make that list available. So a resident who reads carefully can see the shape of what was hidden, which is often enough to know what to ask for next.

All of that belongs to every person in this state on identical terms. There is no press tier. Reporters get nothing a plumber in Franklin cannot get by asking the same question. The one place the statute singles out news organizations at all is a fee provision, RSA 91-A:4, IX, which excludes them from a public-interest waiver on the per-message charge that can attach to very large electronic-communication requests. That is a line about money, not about entry. Anyone who tells you the law lets journalists in and keeps neighbors out has not read it.

234 municipalities, and almost nobody in the room

New Hampshire runs on local government. Thirteen cities, 221 towns, and a set of school boards, budget committees, planning boards, and zoning boards that decide what your property tax bill looks like. Almost all of it happens in public, on a posted schedule, in a building you can drive to.

Then look at who shows up. Hopkinton Town Moderator Sara Persechino told the Boston Globe in March 2026 that a normal March local election in her town draws somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of registered voters, and that the business session, the night the budget gets argued and amended on the floor, usually pulls about 10 percent. She was describing a town that takes its town meeting seriously enough to have voted down switching formats more than once. That is the healthy version.

So the arithmetic of local power in this state is not complicated. A budget that binds every household passes in front of a tenth of the town. The other nine tenths find out in the tax bill.

What happens after the last reporter leaves

Claremont learned the rest of it in the summer of 2025. The Eagle Times, which had covered Sullivan County and the Vermont line in one form or another since the 1830s, announced on June 30, 2025 that it was suspending operations because it could not make the business work. Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative flagged the closure in its 2025 State of Local News report as something New England had mostly avoided until then: a genuine news desert, a county with no local outlet producing original reporting. By the Keene Sentinel’s count, New Hampshire is down to roughly eight daily papers statewide.

Here is the part that should bother you. Nothing about Claremont city government changed on July 1, 2025. The council still meets. The agendas still get posted 24 hours out. The minutes still go up within five business days, because the law does not care whether anyone is reading them. Every legal guarantee survived intact. The only thing that disappeared was the person whose job it was to sit in the back of the room and notice.

A right nobody exercises is indistinguishable, from the inside of a public body, from a right that does not exist.

Distraction is cheaper than secrecy

Pew Research Center reported in January 2026, on survey work done through June 2025, that 90 percent of American adults use the internet daily and 41 percent describe themselves as online almost constantly. That 41 percent is on par with what Pew measured in 2023 and again in 2024, so it is not a spike anymore. It is the baseline condition.

Think about what that does to a meeting notice. A single-page agenda for a Tuesday night planning board hearing has to win a bidding war against every video, feed, argument, and alert ever produced, all of them engineered by people far better funded than your town clerk. Nobody has to suppress that notice. It loses on its own.

This is why I have stopped describing local government failure as a conspiracy. Conspiracies are expensive and they leak. Distraction costs nothing, keeps working while everyone sleeps, and never has to be organized by anybody. A board that wants to move something quietly does not need a back room. It needs a Tuesday in August.

The movie understood the other half of this too, in the character everyone remembers as the traitor. Cypher knew the steak was a program. He ate it anyway and sold out his crew for the right to forget. What makes him hard to dismiss is that his reasoning holds together. Comfort is a real argument. Most people lose to it without noticing an argument was made, and the civic version is easy to spot once you know the shape of it. Rage about Washington is free. It costs an evening, a folding chair, and a certain willingness to be disliked to stand up at your own school board and ask where a number came from.

What it costs them when you look

Attention here means something specific, and none of it requires credentials or money.

Find where your town posts notices, because RSA 91-A:2 requires it to tell you on its website where they are if it does not put them there. Read one agenda a week. Go to one meeting a month and sit through the boring part, which is the part where the decisions get made. Bring your phone and record it; the statute says you may, and no chair can vote that right away. When a number does not add up, put the request in writing and hold the body to its five business days. If the answer is no, make them cite the exemption. If they cannot, the ombudsman charges $25 and can waive it.

None of that is heroic. It is presence, applied on a schedule. And it works because presence is the one variable a public body cannot control. Officials can outlast a complaint, an angry Facebook thread, or a single bad news cycle. They have no answer for a resident who shows up in March, and then again in April, and is still there in September with last year’s minutes in hand.

Neo does not become dangerous in that movie when he learns to fight. He becomes dangerous when he stops flinching.

New Hampshire already gave you every legal tool you need. Nobody in Concord or at your town hall has to take a single one of them away. They only have to be more patient than you are, and on the current numbers, that is not a demanding bet. Whatever holds your attention holds you. Most of us hand ours over for free, every day, to people who never had to ask for it, while the rooms that set our tax rates sit half empty with the door propped open.

Look again at what is in front of you.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Statutory claims in this column rest on the current text of RSA 91-A as published by the New Hampshire General Court; the internet-use figures are Pew Research Center’s and the Hopkinton turnout figures are the Boston Globe’s. Those turnout numbers are one town moderator’s estimate for one town, offered as illustration and not as statewide data. The lead image is an AI-generated illustration, labeled as such in its caption, and is not documentary. This is a column, not legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.