New Hampshire Will Sell You a Record. It Will Never Build You an Index.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Right-to-Know Law hands over documents one at a time and requires no agency to say what it holds. So this newsroom published the index.

Ask a New Hampshire town for a document and you will probably get it. Ask that same town what documents it has, and no one owes you an answer. The Right-to-Know Law hands over records one at a time, on request, to anyone who knows enough to name the thing they want. It has never required a single agency in this state to tell you what is in the drawer.

Full disclosure: the archive described in the back half of this piece is Granite State Report’s own, built from this newsroom’s records requests. I am writing about a thing I made.

That gap is not an oversight and it is not a backlog. It is written into the statute in one sentence, and everything that follows from it shapes what New Hampshire residents can find out about the government they pay for.

The sentence that guarantees the gap

Paragraph VII of RSA 91-A:4 is four lines long and it does more work than any other line in the chapter. It says the Right-to-Know Law never requires a public body or agency to compile, cross-reference, or assemble information into a form in which it is not already kept or reported.

Read it from the agency’s side and it is sensible. A clerk in a town of four thousand should not have to build a database because one person asked an interesting question. Read it from the public’s side and the effect is harder to like. Each document goes out to the person who asked, and then stops existing anywhere a second person can find it.

Multiply that by ten years and the result is a public record that is public in the way a library with no catalog is a library. Everything is technically available. Nothing is findable. The only people who can work a system like that are the ones who already know what to ask for, which is a description of lawyers, lobbyists, and the agencies themselves.

The legislature has noticed the problem once, narrowly. RSA 91-A:4, IV(a) lets a request be answered with a website domain name instead of the file, but only where a municipality has already uploaded the record under RSA 33-A:5-a, III, which governs the disposition of municipal records and runs through guidance issued by the state archivist. It is a small nod at the idea that findable beats produceable. It reaches towns, not state agencies, and it requires nobody to upload anything in the first place.

What a copy costs, and what asking costs

The fee structure is the second half of the picture, and it is more generous than most people assume. Under RSA 91-A:4, IV(d), when an agency uses its own copier or computer to make the copy, it may charge the actual cost of providing that copy and no more. Inspection without copying carries no charge at all. You may sit in a town office and read a file for as long as you like, for nothing.

There is one add-on, and it stacks. RSA 91-A:4, VIII permits a per-communication charge on requests running past 250 electronic communications, capped at a dollar each with the first 250 free, charged in addition to the copy cost under paragraph IV(d) rather than in place of it.

Paragraph IX waives that charge for indigent requestors and for disclosures likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of government operations rather than serving a commercial interest. It then carves out an exception for requestors who publish, and supplies the only definition of them anywhere in the chapter: organizations or individuals who publish in accepted digital, print, or broadcast formats, to standards generally recognized by professional news organizations, and who do not serve primarily as a platform promoting a special interest group, government, individual, or cause.

That definition governs a dollar. It says nothing about who may walk into a town hall and ask. Every person in New Hampshire holds the same right of access under this chapter, and any policy claiming a press tier for access is describing a law that does not exist. Worth noticing, though, that the state has now written down twice what a news organization is, in two different chapters, for two purposes, and has never once said who decides.

So the documents are nearly free. What is expensive is everything around them.

What the gap looks like in practice

Granite State Report has spent a year running into the same wall from different directions. The Department of Safety answered a request about firearms-purchase denial records by refusing five items in a single sentence and booking the sixth for a date months out. The ACLU of New Hampshire went to court over State Police records that had gone fourteen months without an answer under a law written around five business days. The Attorney General’s own Right-to-Know memorandum, the document most municipal clerks work from, leaves out the part where a requester gets the records. Seven separate acts have amended RSA 91-A since that memorandum was issued, and the memorandum has not been rewritten.

None of those are stories about a missing document. They are stories about a missing map. In each case the records existed, the requester had a right to them, and the thing standing in the way was that nobody outside the agency knew what the agency had, how much of it there was, or what a reasonable production looked like. That is the argument paragraph VII wins for the government every time, without anyone having to make it out loud.

Enforcement runs on a stipend

When an agency says no, or says nothing, the statute offers two roads. One is superior court under RSA 91-A:7, I. The other, added in 2022, is a complaint to the right-to-know ombudsman. Choosing one forecloses the other.

The ombudsman road costs twenty-five dollars to enter. RSA 91-A:7-b, I sets that filing fee and lets the ombudsman waive it on a finding of inability to pay. In exchange the office can compel delivery of records inside fourteen to thirty days, order interviews, hold hearings, review withheld material in camera, and issue rulings enforceable in superior court.

Then read how the office is paid. RSA 91-A:7-a gives the right-to-know ombudsman a stipend of two hundred dollars per biweekly state payroll cycle for work performed outside scheduled sessions, four hundred dollars for each day devoted to the work of the office, and fifty dollars an hour for time spent drafting final decisions. The qualifications are real: a member of the New Hampshire bar, five years of full-time practice in any jurisdiction, working knowledge of this chapter, three hours of continuing education a year.

Those dollar figures are new. Before July 1, 2025, the section named no compensation at all. The same amendment moved the office out from under the Department of State and attached it to the office of state and public sector labor relations. New Hampshire spent three years running a right-to-know enforcement office without writing down what the job paid, then wrote it down at four hundred dollars a day. The first ombudsman’s term ended on July 1, 2025, and as of this newsroom’s July 2026 reporting the seat had not been filled.

The teeth exist elsewhere in the chapter. RSA 91-A:9 makes it a misdemeanor to knowingly destroy information to keep it from being inspected, and requires material denied as exempt to be preserved for ninety days, or for as long as a suit under RSA 91-A:7 through 8 is pending. RSA 91-A:8, IV does not merely permit a penalty. On a finding of bad faith the court shall impose one, between two hundred fifty and two thousand dollars, and may award attorney’s fees. None of that reaches the ordinary case, which is not a bad-faith denial but a slow one, answered by a person with no particular incentive to hurry.

So somebody else has to hold the collection

If the state will not assemble, the towns are not required to, and the office that hears complaints runs on a stipend, the assembling falls to whoever will do it for free. That is what an archive is for, and why this newsroom now publishes one.

The Granite State Archive describes twenty-nine items across four series. Six are records obtained from New Hampshire agencies under RSA 91-A, together with the requests that produced them. The rest are the law itself, the state’s own guidance on following it, this newsroom’s drafting files, and the third-party research GSR has cited, each one marked with the publisher that owns it.

Every entry carries an accession number, the agency or publisher it came from, its date, its format, its size, and a plain statement of who holds the rights. Government records carry no copyright, and the page says so, because a reader who does not know that will ask permission they do not need.

The page also lists what is not in it. Duplicate uploads, working drafts, an untitled file with no established provenance, and twenty-two article production packages are named in a table with the reason each was held out. An archive that only advertises its contents is a brochure. The exclusions are what let a reader judge the rest.

It is free, and it stays free. No paywall, and there will not be one. It asks for nothing to open the catalog. Every file sits at a public address on this site, and anyone holding the link can read it. The list is the part this newsroom made, and the list is open too. A newsroom that bills the public for the public’s own records has stopped doing journalism and started reselling the commons.

Why the documents are free and the work is not

There is a second reason for that line, and it sits in a different chapter of New Hampshire law.

RSA 106-F governs private investigators. Its definition of a private investigative agency reaches the business, within or from this state, of offering for a fee or other compensation to collect information on the identity, character, reputation, conduct, background history, movements, whereabouts, affiliations, or transactions of any other living person, for a private rather than a public interest. The penalty section is not limited to operating unlicensed. It reaches any violation of the chapter, and it is a misdemeanor for a natural person and a felony for anyone else.

Set those two provisions side by side and the line for an independent newsroom draws itself. Charge a reader to go pull a file on a named person for that reader’s private purpose, and the transaction fits the definition. The only thing standing between that and the penalty section is a word the state has left undefined for as long as the chapter has existed.

The preposition carries weight too. The exclusion covers persons reporting or providing information to an accredited outlet, which plainly describes a stringer filing to a newspaper. Whether it describes a sole proprietor who is the outlet is a question the text does not answer. Nobody in state government has had to answer it yet, because nobody has been made to.

Which is why the money sits where it does. What a reader can pay for is a commission: the labor of writing the request, running the five-day clock, challenging an overbroad denial, and reading what comes back. The assignment has to be public-interest work or it gets declined. No background checks, no locating people, no litigation support. Editorial control does not transfer, and a commission never buys a conclusion. Everything obtained gets published to everybody, free, on the same terms as every other item on the page.

That arrangement is not a compromise with the law. It is the only version of paid records work that an independent New Hampshire journalist can do while the accreditation question stays open.

What the index is for

Twenty-nine documents is a small collection and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It will not stay small. Every request this newsroom files ends in the same place, and readers who send documents will find them described and credited rather than buried in a story from eleven months ago.

The argument is not about the size. New Hampshire has decided, in statute and on purpose, that no agency has to know what it holds. Somebody should keep a list anyway. Until the legislature changes paragraph VII, the list gets kept by people nobody is paying to keep it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. Statutory amounts are the figures named in RSA 91-A and are not appropriations; the compensation figures in RSA 91-A:7-a took effect July 1, 2025. The archive counts describe the collection as published and will change as the collection grows. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.