Senate Judiciary votes to recommend ITL for HB 66 after lengthy right-to-know debate

The New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee voted to recommend Inexpedient to Legislate (ITL) on HB 66, a bill that would replace the word “citizen” with “person” in the state’s right-to-know statute and add limits on how and when public bodies must provide records to out-of-state requesters. The committee’s action followed several hours of testimony from lawmakers, municipal officials, police representatives and transparency advocates.

Sponsor Rep. Bob Lynn, a Windham Republican, framed the bill as a clarification of the existing statute: “This bill makes several, important changes to the right to know law. First, it replaces the undefined term citizen in current law with the word person,” he told the committee, adding the change was meant to reflect how courts and agencies have treated requests. Lynn also described a provision that would require out-of-state requesters who lack a New Hampshire connection to appear in person to receive records that are not already provided electronically.

Supporters said the change aligns statute and practice. Gilles Bissonette, legal director at the ACLU of New Hampshire, told the committee the amendment is “not an expansion; it is designed to merely reflect the current state of the law” and cited a Superior Court decision and related statutory language to argue courts have not limited requests to state residents.

But municipal officials, police chiefs and town staff warned the amendment would create new costs and confusion. Kate Horgan of the New Hampshire Association of Counties said the bill raises hard questions about how to identify a “person” and whether taxpaying status or other ties must be verified: “We really think this will cause more confusion than help,” she said.

James McLeod, director of planning and development for the town of Raymond, described a prior 91-A request that he said required producing more than 20,000 pages and about 200 hours of his time; he said the cost to his town exceeded $10,000 to defend that work in court. “The expense for 91-A on our communities cannot be understated,” McLeod said.

Police leaders said the volume of records requests already strains law enforcement operations. Assistant Chief Ken Louie of the Manchester Police Department, speaking for the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police, said his department had already handled roughly 1,400 requests last year and that responding has become an “overwhelming and crushing” burden that pulls officers from patrol duty.

Other municipal lawyers urged caution about a provision that would require public bodies to mail or otherwise provide paper records on request, warning it would create a new operational burden for towns and committees. Cordell Johnston, an attorney who represents a number of towns, said the current practice is that requesters can inspect records at a public office; compelling agencies to assemble and mail large paper sets would be “a significant new burden.”

Several witnesses described abusive or commercial uses of records requests, including a Peterborough case in which a requester published police reports behind a paywall; Nicole McStay, the town’s representative, said the process cost local taxpayers about $500 a week while the request was being fulfilled.

After hearing from more than a dozen speakers, the committee entered executive session and then voted to recommend ITL for HB 66. Committee members discussed that the bill’s goal — clarifying who may request records and limiting commercial scraping — is defensible, but that its language needs more work to avoid imposing new, costly obligations on municipalities and police departments.

The hearing record includes repeated references to RSA Chapter 91-A (the right-to-know law), a Rochester Superior Court decision cited by proponents, and the U.S. Supreme Court decision McBurney v. Young (2013), which was raised during the hearing as background on state-level limits other states have enacted.