New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know law promises “the greatest possible public access” to government records. After all, access to these documents is the best way for citizens to verify and ensure their government is functioning effectively. But how open is New Hampshire really?
That’s what MuckRock, the Granite State News Collaborative and the Concord Monitor set out to measure over the last several months. As part of a multi-month collaboration, we tested transparency across New Hampshire by making records requests to cities and towns and their corresponding school districts. Twenty appear in the scorecard below; the rest are documented in our published data.
After submitting 280 public records requests to 46 agencies in 23 communities, we found that access to public records is inconsistent across the state and often obstructed. Some agencies refused to fulfill requests from MuckRock since the nonprofit has its main office outside of New Hampshire. Others cited exemptions to bar access to documents that would otherwise help residents better understand their local leaders. Many required in-person inspection or pickup, even though the requested records were already in a digital format.
Interested in how your community scored?
Check our scorecard ranking 40 cities, towns and school districts on their approach to transparency.
MuckRock’s collaboration with the Granite State News Collaborative and Concord Monitor examined how New Hampshire’s towns and cities responded to public records requests, how quickly they responded and common obstacles to obtaining public documents.
We wanted to know how effective the state’s Right-to-Know law is at the local level for accessing public records. We tested the system by sending requests to multiple New Hampshire’s towns and all 13 cities. This included requests for AI policies, performance evaluations for police chiefs and city managers, ethics policies, police settlements, parent curriculum complaints and more.
Not every community responded the same way. During this project, some New Hampshire communities readily provided public records, while others put up barriers to public records access and overall transparency.
New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know law
According to the text of the statute, which took effect in August, 1967, the purpose of New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know law is to “establish the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussion and records of all public bodies, and their accountability to the people.”
The state Constitution also outlines the role of government and its duty to be transparent.
“All power residing originally in, and being derived from, the people, all the magistrates and officers of government are their substitutes and agents, and at all times accountable to them,” reads Part 1, Article 8. “Government, therefore, should be open, accessible, accountable and responsive.”
In 2022, the New Hampshire state legislature established the Office of the Right-to-Know Ombudsman to help settle public records disputes and appeals, in an attempt to improve access to public records. Despite the effort, budget cuts and office changes in the following years quickly diminished the role. Ultimately, Thomas Kehr, the first appointed ombudsman, left his position in 2025, and the seat remains vacant.
With no working nonjudicial oversight mechanism, members of the public have no recourse to address Right-to-Know denials, obstruction or disagreements over access to public records other than filing a lawsuit.
Additionally, New Hampshire’s law states that “every citizen… has the right to inspect all governmental records.” Except as prohibited elsewhere by statute, that use of the word “citizen” has often been cited to restrict public records to only residents of the state.
Whether the Right-to-Know law actually requires in-state residency is not settled, and the U.S. Supreme Court is not an authority on the interpretation of state law. New Hampshire’s law does not define “citizen,” and the New Hampshire Supreme Court has not weighed in on the definition.
Citing increased strain from out-of-state data mining requests, agencies say it’s becoming more difficult to respond to residents. Some state senators proposed a bill to add a formal definition of “citizen” to the Right-to-Know law. The change would have explicitly required “proof of domicile or permanent residence” in New Hampshire, with an exception for news organizations.
Several agencies rejected or delayed requests from this project by default because MuckRock is a national news organization based in Massachusetts, citing a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that found states may lawfully limit their freedom-of-information laws to their own citizens without any constitutional conflict.
Some continued to push back even when local partners from the Granite State News Collaborative were added to the requests directly.
What we wanted and why
For this project, we made records requests across a number of categories on topics of interest to local communities in 20 municipalities and their school districts. These requests targeted documents that contribute to an overall goal of community transparency and would give residents a better insight into their local government.
To that end, we asked each municipality for conflict of interest and ethics disclosure policies. These policies and disclosures are critical to maintaining public trust and confidence in elected officials. Town and city-specific ethics policies ensure that when actual or potential conflicts of interest arise, local government has a process in place to handle them.
We also requested the most recent performance evaluation for the current chief of police, city or town manager or administrator, and the same for each school district superintendent. These are often the highest-paid or highest-ranking employees in their community, at the forefront of the decision-making process for their local government and district.
From each city and town, we also asked for records related to police settlements over the last decade. No local government agency has more direct control over the life, liberty and safety of its citizens than its police department. Knowledge of what legal complaints have been made against a department and how they were handled can be helpful to a community when evaluating policies and their effects.
These records can also provide insight into how law enforcement agencies handle officer misconduct, and municipalities are required by statute to maintain records of settlements and related documents for at least 10 years.
Additionally, we asked for any policies on AI usage adopted by municipal governments and AI chat logs of usage by government officials. Artificial intelligence usage has spread exponentially over the last few years, but many towns and cities do not yet have policies that govern its use. These records contextualize how AI is being used by a municipal government, and information on how each local government is or isn’t moderating usage can lead to healthy dialogue about what AI should and shouldn’t be used for.
For each school district, we asked for the last two academic years of parental objections to instructional and library materials. The decisions that follow a complaint can shape the materials for all children in a community. Transparency about curriculum is core to building trust in a school system, and knowledge of prior complaints can help community members understand how the district is approaching curriculum changes.
Finally, we requested emails sent and received by mayors, select board chairs and school board chairs during a single-month period from January 1 to January 31, 2026. How elected officials communicate with their constituents and how they discuss government matters away from public meetings is important to the people they serve, and much of that communication is occurring via email. At the same time, some elected officials use private email accounts to discuss government business, which is not a shield from public records laws.
Scoring New Hampshire communities
See how these New Hampshire’s towns and cities stacked up, how we scored them on public access to records and what these agencies have to say about government transparency.
MuckRock and the Granite State News Collaborative have summarized and linked to each request sent to each New Hampshire town, city and school district we reached out to this project on this interactive scorecard.
What we learned
Records fulfillment was not always straightforward.
Even when dealing with records that are likely to be maintained digitally, a number of agencies that responded to our requests would only provide records by appointment, either reviewed or collected in person.
Most agencies provided links to ethics policies already hosted publicly on their websites, but otherwise, only 25 of 40 municipalities and school districts provided digital copies of other responsive records. Nineteen required that we send someone to review or collect records in person for at least one request.
Agencies are allowed to require public records to be reviewed or collected in person, but requiring it has not been without controversy, as Annmarie Timmins reported for the New Hampshire Bulletin in 2023.
In Peterborough, with the exception of providing a link to ethics policies as most municipalities did, the town would only provide records through in-person inspection. The same was true for Somersworth and Shaker Regional School District. Other municipalities provided some records digitally or by mail but required in-person review for others.
Some agencies declined to fulfill requests submitted by members of the MuckRock team located outside of New Hampshire. While most agencies were willing to fulfill requests after a follow-up, including our collaborating team at Granite State News Collaborative and the Concord Monitor, some agencies still refused to fulfill a request unless they received an entirely separate request. Nothing in New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know law prescribes this barrier to access.
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This approach to requests by agencies can be difficult for members of the public to navigate. Policies vary, and some agencies prepare copies for collection, while other agencies don’t guarantee they would actually have records to provide for an in-person inspection, risking requestors traveling across the state to access public records with nothing to show for it.
For this project, some requests were aimed at records that are routinely disclosed to the public. Those included requests for policies such as the ethics rules we were provided by Belmont and the AI usage policies we received from Manchester and Lebanon. These also included requests for police settlement agreements made with the municipal police department, like we received from municipalities including Keene and Derry.
Despite routine production of these kinds of documents, some agencies still denied our requests.
For example, Somersworth rejected a request for police department settlements that was fulfilled by many other towns and cities because “the law does not require the city to compile documents” in response to our request.
Despite that claim, the Right-To-Know law specifies that settlement agreements are explicitly required to be kept for public inspection. While another subsection does protect agencies from having to “compile, cross-reference, or assemble information” in a form it is not kept, or to answer specific questions, it is not reasonable to describe a request for records the agency is explicitly the custodian of, for the set period they must be kept, as a request to compile documents. Those documents, under New Hampshire law, are already supposed to be “kept on file.”
A few communities tried to charge steep fees to access records, including the Manchester school district, which wanted nearly $1,000 for staff time to compile emails. While the law allows for “reasonable” charges for copying fees, it does not allow municipalities to charge for staff time to make records publicly available. Rather, it expressly tells government agencies to “keep and maintain all governmental records in its custody at its regular office or place of business in an accessible place.”
In addition to records that are routinely made public in other jurisdictions, this project targeted some requests for records that might require agencies to apply a balancing test on privacy and other exemption concerns based on recent New Hampshire court precedent.
We asked for performance evaluations for police chiefs and town officials, like the ones we received from Claremont, as well as email communications sent by mayors, municipal chairs and school district leaders, like the ones we received back from Concord School District and Lebanon School District, and parental objections to school curriculum, like the records we got back from Dover School District and Nashua School District.
A number of our balancing test requests were denied by agencies citing exemptions under the Right-to-Know law.
When asked for the most recent performance evaluation for the city manager, Rochester denied the request citing the list of matters allowed to be considered during closed meetings in the Right-to-Know law’s section on nonpublic sessions, arguing that the evaluation is unreleasable because it was conducted in a non-public session. That subsection is meant to govern sessions discussing the dismissal, promotion, compensation, discipline or investigation of an employee from public release unless the employee requests a public meeting.
Rochester also denied a request for the most recent performance evaluation for the chief of police, citing RSA 91-A:5’s exemption for internal personnel practices, as did Somersworth, even though municipalities across the state fulfilled the same request.
Likewise, Nashua School District and Manchester School District/SAU37 rejected requests for the most recent performance evaluation of their district superintendent under the same personnel practices exemption.
Berlin denied a request for constituent emails citing the definitions section of the Right-to-Know law, arguing that Mayoral emails maintained on an external account do not constitute “government records.” The statute defines government records as “any information created, accepted, or obtained by, or on behalf of, any public body, or a quorum or majority thereof, or any public agency in furtherance of its official function. Without limiting the foregoing, the term ‘governmental records’ includes any written communication or other information, whether in paper, electronic, or other physical form, received by a quorum or majority of a public body in furtherance of its official function, whether at a meeting or outside a meeting of the body.”
In Hanover, the town manager personally rejected our request for a copy of his own performance, citing an exemption for personnel files. But the town’s police department provided the police chief’s performance evaluation without issue.
Some requests have been put into a long production queue where the agency hasn’t informed us when we can expect to receive or be able to access responsive documents. Other requests have gone unanswered, or were assigned deadlines by an agency that have since passed.
In one example, the Peterborough town manager informed us that the town can only process one request for email records at a time. On March 25, our request for constituent email communications was third in the queue. As of May 27, the town has not updated us on our position in the queue or when we can expect responsive records.
For the same request in Rochester, the agency asked a clarifying question about which communications we were asking for on April 8, received a response on the same day, and have since not responded with an update or the requested records.
We submitted requests to each city and town for bid and proposal (RFP) records for the five highest-value municipal projects over the past decade, but some agencies were uncertain about how to interpret the scope, so those records requests were excluded from scoring.
When agencies reported that they had no responsive documents, we excluded that request from the weighting of their transparency score to avoid penalizing municipalities and districts that were cooperating.
This project is ongoing, and our partners at Concord Monitor and the Granite State News Collaborative are working on stories diving deeper into each assessed community and how agency administrators view this work.
Sruthi Gopalakrishnan, Jonathan Van Fleet, Michael Nolan, Lily Dokhanchi and Jasmine Lewin contributed to this report. This research was conducted in partnership with Granite State News Collaborative.