By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Laurie Ortolano keeps fighting Nashua City Hall, and she keeps winning.
This week the New Hampshire Supreme Court sided with Ortolano in her latest quest to get answers out of the City’s assessing department, and the high court called out Nashua officials’ excuse they did not have access to emails Ortolano was seeking.
“Very relieved I am inching closer to receiving my records,” Ortolano said in an email.
Ortolano took the city to court last year after officials claimed they could not retrieve emails from assessing department employees that she was seeking through a right-to-know request. The city argued that all employee emails are deleted after 120 days, and that the backup tapes with the email data were not easily accessible and therefore the city did not have to search for them.
After this argument was shot down by Hillsborough Superior Court Judge Charles Temple, the city appealed to the state Supreme Court. But in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court also found Nashua’s excuse lacking.
The city claimed requiring employees to look for information off the backup tapes was a time consuming, speculative fishing expedition. Further, the city claimed that since the emails had been deleted, they could not be considered readily accessible and therefore not subject to the state’s right-to-know law.
Unfortunately for Nashua, that argument did not stand up to scrutiny.
Deputy Director of Information Technology Nick Miseirvitch testified that while the emails Ortolano sought were deleted, it would take a couple of hours to access them from the data on backup tapes. In fact, according to Miseirvitch, the city has regularly used the backup tapes to fulfill right-to-know requests from people not named Laurie Ortolano.
“Given these circumstances, including the fact that it would take only ‘a couple of hours’ to restore the back-up tapes to enable a search of (Assessing Department employee) emails, we conclude that the trial court did not err in finding that the requested emails on the back-up tapes are ‘readily accessible’ to the City,” the Supreme Court justices ruled.
The Supreme Court also upheld Temple’s ruling that City employees should be required to undergo remedial right-to-know training.
Ortolano has been on a crusade for assessment transparency in Nashua for years. Her belief she was being overcharged on the real estate taxes on her home led her to dig into Nashua’s assessing process and employees.
In 2019, she had private detectives follow city assessing employee Greg Turgiss, and discovered that instead of going to homes to conduct assessments, Turgiss was taking naps in his city vehicle.
Nashua was forced to revamp the whole Assessing Department, and to conduct a new property valuation in 2021. That has not stopped Ortolano from seeking documents from the Assessing Department, nor has it stopped the now contentious relationship she has with the city.
In 2021, she was charged with trespassing when she entered the Assessing Department offices seeking information. The city claimed the offices were closed to the general public at the time due to COVID-19 protocols. Ortolano is suing the city in federal court.
This year, she already won $63,000 from Nashua to recover court costs for her lawsuits.