Senate bill aims to give RTK protections to all media, including 'Rochester Voice'

State Rep. Bill Gannon, R-Sandown, left, and New Hampshire Municipal Association's Sarah Burke Cohen testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (State of NH screenshot)

CONCORD - If a Senate Bill regarding the Right to Know law passes through the state legislature and is signed by the governor, the City of Rochester will no longer lawfully be able to deny The Rochester Voice digital delivery of Right to Know documents in a timely fashion.
Senate Bill 626, which was sponsored by State Rep. Bill Gannon, R-Sandown, would bar out-of-state interests from receiving Right to Know documents, but media organization would be exempt from that prohibition, as described by New Hampshire Municipal Association's Sarah Burke Cohen, who requested that Gannon bring forward the bill.
"The bill would allow all media Right to Know access," Cohen said. "So if The Rochester Voice wanted to request records there would be no issue, because they are considered media."
She said the same access would be allowed by other out-of-state media and newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
The City of Rochester has denied The Rochester Voice full access to Right To Know government documents for several years, ever since City Attorney Terence O'Rourke began refusing them due to the digital daily newspaper being domiciled in Maine, a half mile from the New Hampshire border..
He continued the practice of denying even after The Rochester Voice was incorporated in the state of New Hampshire two years ago.
Meanwhile, in what has been characterized as a 2024 landmark case in Strafford former Superior Court Judge Daniel E. Will wrote a scathing rebuke of the city's refusal to acknowledge that The Rochester Voice "had standing" to receive full Right to Know protections.
"(The court) is skeptical that (Rochester's intended) result was intended by the General Court when it considered the language of RSA 91-A," Will noted in his Aug. 13, 2024, decision. "The City's construction would create logical inconsistencies within the Right to Know law that further augur against the City's narrow construction of 'citizen.'"

The word "citizen" never appears in New Hampshire's Right to Know law and only appears once in the 91-A statute, but during a hearing on May 2, 2024, in front of Judge Will in Strafford Superior Court, O'Rourke argued that the protections of 91-A only apply to New Hampshire citizens.
Since April of 2023 the City of Rochester has denied The Rochester Voice access to digital requests for government documents, but Will found that the digital daily newspaper was a genuine media entity that deserved access to government documents.
"The Rochester Voice has covered issues of public interest concerning the City of Rochester since as early as 2017, and serves, as a practical matter, to advance the constitutional ends of open and responsive government and the parallel purpose of the Right to Know law," Will added in his decision.
In fact, Judge Will found that The Rochester Voice was, indeed, a party "aggrieved" by the City of Rochester's dubious actions.

Interestingly, no one spoke in opposition to SB 626 at Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, meaning the Senate Judiciary Committee could vote the bill out of committee as early as next Tuesday and send it over to the full Senate for a vote.