A transfer of leadership, but lingering RTK malevolence toward The Voice remains

City Manager Katie Ambrose, and statements made about the role of citizen status by City Attorney Terence O'Rourke and former N.H. Attorney General Joseph Foster (Ambrose, O'Rourke screenshots; Foster (Courtesy)

ROCHESTER - The city manager's office on Monday indicated to The Rochester Voice that the city of Rochester would continue its wrongheaded policy of denying The Voice digital Right to Know requests.
The response from City Attorney (Terence) O'Rourke still stands unless there has been a change in the status of your citizenship," newly installed City Manager Katie Ambrose emailed The Voice Monday afternoon.
After a precedent setting five years of delivering digital Right to Know requests to the award-winning digital daily and Rochester's 2021 Business of the Year, O'Rourke saw fit to terminate the dispatch of digital RTK documents in April.
As the city has said before, The Rochester Voice is free to visit various departments in person and ask to view documents they may have on file, however no news organization today has time budgeted for reporters to wait at the counter to see if the documents are even available.
In a time when newsrooms across the country are seeing their reporting ranks thin, this policy of driving to various departments to pore over documents that may take time to find - or not even exits - is untenable, The Rochester Voice contends.
Ambrose also noted that "we (the city of Rochester) continue to post many materials on our website."
However you can be sure they never would have posted on their website that City Planning Director Shanna Saunders sent a controversial email to New Hampshire Listens, a group that says it works to facilitate solutions for various communities.
In the email Saunders complains that at an Aug. 26 planning board meeting Gonic residents came out in stiff opposition to a low-income apartment housing project that would be located at the Gonic Brickyards property, which is zoned industrial and prohibits high density housing.
In the email Saunders said she had to endure "an hour and half of rowdy pubic input, in which the public came out with pitchforks in hand."

The insulting and disparaging email helped to rally Gonic residents in opposition to the low-income housing project.
Moreover a footnote on page 39 of former New Hampshire Attorney General Joseph Foster's 132-page updated memorandum regarding the (RTK) law clearly states that citizen status has no bearing on the government's requirement to provide documents to "the public" to allow for transparency and accountability.
The footnote states the following: "RSA 91-A:4, I, refers to "citizens," but the Right-to-Know law does not define this term, and uses it nowhere else. Instead, the statute emphasizes accountability to "the people," accessibility to the "public," and the goals of a "democratic society." An agency should not, therefore, require persons requesting access to public documents to demonstrate that they are citizens of either New Hampshire or the United States."

We have asked Ambrose to comment on the above comment from Foster. If we hear back, we will let you know her response.