PART 3 The Price of Accountability, When Transparency Requires a Lawsuit

Transparency should not require a lawsuit. Yet in Nashua, the only way to force the ERC to follow its own ordinance has been to ask a court to intervene. When internal oversight systems stop working, citizens are left with a simple choice: Accept the dysfunction, or challenge it. I attempted to resolve my concerns through direct email communications with ERC Chairman Attorney Tim Bush. His response was blunt: file suit in Superior Court.

Taking the Issue to Court

After months of waiting for required hearings that never occurred, I filed a Declaratory Judgment action and Injunctive Relief asking the court to clarify and enforce the ordinance governing the Ethics Review Committee.

The request was simple. The ordinance says the committee shall hold hearings within 30 days of receiving a complaint. If the rule is mandatory, the court should require the committee to follow it.

The city’s response was not to schedule the hearing that the ordinance requires. Instead, it filed a Motion to Dismiss and asked the court to impose sanctions and attorneys’ fees, arguing that the lawsuit seeking enforcement of the ordinance was frivolous.

To defend that position, the city has assembled multiple attorneys with decades of experience to argue that a citizen asking the court to enforce the word “shall” is somehow abusing the legal system.

Escalating the Accountability Question

Because of Attorney Bush’s conduct surrounding the ethics process, I have also filed a complaint with the New Hampshire Attorney Discipline Office regarding potential professional conduct violations.

When attorneys serve in quasi-judicial roles, they carry heightened obligations to fairness and impartiality. Those obligations exist precisely to protect public confidence in the integrity of the process. Right now, New Hampshire’s Judicial/Legal system is on shaky ground.

Sunshine Week celebrates the public’s right to know and the importance of open government. But in Nashua, the experience of pursuing transparency has revealed a different lesson. Rules written with the word “shall” mean little if the institutions responsible for enforcing them choose not to.

Transparency does not defend itself. Sometimes it requires unwelcome citizens asking for records. Sometimes it requires courts willing to enforce the law. And sometimes it requires a long and uncomfortable fight simply to make government follow the rules it wrote for itself.

The question now is whether those rules still mean what they say.