In 2024, the Hillsborough County Superior Court decided Ortolano v. City of Nashua, a Right-to-Know Law case built on facts that will feel uncomfortably familiar to any New Hampshire municipality: an advisory committee whose meetings quietly disappeared from the city's website calendar, minutes that surfaced months after the meetings they documented, and a resident who kept asking questions until a judge answered them. In February 2026, the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed the ruling.
What makes Ortolano significant is the defense that failed. Nashua attributed its lapses to staffing problems — the same shortage of administrative capacity nearly every New Hampshire municipality is living with. The court's answer was categorical: "staffing issues do not obviate the City's responsibility to comply with RSA 91-A." The statute's clocks run whether or not anyone is at the desk. And because the court went on to find the pattern purposeful, the case also maps out what noncompliance costs once a judge stops giving a town the benefit of the doubt.
Here is what happened, what the court held, and what it means for how towns run their boards.
The background
Nashua's Downtown Improvement Committee was an advisory body handling a contentious local issue: pandemic-era street barriers that had divided downtown businesses. In early 2022, the committee met twice without either meeting appearing on the city's website, even though the city had always posted its meetings there. A resident, Laurie Ortolano, had been pressing officials for weeks about the committee's membership and schedule. One official's response to her records request landed the afternoon after the morning meeting it would have disclosed. Minutes from committee meetings held the previous summer were not made public until the following February, and only once she started demanding them.
The city conceded some of the lapses but attributed them to short staffing and characterized them as harmless, since the underlying decisions ultimately ran through the Board of Aldermen anyway. The court disagreed on both counts — and found the pattern intentional.
The precedent: three core rulings
1. Notice must be where citizens expect it
RSA 91-A:2 requires notice of every meeting, posted at least 24 hours ahead in two appropriate places. Ortolano adds teeth to a companion provision: a body that uses its website for meeting notices must post them there consistently, in a reasonably accessible spot, or else tell the public on the website where notices actually live. Tacking a paper log inside a municipal building does not cure a missing web posting. In the court's memorable phrasing, citizens "should not have to go on a proverbial scavenger hunt" to learn when their government is meeting.
2. The five-business-day minutes rule applies to every board
Minutes must be recorded and open to inspection within five business days of the meeting, and the statute extends that duty to subordinate bodies "without exception." Advisory status is not a waiver. Nashua's practice of letting committee minutes accumulate, then publishing them in a batch after a complaint, was itself a violation — timeliness is the requirement, not eventual availability. The court also declined to accept the city's staffing shortage as justification, holding flatly that personnel problems do not suspend the statute.
3. Intent unlocks the remedies
RSA 91-A:8 escalates sharply when a court finds a violation was purposeful. Because Nashua knew its posting obligations and failed them anyway, the court awarded the requester her litigation costs and issued an injunction compelling the city's future compliance with the notice and minutes provisions. The one remedy that failed — the personal civil penalty of $250 to $2,000 per official — failed only on procedure: the officials had not been named as individual defendants. The court said it would have seriously considered fining them otherwise, and the Supreme Court endorsed that reasoning on appeal. Future petitioners will not repeat the omission.
The structural threat: the staffing crisis meets an unforgiving statute
The uncomfortable core of Ortolano is the collision between two realities. The first is fiscal: municipal budgets are tighter than ever, and towns struggle to attract and retain the administrative employees who post notices, take minutes, and answer records requests. Positions sit vacant. One person covers work that used to be split among three. Nashua — a city of 90,000 with a professional staff — told the court exactly this: the postings were missed because of staffing problems, since resolved.
The second reality is legal: RSA 91-A contains no hardship exception. The statute does not scale its deadlines to headcount, and Ortolano confirms that courts will not read one in. The obligation to notice a meeting 24 hours ahead and to open minutes within five business days attaches the moment a body convenes, whether the town has a full clerk's office or a single overextended administrator. When the two realities collide, the town loses — and the arithmetic is punishing. A missed web posting is a task measured in minutes; defending it cost Nashua a multi-year lawsuit, six days of trial, an appeal, a cost award, and a standing injunction. Understaffing does not shrink a town's RSA 91-A exposure. It concentrates that exposure on whoever is left.
The takeaway: build compliance that survives a thin roster
Since towns cannot litigate their way out of the statute and cannot always hire their way out of the shortage, the only durable answer is to make RSA 91-A compliance require less labor. That means stripping the friction out of the two tasks the law actually measures: designate a single posting location and establishing a repeatable, reliable, process for generating minutes within the 5-day limit that is lean enough for the staff a town actually has.
Sources: Ortolano v. City of Nashua, Hillsborough Superior Court (Southern District), No. 226-2022-CV-00309 (July 24, 2024), aff'd (N.H. Feb. 2026); N.H. Right-to-Know Law, RSA ch. 91-A; RSA 91-A:2, II; RSA 91-A:8.
This is an information piece for general knowledge purpose, may contain errors, and is not legal advice.