The town of Jaffrey has adopted a policy for handling Right-to-Know requests, including fees for copying records and large electronic records requests.

During its meeting on Wednesday, the Select Board agreed in a 2-0 vote to adopt the new policy, which aims to codify the process for all town employees. Board member Franklin Sterling was absent.

Town Manager Jon Frederick said the town had no official policy before Wednesday beyond following RSA 91-a, which outlines the state’s Right-to-Know law.

The law outlines that meetings, with limited exceptions, must be open to the public, and that citizens can inspect or copy governmental records created, received, or obtained by a public body, again, with limited exceptions.

By law, citizens must “reasonably describe” the records they are looking for, and public bodies must acknowledge and respond within five business days. Typically, this includes providing the requested records, estimating when they will be ready, or explaining which exemptions apply.

Frederick presented a proposed policy to the board, calling it “standard” for other towns that have adopted a Right-to-Know policy. Its main function, he said, was to give town staff a framework for responding to requests when the town manager is not available.

Select Board Chair Charlie Turcotte introduced the policy, saying it was partly due to the “weaponization” of Right-to-Know requests.

Namely, Frederick stressed, the state law does not require the town to provide records in a specific format, such as by email, or to conduct extensive, widespread searches.

“We are only required to provide the records for review,” said Frederick. “The point of it is, a lot of people think Right-to-Know requests, they can ask for whatever they want, and we have to send it to them the way they ask for it. That’s not the case.”

Turcotte noted that sometimes the format the town could accommodate would be “box format,” or, as he clarified, “a box of stuff” for citizens to look through.

Frederick said the law does not require staff to “sift through thousands of town files to find the information the individual is looking for” – just to make those files available for people to look through themselves.

Selectman Andy Lawn said that in one instance, the town had received a request for “correspondence for the last five years.”

“We do need a policy in place, and I think it makes perfect sense,” said Lawn.

“I’m not a big policy guy, but some policies you have to have, and it makes perfect common sense to me,” agreed Turcotte.

New policy rules

The four-page policy outlines procedures for staff who receive Right-to-Know requests, including directing citizens to the policy and Right-to-Know request form and notifying their manager, and then the town manager, of any requests the same day they are received.

If the records are immediately available, the town manager will make the documents available for inspection and copying. If they are not immediately available, the town manager will identify a reasonable time period during which they can be made available.

The town also identifies fees for large requests of electronic communications. Any request that generates more than 250 electronic communications will include an additional fee of $1 for every communication over the initial 250. The fee applies whether the town delivers the records in hard copy or electronically. Text and chat message threads will be considered a single communication, up to 50 individual messages.

The town will provide copies of records, but will not allow citizens to feed any record into a scanner, printer, or copy machine, and all copying must be done by town staff. Copying fees are $1 per 8.5″ by 11″ page and $1.50 per 11″ by 17″ page.

The town will not transmit records by email or electronic portals or file shares such as Dropbox, but can provide records on a USB drive. The drive must either be provided by the requester, still in factory-sealed packaging, or purchased by the town at the requester’s expense.

The town has the right to waive electronic communication charges in cases where the person requesting is an “indigent individual” or where the disclosure of the information is in the public interest “because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities” of the town, such as news organizations.