When a Granite Stater asks a town hall, a school district, or a state agency for a public document and gets turned away, the state built a low-cost referee to settle the fight. That referee has now been off the field for a full year. As of July 1, New Hampshire’s right-to-know ombudsman position has been vacant for twelve months, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte has not nominated anyone to fill it, according to the New Hampshire Bulletin. The gap matters to anyone who believes government works better when residents can see what it is doing with their money.

The office exists because of RSA 91-A, the state law most people know simply as the Right-to-Know law. It gives residents the ability to request records from state and local government bodies, from the minutes of a select board meeting to the emails of a department head. The premise is straightforward and old: government in New Hampshire is supposed to be open, accessible, accountable, and responsive, a standard drawn directly from the state constitution. When a public body says no to a request, the disagreement is usually about whether a record is genuinely exempt or whether an official is simply refusing to hand over something inconvenient.

Why the office was created

Some records are clearly off limits. State employee personnel files, exam questions used in public schools, and grand jury records are all exempt from disclosure. The trouble is that the line between a protected record and an improperly withheld one is not always obvious, and reasonable people disagree about it constantly. For years, the only way to force the question was to sue in superior court, a path that costs money, takes months, and puts an ordinary resident on the wrong end of a resource mismatch against a government legal team.

Lawmakers created the ombudsman to give people a faster, cheaper, and less intimidating way to challenge a denial. The Legislature established the role, and former Gov. Chris Sununu appointed Concord attorney Thomas Kehr as the first ombudsman in late 2022. The idea was that a requester could bring a dispute to the ombudsman, get a ruling in weeks rather than years, and avoid the courthouse entirely. In a state that prizes citizen participation and small-government accountability, an inexpensive path to public records fit the civic culture well.

How the seat came to sit empty

The office did not disappear because voters decided it had failed. It emptied out after a budget squeeze. During a tight cycle, the Legislature cut the position’s combined salary and spending budget from $105,000 to $30,000, effectively converting a full-time office into a thinly funded part-time role. Kehr resigned in July 2025. In the year since, the seat has stayed open. Ayotte, who took office in January 2025, has not put forward a replacement, and her office did not respond to the Bulletin’s questions about why no nomination has come, whether one is coming soon, or whether the reduced pay and hours are making it hard to attract a qualified candidate.

That silence leaves an obvious practical problem. With no ombudsman, a resident whose request is unfairly denied is back to the old options: give up, or file suit in superior court and absorb the cost and delay that the office was designed to eliminate. For most people, that is not a real choice. The expense alone screens out the average requester, which means denials that might have been overturned quickly now stand unchallenged.

Not everyone mourns the empty chair

The picture is more complicated than a simple story of transparency lost, because some of the state’s most experienced open-government advocates were never sold on the office to begin with. William Chapman, a Concord attorney who has represented journalists, newspapers, and media organizations in New Hampshire for decades, argues that the ombudsman adds “an unnecessary step” and “doesn’t hasten the production of the records.”

His objection is rooted in a structural weakness. The ombudsman’s rulings are not binding. When the ombudsman sides with a requester, the agency that wants to keep a record secret can simply refuse and take the matter to superior court anyway. “That’s just theory,” Chapman said of the promise of a faster, cheaper path. “But the reality is if the municipality doesn’t like the result it can go to superior court. So now, whatever time you’ve taken to get the issue before the ombudsman and get a decision from the ombudsman, however many weeks you’ve taken to do that, at the end of the day, you get nothing. You’ve got to go to superior court.”

Chapman’s alternative is to fix the timeline rather than the referee. He wants lawmakers to shorten the deadlines agencies have to respond to requests and to require superior courts to set an initial hearing date quickly once a requester files suit. “The pressure ought to be on the front end of the process,” he said. “Shorten the time for a response and accelerate a date for a court hearing.” In that view, the vacancy is less a crisis than an invitation to build something sturdier.

What the law has already delivered

Whatever the merits of the ombudsman office specifically, the underlying Right-to-Know law has done real work in the past year, which is exactly why its enforcement mechanisms matter. New Hampshire Public Radio used RSA 91-A to confirm a tip that an employee in the state’s judicial branch and the chief justice of the Supreme Court had completed an unusual hiring maneuver that let the employee collect an additional $50,000 in taxpayer money. Documents obtained through the law turned a rumor into a reported story.

The tool has reached into federal matters landing on New Hampshire soil as well. In February, the ACLU of New Hampshire used a right-to-know request to obtain documents confirming that the federal government planned to convert a Merrimack warehouse into an immigrant detention center, a plan that had been only rumor beforehand and that was later scrapped after intense local pushback. The Bulletin itself leaned on the law heavily while investigating abuse and neglect in the state’s taxpayer-funded care system for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and even appeared before Kehr for an official ombudsman hearing while gathering documents for that series.

These examples underline the stakes. The Right-to-Know law is not an abstraction. It is the instrument that lets residents, reporters, and advocacy groups check the government’s work, and the ombudsman was one of the levers that made the instrument usable for people without a lawyer on retainer. For related coverage of how records and court rulings shape civic life in the state, see our reporting on what Granite Staters now need to register to vote after a recent court ruling and on how the ICE 287(g) roster has shifted across New Hampshire departments, a story in which Right-to-Know requests played a direct role. Questions about judicial accountability also run through our piece on the Supreme Court case weighing police liability in a New Boston abuse matter.

For now, the office in the State House Annex on Capitol Street waits for an occupant. Whether it is filled, restructured along the lines Chapman suggests, or left to fade depends on choices the governor and Legislature have not yet made public. What is not in dispute is that residents who hit a wall this summer while asking their government a simple question have one fewer place to turn.

What is the New Hampshire right-to-know ombudsman?

The right-to-know ombudsman is a state mediator created by the Legislature to help residents and government officials resolve disputes over public records requests filed under RSA 91-A. The office was designed to offer a faster and cheaper alternative to suing in superior court. Thomas Kehr, appointed in late 2022, was the first person to hold the role.

Why has the position been vacant?

Kehr resigned in July 2025 after the Legislature cut the position's combined salary and spending budget from $105,000 to $30,000, turning it into a thinly funded part-time role. Gov. Kelly Ayotte has not nominated a replacement in the year since, and her office did not respond to the Bulletin's questions about the delay.

What happens to a records dispute now that the office is empty?

Without an ombudsman, a resident whose request is denied has to either drop the matter or file suit in superior court, which is expensive and slow. That is the exact burden the ombudsman office was created to reduce.

Do some experts think the office is unnecessary?

Yes. Concord media-law attorney William Chapman argues the ombudsman adds an unnecessary step because its rulings are not binding, meaning an agency that loses can still take the dispute to superior court. He favors shortening response deadlines and speeding up court hearing dates instead.

What is RSA 91-A?

RSA 91-A is New Hampshire's Right-to-Know law. It allows residents to request records from state and local government bodies to promote transparency and accountability, with limited exemptions such as personnel files and grand jury records.

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