Michael S. Lewis, senior litigation shareholder at Rath, Young & Pignatelli in Concord, is one of the state’s leading media-rights and First Amendment attorneys with substantial experience litigating matters involving state and federal constitutional rights.

New Hampshire demands more accountability from government actors than any system of laws I have ever encountered. This feature is part of the central bargain our state constitution strikes with us, from its first words.

Its first article announces what all free people know, that “government originates from the people.” The eighth article, which we the people expanded by amendment in 2018 in response to court decisions limiting it, reemphasizes this point. It once again says that government actors “derive” their power from us. It says that they are therefore accountable to us, “at all times.”

To emphasize the mechanism for accountability, it announces: “To that end, the public’s right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted.” The fourteenth article explains one way in which this access will be deemed unreasonably restricted. Our government grants us the power to “obtain right and justice freely, without being obliged to purchase it.” Too few citizens read our state constitution. More should.

Apparently, those who should include the sponsors of recent legislation on the State House floor. HB 1002 wants citizens to “purchase” their rights to open government on financial terms never imposed upon them by the government before. In effect, it seeks to charge conscientious citizens a hefty new fee for doing the focused business of obtaining information about the functioning of our government, through right-to-know requests.

Under this amendment, citizens who can afford it may continue to make the investment. Citizens who cannot, will not. The cost is not one that should be shifted to only certain members of the public. It is one society should bear, broadly. We benefit from it. Our state constitution describes it as a “public right.”

The government proposes this new charge on citizens in the midst of a series of crises in public services, perhaps most acutely in the context of the government’s heavily documented failure to protect children from child abuse. These specific failures span from those related to DCYF’s extreme failures to those by municipal bodies within local communities, who hired, trained and supervised police who failed to protect our children.

But the breakdown in government performance expands further. It includes documented failures in our county systems of prosecution, our overwhelmed circuit court system and its significant backlog of cases New Hampshire families need courts to resolve more quickly, homelessness in our major cities, as well as questions regarding how our public schools are working. Now is not the time to make governmental accountability more difficult.

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HB 1002 also would constitute a specific attack on our local press at a time when local press cannot absorb it. We have all relied on local press to hold the government accountable to us. But, nationwide, and here in New Hampshire, local press has withered in the age of the internet. In this context, local press cannot absorb the expense this new bill imposes without suffering greater financial hardship. That hardship may even be existential.

Again, our state constitution speaks to this issue. At Article 22, it provides that “liberty of the press” is “essential to the security of freedom in a state,” and “ought to be inviolably preserved.” HB 1002 is a bill designed to make liberty of the press expensive for local news organizations, at the expense of “the security of freedom in [our] state,” at the worst time for local press and for us.

This is about your freedoms, fellow New Hampshire citizens. Don’t let the lights go out on your watch. Don’t let government make it more difficult for you to hold it accountable. Make your views known, now. Rights, once lost to a power-hungry government are not easily recovered. And you, and your voices, are the best and strongest guarantors of our traditions of freedom this bill would undermine.

House Bill 1002, an act relative to fees for records under the Right-to-Know law, will be back up for reconsideration before the full House on Thursday, Feb. 8.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.