Happy birthday, Sunshine Week.

For the last 20 years, news organizations and non-profits have observed one week around March 16 that’s meant to “shine a light on the importance of public records and open government.”

The date is no coincidence: March 16 is the birthday of James Madison, the fourth President of the United States who’s considered the “Father of the Constitution.”

For the past decade, the Concord Monitor has used the occasion to publish stories using data and records obtained through the state’s Right-to-Know law, and this week was no exception. Readers got to explore articles on the growth of salaries and overtime in the city of Concord, attempts to get more information from the Attorney General’s Office following police-involved shootings and a review of the state ombudsman’s office. On a lighter note, we made a slideshow of all of the vanity license plates rejected by the Division of Motor Vehicles.

The state Constitution says the government “should be open, accessible, accountable and responsive. To that end, the public’s right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted.”

It’s easy to get high and mighty over the need for transparency and the fact that the government exists to serve the people. Those points are valid, but sometimes they miss how the law is applied on the ground in your local communities.

Because laws are open to interpretation, access to government records and proceedings in New Hampshire tends to be a mixed bag. Access to one record, like a candidate’s filing paperwork, is granted in one place, but denied in another. (More on that later.)

It’s important to give solid credit to communities that information every day without anyone asking.

For example, the City of Concord publishes the earnings of its employees online going back to 2017. The state of New Hampshire does the same thing through it’s TransparentNH page. Pick up any town report, which are mostly available online these days, and they contain similar information.

Why does this information matter? When someone says a public employee is underpaid or overpaid, members of the public have the ability to look up that information and decide for themselves.

Boscawen has lots of information on its Transparency Project web page, which was created by Town Administrator Katie Phelps, who took the job in 2022.

“I figured I’ll just have one spot dedicated on the website that people can go to and find as much information that they can,” Phelps said.

Some things are missing, like employee pay, but that information is included in the town report.

Bravo to these efforts.

That’s not to say everything is sunshine and roses.

Here at the Monitor, we often have to fight for access to records and information that should be released. Sometimes, despite all our reasoning, we, and by extension, the public is denied access.

We’ve filed requests for state police communications and body cam videos at the Dartmouth and UNH protests that led to dozens of arrests. The state keeps saying it needs more time.

We’ve asked for communications and documents between the Department of Education and the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which administers the state’s school choice program called Education Freedom Accounts.

We asked the city of Concord to unseal some meeting minutes that we thought were improperly discussed in non-public sessions. Those were unsealed.

Sometimes the information seems mundane and not worth fighting about. For example, prior to election day on March 11, the Monitor asked Allenstown for contact information for the seven candidates running for the select board. The town said it couldn’t release the information because it would be an invasion of the privacy of the people who want to govern the town.

In response to a Right to Know request, Town Administrator John Harrington sent the Monitor the candidates’ declaration forms with their phone numbers and email addresses scrubbed out. Why did we want this information? To contact the candidates and interview them about their priorities, and to give that information back to the community so they could make informed decisions on voting day. Candidates can, of course, have no comment, but the government can’t make that decision for them.

We tried to convince Harrington of his error, but he didn’t call us back.

He wasn’t alone. Most towns released candidate contact information, which the Secretary of State’s office confirmed is and should be made public, but not all did.

The privacy argument is a compelling one – some information is private even when it’s in the government’s hands – and the courts have addressed the issue. When a privacy interest exists, a balancing test can be applied to determine if the interest in disclosure outweighs secrecy.

Guidance on this can be found in the Right to Know law itself, which states in plain language its purpose to provide the “greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies, and their accountability to the people.”

For example, the Monitor recently requested from the city of Concord the records of payments made to hotels to pay for emergency shelter after pandemic rental assistance funds expired. State law protects the identity of individuals who are receiving welfare assistance, but the Monitor specifically asked for the names of vendors, like the Holiday Inn, to be made public. Records the city sent over excluded the names of any hotels that received the money because releasing the information could reveal the addresses of welfare recipients, they argued.

We don’t want anyone’s name and we have since asked the city to reconsider.

It could be argued that the city didn’t want to release the information about the companies that received these government funds, but we don’t know that. More literally, the city determined that the privacy interest of those individuals outweighed the public’s interest in knowing where the money went.

It’s important to note the balancing test does not need to be applied only by judges. If a compelling argument for disclosure is made, the records can be released without anyone filing a lawsuit.

We wish this was true more often than not.

Sometimes different interpretations of the law can be found in the same community.

Last year, the Monitor asked Concord’s school board for their correspondence on the decision to relocate Rundlett Middle School. The public was stirred by the decision to build a new school on raw land on the city’s East side. The public wanted to know how their elected leaders were communicating about the project.

The school district provided the Monitor with the emails of school board members between members of the community about the project.

In a similar request, the Monitor asked the City of Concord, to provide email correspondence between city councilors and the community regarding its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Through its legal department, the city denied the request saying the emails weren’t public records because they weren’t circulated to a quorum of the city council.

“Correspondence solely between a city councilor and a member of the public would be protected as confidential,” the rejected letter stated.

First, that view is not shared by all, and second, nothing prevented the city from releasing those records just like the school district did. They simply chose not to.

Ask yourself: Does that seem like the “greatest possible public access” to the records and discussions happening in the city?

This is where the government can go astray. This isn’t a fight between them and the newspaper. It’s deeper than that.

Accessing government records is one of the key tenets of democracy and is a core principle in an open government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

These are your records, the public’s records, and the law says you should have the greatest possible access to them, even in cases when they don’t want to hand them over. The best case scenario is to lean in favor of disclosure, at all times.

Don’t take my word for it. This is what James Maddison had to say about it.

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.”

Jonathan Van Fleet can be reached at jvanfleet@cmonitor.com.