A Betrayal of Public Trust:

By Jeffrey Thomas Clay

When public officials take an oath of office, and when municipal attorneys accept the duty of representing a town, their paramount obligation is to the law and to the citizens who fund their salaries. In Newmarket, New Hampshire, that fundamental duty has been subverted in a staggering display of institutional hubris. Town Manager Steve Fournier, alongside attorneys from Donahue, Tucker & Ciandella (DTC)—including Christopher Hawkins, John Ratigan, Briana Matuszko, and William Warren—did not merely stumble into a flawed settlement agreement. They crafted, offered, and vigorously defended a contract that blatantly violates New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law (RSA 91-A) and Part I, Article 8 of the New Hampshire Constitution, and they did so with full awareness of its illegality.

The legal realities governing municipal authority in New Hampshire are neither obscure nor open to creative interpretation. Municipalities are creations of the state, possessing only those powers expressly granted to them by statute. Under longstanding state law, a town council or town manager has zero legal authority to contract away the public’s statutory right to transparent government. Any agreement executed in violation of positive statutory commands like RSA 91-A is ultra vires—beyond municipal power—and void ab initio. Experienced municipal attorneys like Hawkins, Ratigan, Matuszko, and Warren, as well as a veteran town administrator like Fournier, know this elementary rule of public law. Yet, rather than upholding the law, they chose to negotiate around it.

What makes this conduct truly unconscionable is not just the initial drafting of an illegal contract, but the relentless, posture-driven war waged to defend it in court. Rather than owning the statutory defect, conceding error, and rectifying the breach of public trust, Fournier and his DTC legal team doubled down. They retreated into courtrooms to defend an unenforceable nullity, engaging in exhaustive litigation tactics that have wasted an estimated $60,000 or more of Newmarket taxpayer funds. Every single dollar spent litigating to protect an unconstitutional agreement is a direct extraction from the local citizenry—money siphoned away from municipal infrastructure, public safety, and community services simply to protect public officials from the embarrassment of accountability.

This is an outright assault on the integrity of the judicial system and a systemic abuse of the public purse. Municipal legal counsel exists to keep local government within the boundaries of state law, not to act as a taxpayer-funded shield for illegal executive overreach. By pushing forward with claims rooted in an invalid contract, DTC lawyers transformed what should have been a standard duty of statutory compliance into a protracted, costly war of attrition against citizen oversight.

Despite the insurmountable statutory barriers, these public officials and their retained counsel still stubbornly refuse to dismiss their untenable claims. They refuse to acknowledge the nullity of the underlying agreement, and they refuse to take responsibility for an abomination that undermines the open-government protections guaranteed by the New Hampshire Constitution.

The citizens of Newmarket deserve an immediate accounting. Town Manager Steve Fournier and the legal practitioners at DTC must be held publicly answerable for squandering tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to defend the indefensible. It is time for this charade to end: withdraw the illegal claims, cease the drain on municipal funds, and restore the constitutional transparency that the law unequivocally demands.