Newmarket Officials Knew—or Should Have Known: An Illegal Contract, Manufactured and Enforced Anyway

There is no longer any credible ambiguity about what happened in Newmarket. The legal principles are clear. The facts are documented. And the conduct of town leadership—specifically Steve Fournier, Terrie Littlefield, and Greg Jordon—demands direct and unflinching scrutiny.

These are not inexperienced actors. They are senior public officials entrusted with understanding and complying with the law. Yet they created, approved, and enforced a contract that any competent public official knew or should have known was unlawful from the outset—formed outside statutory authority, in violation of RSA 91-A, and incapable of ever being ratified under settled law.

This was not a gray area. The Supreme Court of the United States has long held that government officials cannot bind the public beyond their lawful authority. In Federal Crop Insurance Corp. v. Merrill, the Court made it unmistakably clear: those dealing with the government are charged with knowing the limits of official authority because actions taken beyond those limits are not binding. That rule applies with even greater force to the officials themselves. They do not get to claim ignorance of the law they are sworn to uphold.

Nor is this some obscure federal doctrine buried in casebooks. The New Hampshire Supreme Court has repeatedly reinforced that municipalities possess only those powers granted by statute, and actions taken outside those powers are ultra vires—void from the beginning. Not voidable. Not fixable. Void. That means no amount of creative lawyering, no after-the-fact justification, and certainly no later lawsuit can resurrect such an agreement.

And yet, that is exactly what happened here. A contract was crafted and offered that purported to strip a citizen of statutory rights prospectively—rights rooted in open government law and public policy. It was done without lawful approval, without compliance with mandatory procedures, and without any legitimate authority to impose such sweeping restrictions. This was not merely sloppy governance. It was a deliberate end-run around the law.

What makes this conduct indefensible is not just the illegality of the contract itself—it is the inevitability of that conclusion. Any minimally competent public official understands that you cannot contract away statutory rights in advance. Any minimally competent official understands that public bodies cannot act outside the procedures mandated by law and expect those actions to stand. And any minimally competent official understands that an illegal government act cannot later be “ratified” into legality.

So the question is unavoidable: what exactly did these officials believe they were doing?

Did Steve Fournier believe he could bind the Town to an agreement that was never lawfully approved and that restricted statutory rights? Did Terrie Littlefield believe that bypassing public processes required under RSA 91-A carried no consequence? Did Greg Jordon believe that participating in or supporting the enforcement of such an agreement was consistent with his oath to uphold the law?

Or did all three simply assume that the rules did not apply to them?

Because that is what this conduct reflects—not confusion, not oversight, but a willingness to proceed with an unlawful course of action and rely on the courts to clean it up later. And even now, despite the overwhelming weight of precedent establishing that such contracts are void, there has been no accountability—only continued reliance on a legally indefensible position.

This is not governance. This is institutional disregard for the rule of law.

Public officials are not permitted to experiment with legality. They are not permitted to test the boundaries of their authority by entering into agreements that violate statutory mandates. And they are certainly not permitted to impose unlawful conditions on citizens and then attempt to enforce them through litigation.

The most troubling aspect of this entire episode is how easily it could happen again. If senior officials can create an illegal contract, enforce it, and face no consequence—if courts are willing to look the other way and call it “well reasoned”—then the protections of open government laws become meaningless.

This is not about one contract. It is about whether the law still constrains those in power.

And based on the actions of Steve Fournier, Terrie Littlefield, and Greg Jordon, the answer—at least in Newmarket—appears to be no.