The Unified Complaint, Administrative Indictment, and Condemnation of Mutual Overreach

THE UNIFIED COMPLAINT, ADMINISTRATIVE INDICTMENT, AND CONDEMNATION OF MUNICIPAL OVERREACH

TO: The Newmarket Town Council & The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) Ethics Committee, NH Attorney General, Patricia Conway, and Greg Jordan.

FROM: Jeffrey T. Clay

DATE: June 18, 2026

SUBJECT: UNIFIED COMPLAINT AND CONDEMNATION FOR SYSTEMIC ETHICAL VIOLATIONS, FINANCIAL MISAPPROPRIATION, MULTI-FORUM DECEPTION, AND INDEFENSIBLE LITIGATION OPERATED BY TOWN OFFICIALS AND DONAHUE, TUCKER & CIANDELLA, PLLC (DTC)

I. PREAMBLE: THE ARCHITECTURE OF A MUNICIPAL COVER-UP

This unified document is formally submitted to request an immediate, unrestricted investigation into the professional conduct of Newmarket Town Manager Steve Fournier, and a blistering public condemnation of the Town’s external counsel, Donahue, Tucker & Ciandella, PLLC (DTC). As a credentialed member of the ICMA and the Chief Administrative Officer under the Newmarket Town Charter, Mr. Fournier is bound by strict fiduciary and transparency mandates.

The certified multi-forum litigation record—culminating in verified court transcripts and appellate filings—proves that the Town administration did not merely commit a procedural oversight. Instead, they executed a coordinated campaign utilizing four separate private attorneys, over 120 factually irreconcilable or fabricated statements, and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to defend an entirely indefensible, legally void transaction against an unrepresented pro se citizen requestor.

II. CHRONOLOGY OF CONCEALMENT & SHIFTING NARRATIVES

The core of this institutional misconduct rests on a documented trail of mutually exclusive factual assertions generated by the Town and DTC to mask an illegal, backdoor open-government workaround:

1. The Absolute Public Denial (August 28, 2023): Mr. Fournier issued an official written Right-to-Know (RSA 91-A) response declaring that no Town Council deliberations occurred, no vote took place, and absolutely "no responsive public records" or emails existed regarding the authorization of a $2,000 settlement contract.
2. The Admission Before the Ombudsman: Hauled before the Office of the Right-to-Know Ombudsman (Case No. RKO 2023-024), DTC completely flipped, admitting the emails did exist and confessing that the settlement decision was the direct "product of the Town Council email responses to the Town legal counsel's email inquiry."
3. The Contradiction in Superior Court (January 17, 2024): In a formal Statement of Material Facts submitted to a judge, DTC reversed course again, certifying as a flat "fact" that "The Newmarket Town Council did not approve the Settlement Agreement..."
4. The Courtroom Transcript Confession (March 28, 2024): During a live hearing, with Mr. Fournier present at the table, DTC Attorney John J. Ratigan openly admitted to Judge Andrew R. Schulman that the contract was routed through the Town Manager to collect a council quorum's consensus outside of a public meeting. Attorney Ratigan confessed: "I communicated an email to the town manager... requesting him to communicate the settlement agreement to members of the town counsel and get their input... and he returned their input to me. And that was the source of authority for the settlement agreement to go through."
5. The False Certification to the Supreme Court (March 3, 2025): Defying their own previous on-the-record statements, DTC Attorney Briana L. Matuszko submitted a Rule 7 Mandatory Appeal Brief to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, falsely certifying as fact that "there were no emails between the Town Manager and the Town Council related to the Agreement".

III. SMASHING THE "CLOSE CALL" MYTH: THE ABSENCE OF STATUTORY AUTHORITY

In his July 8, 2024, final order, Judge Schulman attempted to inject legal nuance into this cover-up by framing the Town Manager’s authority to strip a citizen of his prospective constitutional transparency rights as a "close call." It was never a close call. It is a black-letter legal impossibility under New Hampshire law.

A. Strict Statutory Boundaries: "Work Done for the Town"

The fundamental deception relied upon by the Town and adopted by the Superior Court is the intentional conflation of ordinary municipal purchasing rules with a non-existent power to bargain away public accountability laws.

New Hampshire RSA 37:6, VII(j) explicitly defines and cabins a town manager's operational contracting scope. It mandates that the town manager shall have charge, control, and supervision of "the letting, making, and performance of all contracts for work done for the town." Correspondingly, Section 5.12 of the Newmarket Town Charter governs purchasing protocols solely for operational commercial vendor "purchasing" and "contracts for products and services."

The statutory intent is ironclad: a Town Manager is an operational purchasing agent. They can execute contracts for physical paving, hiring tree services, or purchasing municipal equipment.

The citizen targeted by this contract never worked for the town. He was not a vendor, an independent contractor, or an employee. He was an external citizen requestor exercising a statutory right under NH RSA 91-A to inspect public records. To suggest that an administrative manager can use standard operational procurement codes to purchase the permanent silence and constitutional disenfranchisement of an external member of the public is an absolute perversion of the law.

B. A Power Never Granted to Any Public Body

Under well-established municipal law, towns are mere subdivisions of the State and possess only those powers explicitly granted to them by the state legislature. The New Hampshire General Court has never passed a statute authorizing a town manager, a selectboard, a city council, or any public body to enter into an agreement that contracts away a citizen's prospective open-government protections. Because the state legislature never granted this radical authority to the Town of Newmarket itself, the Town could not possibly delegate it to Town Manager Steve Fournier through a localized commercial purchasing threshold. You cannot delegate an authority you do not possess.

IV. CONDEMNATION OF DTC ATTORNEYS: THE PROFITEERING AND ARROGANCE

DTC's legal team did not march into court to defend the rule of law; they went into court with full knowledge that this contract was a total legal nullity, choosing instead to systematically plunder Newmarket taxpayer dollars to defend the indefensible.

A. Defying Ettinger and Stone v. Claremont

DTC’s highly compensated municipal experts are intimately familiar with landmark New Hampshire open-government precedents:

• The Ettinger Violation (162 N.H. 785): The Supreme Court made it clear that a "consultation with legal counsel" narrow exemption requires a real-time, contemporaneous exchange between a public body and its attorney. Public bodies are explicitly forbidden from using private email loops or the cover of an intermediary to build a secret quorum consensus and deliberate public business outside a public meeting. DTC knew that using an asynchronous email string to establish the "source of authority" to execute a public transaction directly violated the Ettinger mandate.
• The Stone v. Claremont Mandate: DTC attorneys knew that New Hampshire law explicitly prohibits municipal bodies from entering into contracts whose primary purpose is to suppress or contract away transparency obligations, public disclosure requirements, or statutory oversight.

B. The Local Conflict: Partner Christopher Hawkins

This institutional arrogance is personified by DTC Partner Christopher Hawkins. While Mr. Hawkins was actively prosecuting this aggressive breach of contract claim against a local resident, endorsing court pleadings packed with disproven factual contradictions, and pushing for punitive property attachments, he was simultaneously serving as Newmarket’s Town Moderator and sitting on an influential town committee.

As the elected Town Moderator, Mr. Hawkins is trusted by the voters to act as an objective, transparent guardian of democratic processes in Newmarket. Yet, wearing his private private billable hat at DTC, Mr. Hawkins has plundered the town treasury to fund an administrative cover-up and block open-government disclosure. Serving his own billable interests at the expense of the electorate he was chosen to moderate is a catastrophic, unconscionable violation of public trust.

V. VIOLATIONS OF CRIMINAL STATUTES AND ETHICS CODES

The operational choice by Mr. Fournier and DTC to leverage these fabricated judicial postures to secure punitive fee-shifting, sanctions, and property liens against a citizen constitutes an array of severe offenses:

• NH RSA 641:3 & 638:1: Falsification of Government Records and Felony Evidence Tampering by issuing an official written response denying the existence of records that Mr. Fournier personally executed and housed.
• NH RSA 641:2: False Swearing by submitting a sworn affidavit to a state court that was directly disproven by subsequent records and courtroom transcript confessions.
• NH RSA 643:1 & 637:4: Official Oppression and Theft by Deception by expending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a multi-lawyer private firm to build a structural Fraud Upon the Court to extract money and property liens from a citizen based on false factual grounds.
• ICMA Tenets 3 & 4: Total collapse of professional management honor, integrity, and public service by operating an administrative consensus machine behind locked doors via secret email strings.

VI. REMEDIES AND REQUESTED ACTION

Because these violations are documented through certified courtroom admissions, the following actions are immediately required:

1. Administrative Suspension: Order the immediate suspension of Town Manager Steve Fournier pending a complete, third-party investigation into his disproven affidavits and letters.
2. External Public Integrity Referral: Formally refer this certified file to the New Hampshire Public Integrity Unit / Attorney General's Office for investigation under felony provisions RSA 641:2 and RSA 638:1.
3. Comprehensive Legal Billing Audit: Conduct a full forensic audit of all public funds paid to Donahue, Tucker & Ciandella, PLLC, from August 2023 to the present to evaluate the legality of using tax revenue to fund a multi-forum deception scheme.
4. Stay of Collection Actions: Halt any further enforcement of writs, collections, or property attachments against the complainant that rely on judicial orders procured through these fraudulent administrative premises.
5. Revocation of Professional Credentials: Request that the ICMA Ethics Committee issue a formal public peer censure and revoke Mr. Fournier's credentials for violating the core ethics of local government management.

Respectfully submitted,

Jeffrey T. Clay

jeffreytclay@gmail.com

603-534-1963