Nashua’s Ortolano Feted As 1st Amendment Award Honoree By Loeb School

NASHUA, NH — A Gate City resident who has been fighting city hall for public records for nearly a decade will be celebrated later this month in Manchester.

Laurie Ortolano of Nashua will receive the Nackey S. Loeb School’s 2023 First Amendment Award at an event on Oct. 26 at the NH Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. The guest speaker is Maggie Haberman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from the New York Times and CNN.

The event will be held from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $100 and is the school’s annual fundraiser. The first 75 tickets sold will receive a copy of Haberman’s book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”

Ortolano was awarded this year due to her unwavering commitment to open government since her first encounter with right-to-know requests as a member of the Litchfield School Board more than two decades ago. The org said her move to Nashua in 2014 began a different journey.

“City officials in Nashua have met Ortolano’s numerous right-to-know requests for tax assessment, finance, and development information with denials, court battles, and even an arrest for criminal trespassing when she visited city hall during the pandemic without an appointment (the arrest was later annulled),” the org said. “Undeterred by these challenges, she has consistently taken her fight to court, accumulating legal fees and costs totaling $270,000.”

Ortolano has consistently won victories against the city. Earlier this year, the city was ordered to pay Ortolano $63,400 in legal fees “and mandated that Nashua city officials undergo remedial right-to-know training to avoid ‘future violations.’”

On Thursday, the state Supreme Court voted unanimously to deny a request by the city and the New Hampshire Municipal Association, which wrote the motion, for a reconsideration.

“This win is particularly interesting because the city of Nashua has been trying to say that each department is a separate agency, and therefore, the Nashua residents would need to know where the information was located in order to submit a right-to-know request to the right ‘agency,’” she said. “The Supreme Court stated that all departments are under the city of Nashua.”

To register for the event, visit this link.

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