North Haverhill
Teran “Terri” Mertz filed a lawsuit in July 2016 accusing her two male colleagues of holding illegal meetings, making secret agreements and mismanaging meeting minutes.
She asked the court to send Selectboard members Randy Subjeck and Colin Stubbings to training sessions on the state’s Right-to-Know law. Mertz also asked that her legal fees be reimbursed.
But in a ruling late last month, Judge Lawrence MacLeod Jr. declined those requests.
Although the board violated state law on at least two occasions in 2016, he said, it “took prompt corrective action” to remedy those mistakes.
Since Mertz was unable to cite a pattern of violations, MacLeod ruled the lawsuit wasn’t needed to enforce the Selectboard’s compliance with the law.
“Additionally, the evidence does not support a finding that the aforementioned violations of the Right-to-Know law were purposeful,” MacLeod wrote.
Mertz’s lawsuit came just four months after she was first elected to the three-member Selectboard in March 2016. In it, she details several instances where she alleges members of the board either disregarded the Right-to-Know law or acted secretly.
The law states that an official meeting occurs whenever a quorum of a public body is gathered for the purpose of discussing or acting on official business. In the Piermont Selectboard’s case, two board members out of three constitutes a quorum.
Under the statute, meetings also are supposed to be noticed in advance and draft minutes should be available to the public five days later.
Trouble first began with the board’s handling of minutes, according to Mertz.
She said the town took months to provide the minutes from a May 5, 2016, Selectboard meeting after she requested to view them.
During the legal proceedings, town officials said they’ve had trouble for years providing minutes in a timely manner. But those issues were resolved before the lawsuit was filed, they said.
Mertz also took issue with the town’s cemetery maintenance contract, which she said wasn’t made available upon request. The town countered that was because it was a verbal agreement and there was no formal record.
The lawsuit details issues between Mertz and fellow board members regarding what she considered improperly noticed meetings, including one she said took place in the parking lot of the town attorney’s office and another that occurred when the board attended a staff meeting regarding the town website.
The staff meeting was contentious, partially because of dissatisfaction with how the website was being managed, according to court documents.
All three board members were present at that staff meeting, according to court documents. However, Mertz left the meeting after suggesting that their collective presence without prior public notice constituted an illegal meeting; Subjeck and Stubbings stayed.
After consultation with an attorney, the board was told its action could be considered unlawful, and it quickly held a public meeting to acknowledge the mistake.
In his ruling, MacLeod said some of the board’s actions highlighted by Mertz were not illegal, such as failing to keep record of a verbal agreement, discussing town business in passing or placing ads for an open staff position without the full board’s knowledge.
The town was required to produce meeting minutes in a timely manner and the board shouldn’t have been present at the staff meeting without a public notice, MacLeod ruled, but both issues have since been adequately addressed.
“We’re very pleased with the decision. We were honest with the court that there had been some accidental violations but those had all been remedied,” said Laura Spector-Morgan, a Laconia, N.H.-based attorney who represented the town.
A “large black cloud” has hung over Piermont since the lawsuit was filed in July, said Stubbings, who now is the Selectboard’s chairman.
“I sincerely hope that this period of time can be left in the past and everybody can move on,” he said in an email on Tuesday.
Throughout the court proceedings, townspeople supported the board both in meetings and private conversations, according to Stubbings. He said the town has so far spent about $60,000 defending itself from the lawsuit.
“It is such a shame that so much taxpayers’ money was spent on this needless case,” he said. “Now the board must do the best that it can to reduce costs without loss of service.”
Mertz also has spent about $60,000 since the lawsuit was filed. She said on Tuesday that she’ll soon ask the judge to reconsider the ruling.
“Respectfully, I feel that the judge got it wrong and I’m not satisfied with the ruling,” Mertz said.
Mertz’s husband on Tuesday said that the court chose to side with the town in spite of a lack of evidence for its version of events, and that the court declined to accept evidence of ongoing transparency issues in Piermont.
“We think that if he applied the law correctly, and interprets it correctly and realizes the error in the testimony or the facts that were wrong, he would reverse himself,” said George Mertz, who lost a race for the Selectboard in March.
Since the lawsuit was filed, Terri Mertz said, discourse has continued to deteriorate.
The Selectboard also has continued to operate in a secret manner, she said.
“Things are still not transparent in town,” said Mertz, who resigned from the board in May.
She said her decision to step down was made after continued verbal abuse from board members and the public.
“In almost every single meeting, either myself or Terri is verbally attacked, defamed,” George Mertz said.
But with the judge’s ruling, Stubbings said he hopes Piermont can become the “friendly town” it was before the lawsuit.
“Perhaps this time, these untruths, lies and fabrications can stop and the whole town can work on taking Piermont back to the great community it has always been,” Stubbings said.
Mertz agreed on Tuesday that she hopes the town can be more civil, adding that “the town is the one that’s losing in this situation.”
Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com or 603-727-3223.