A circuit judge on Friday dismissed the case to remove Martinsville Mayor L.C. Jones from office, ruling that a citizens’ petition filed against Jones did not include the legally required percentage of signatures. Substitute Judge Marcus Brinks, after ruling in Jones’ favor, awarded $40,000 in attorneys’ fees to Jones’ lawyers and to the special prosecutor, Colonial Heights Commonwealth’s Attorney Alfred Gray Collins III. The city is liable for those fees. There were 401 valid signatures in a petition that Martinsville resident Patti Covington filed in January, lawyers on both sides agreed. According to state law, such petitions require signatures from 10% of those who voted in the most recent election for a position. Mark Krudys, one of Jones’ representatives, argued in court on Friday that 6,818 voters participated in November 2022, when Jones won his seat.

Richmond’s 26 school zone cameras collectively issued more than 100,000 speeding tickets in 2025, according to records obtained by the Times-Dispatch. But as of May 1, only about 37% of those citations have been paid, the records show. The cameras, which are distributed across 13 city school zones, are part of Vision Zero: officials’ ongoing efforts to tamp down on traffic injuries and deaths, which have been a persistent problem in Richmond.

When the Commission on Government Efficiency released its final report and recommendations to Gov. Kelly Ayotte, co-chairs Craig Benson and Andy Crews pointed to data-mining firms inundating state agencies with Right-to-Know requests and suggested prioritizing New Hampshire residents. The state’s Right-to-Know Law, RSA 91-A, ensures members of the public are able to access governmental records. But the process by which responses to those legal requests are compiled is labor-intensive and large requests by commercial entities add to the burden. Over recent years, Benson and Crews wrote, the volume of Right-to-Know requests has “placed a growing strain on agency resources, consuming months of staff time and delaying responses to the very citizens that the law was designed to serve.” “Increasingly, these requests come not from residents but from data mining firms, special interest groups, or out-of-state organizations seeking to compile or resell government information,” according to the report. … The report’s recommendation was simple: Agencies should be directed to prioritize requests submitted by state residents or entities conducting business within New Hampshire.

NOTE: Here is the “COGE” report, which is 77 pages long. The Right to Know piece of it is exactly 4 paragraphs with no statistics or examples. The only measure of burden in the news story is that 12 of 115 requests to the New Hampshire Department of Transportation were from commercial entities, which is 10%, and there are no examples of what a commercial entity request might ask for.
https://www.governor.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt971/files/inline-documents/coge-chairmens-report.pdf