NASHUA — The Right-to-Know lawsuit accusing city assessing officials of failing to fulfill a request for stored email correspondence has been settled in favor of the plaintiff, Nashua resident Laurie Ortolano, who filed the suit in July after repeated attempts to obtain the documents.

In a 12-page order issued this week, Hillsborough County Superior Court South Judge Charles Temple found “nothing in the record to indicate there are any other practical obstacles to accessing the backup system in order to comply with the petitioner’s request,” he wrote, referring to city officials’ argument that they did in fact fulfill most of Ortolano’s requests, but searching for emails contained on back-up tapes would “be excessively time-consuming and unduly burdensome” on the department and its employees, according to Temple’s order.

The city, the order states, “characterizes a search for emails on the back-up tapes as ‘exactly the kind of speculative, time-consuming fishing search that is not required'” under the RTK law.

The city also claimed in its defense that the documents they had already provided Ortolano met the requirements of the RTK law.

Temple in his order also granted Ortolano’s request that the court require those representatives of the city responsible for such violations to undergo appropriate remedial training …”

Ortolano had further asked that the court may enjoin future violations of the RTK law, meaning that should such alleged violations occur going forward, the court may issue an injunction against the city.

But declined to take that step and “enjoin future violations,” noting that such actions “can best be avoided through requiring participation in remedial training regarding the city’s compliance with Right-to-Know law records requests,” he wrote.

As for the remedial training, Temple ordered city officials to submit, within 30 days, proposals regarding the “nature and duration” of the training sessions.

He reminded city officials that the proposals “shall address only how the city’s searches in response to requests for records must be conducted” under the RTK law, “and not whether the city’s email retention policy complies” with the statute that governs that topic.

The emails Ortolano was seeking, according to the suit, involve correspondence between current and former city employees in time frames that range from two months to five months in late 2000 and early 2021.

Ortolano eventually received some of her requested documents, along with some from city Director of Administrative Services Kim Kleiner’s personal Outlook email, according to the suit.

Dissatisfied with the city’s response, however, Ortolano filed the suit, which led to a bench trial in December 2021.

Kleiner, along with Nick Miseirvitch, city Deputy Director of Information Technology, and former Assessing Department administrative supervisor Louise Brown, testified at the trial.

Miseirvitch testified that while city employees’ emails are stored for a certain period of time — currently it’s 120 days — then automatically deleted, employees are “advised to move important emails to their U-Drives” to save them permanently.

But even if the files are not moved to the U-Drives, Miseirvitch testified, they can still be accessed via the city’s back-up tapes, which are derived from regular system backups, according to his testimony.

Regarding how involved the process of recovering emails would be from the time frame of Ortolano’s request, Miseirvitch estimated it would take “a couple of hours,” according to Temple’s order.

Temple cited Miseirvitch’s testimony in making his ruling, noting that the city “has the technological capability to retrieve (requested) documents from back-up tapes, and has already done so with respect to an unrelated records request … .”

The roughly two hours Miseirvitch estimated it would take to recover emails from the back-up system, Temple added, “does not render the resulting search so time-consuming as to obviate the city from having to perform the search in the first place.”

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.