Town Council - Regular Meeting

This is a special Londonderry Town Council meeting for Monday, June 29, 2026. Could everyone please rise for the pledge?

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

The purpose of the meeting tonight is to approve engagement letters for the two law firms. These engagement letters will formalize the scope of each firm's representation of the town. The council has determined it has become necessary to engage a new law firm because the town has received numerous complaints regarding a senior town official, the town manager. The council is also now aware of allegations and investigations of those complaints. These allegations of serious misconduct require a thorough investigation and the council has determined that this investigation should be carried out by a separate law firm that provides the town with general legal advice. further the council has determined the steps must be taken to ensure that certain sensitive aspects of this investigation be kept confidential the primary reason this investigation is to be kept confidential are to protect the anonymity of the complainants and the witnesses to ensure that they are not subject to retaliation and making good faith complaints and offering their testimony and to ensure that other complaints in the future either now or in the future are intimidated from coming forward. In order to ensure the confidentiality of this investigation, the council has previously voted to establish a subcommittee and to delegate that authority to that legal subcommittee. Up first, we have the engagement letter from Shaheen Finney. Under this, they'll represent the town of Londonderry for general counsel, with the exception that they will not represent the investigation into the town manager, any counsel that deems necessary the result of this investigation, any dispute for the town manager or the town council.

Discussion. Before we get into this, can I say something? I just want to go on the record as saying that I'm, as one counselor, was shocked to get an email, not from you, but a general email that went out saying that the agenda had been changed, that public comment had been removed at the very last minute. As a resident, there are people who may not have seen that. They're going to show up. They wanted to speak to us because you told them in advance that this was going to be public comment. I find it just really wrong, and I don't understand why it was done, number one. Why we as a council weren't even going to be told by you that it was done. That, you know, it's a good thing I saw it in the email from the, I don't know, it's the mass email that goes out to everybody who's on it. So it really bothers me because They may want to say things about this, but they may have wanted to say other things. And we were elected to listen to them because it's we the people that run this. We represent people that elected us. But in the long run, we're here to serve the general public and should always be accessible. And so to do it last minute, I just it's really not appropriate, and I find it very, very, very disturbing. If I was a resident, I would be out there holding signs going, why did you do this?

and that that's what i i wanted to say before we went any further because so i'll just elaborate the town manager and i had spoke in the morning and due to some error i don't know whose error it was i didn't ask uh the agenda was put out the way it was whenever we've had a special meeting it's always been the special topics and that's what we discussed and that's it So that correction couldn't happen until Monday because I didn't see it until late on Friday. So that's why it couldn't be done on the weekend.

So I still think that you should apologize to the people because it had happened. You really should.

Okay.

I mean, it doesn't matter whether you made the mistake or somebody else did. You're the chair. You represent us. You represent the agenda. You set the agenda. So hopefully when you got the agenda, you looked at it and obviously you saw that it was on there and it wasn't done right away. I mean, I don't know your process with you and Sean, but I really think that you need to do that.

Okay. So we did discuss it on Friday morning, and then I noticed it on Friday night late. The town manager and I had communication over the weekend, and it was fixed on Monday. So for any residents that showed up today for public comment, I do apologize that the error was made. I didn't ask whose fault it was, I just know the error was made and we fixed it.

Um, moving on.

Anybody else? Yeah. Mr.

Chair. Mr. Chair. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So we've, we had an RFQ that went out and, uh, hold on a minute. I have this somewhere. So we had an RFQ that went out and we never got that information. So I don't understand why we're doing letter of engagements and we haven't even gotten the RFQs, the people that put it in for it, because they could be interested in doing this work as well. I mean, we sent out an RFQ for legal counsel. We never got that back. And again, you have not brought it forward. I mean, it's been pushed back, pushed back. So I just wanna talk a little bit about how we got here. So on June 3rd, we had a meeting for consideration of legal advice. It was not really legal advice, it was talking about hiring an attorney. Two weeks prior, Chairman Dunn said we would interview as a board. We've never had that. On June 3rd, the urgency was to hire an attorney. We had an urgency to hire an attorney. We had no motion whatsoever, no vote to hire any attorney, no interviews. This was decided by Chairman Dunn to hire attorney William Christie from the Shaheen Gordon Law Firm. On June 22nd, on a Monday, Chairman Dunn stated he would get the letter of engagement on Tuesday that he has, you said you had it. So we could review it as council members. On June 24th at 10.54 p.m., you sent it out. So we asked the town manager as a board to send out the RFQ for legal counsel. We never got it. This has been pushed back. So on June 23rd, I emailed you, Chairman Dunn, on the status of this legal subcommittee because it was brought up to be illegal. So I'm gonna read the email that I sent to you and your responses. So, my email was, Ron, at the June 15th, 2026 council meeting, you formed a legal subcommittee and it was brought up if it was legal or not. You stated you would get a legal opinion on it. Your response is, Dan, I have not received an option. I have to have it, I hope to have it before the July 6th meeting. I asked you, have you asked for one? And you said, yes. I don't understand how you are conducting business with an attorney where we don't even have a letter of engagement. We have never voted to hire this attorney. So it seems like you've been having discussions with attorney Christie about this and other issues. We have another attorney, Attorney Verrantes. Where's the letter of engagement for him? I don't see any letter of engagement. I wasn't part of it. Because we never voted as a board on any letter of engagement. So never in all my years in this town I have seen such a waste of money by a few town councilors. There's no public comment tonight and who decided that? Apparently you didn't. So I feel that this is ramming this down our throats. I have a lot of questions about this law firm because when I look at it, I see Attorney Christie at $500 an hour. Attorney Quirk, $495 an hour. Attorney Custer, $335 an hour. None of them, if you read, and I have, I printed it on my own, all their background. There's nothing in here where they have municipal law experience. It's all criminal law experience. So this is my concern, all right, Chairman Dunn? You're gonna contact one attorney at $500 an hour, and he's gonna say, okay, let me look into that. He's gonna talk to the other attorney at $495 an hour, and next thing you know, we're paying $1,000 an hour to have something looked at. So I'm not in favor of this. I think we should be looking at the RFUs. I'm going to invoke council privilege on this issue, both of them.

Yeah.

Um, so I guess, yeah, the only thing we can do then is that, so, um, the council at the record show that, uh, Mr. Bouchard is a vote council privilege.

Council has done the chairman done. I have one more thing.

I will second the motion to adjourn. Okay. All in favor of adjourning. There's already a motion to a chart.

Are we going to talk about the 91 A's that you have to respond to?

You just made a motion. We just made a motion to adjourn.

You just said you have a discussion.

You're not going to address the 91 A's request that we've had from people. You're just going to ignore that. We've been ignoring this. This has been, oh, okay. You're not going to address it.

Transparency, Ron. You're digging a grave. No, I was just saying.

You need to be transparent. You're digging a grave. Out of touch with what's supposed to be going on.

What is it? I don't know. All right so all right so I'll respond to 91, a request.

Now you use the motion to adjourn so they want to discuss it in public and what you want. We have to respond to these 91, a one answer to adjourn you keep going back and forth which one you want. Are you the chair? Are you sitting there? I'm talking to the chair.

Do you want a response?

You don't just get to talk to the chair.

Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

I did.

Whereas we can talk about how we now talking as a body because, you know, a lot of things have been discussed and everything else, not as a body. So, okay, Mr. Chair.

all right as far as 91a goes the town will comply with 91a rules completely however some information relevant to the ongoing investigation is exempt from disclosure and some other information may temporarily be withheld while the investigation remains ongoing we will respond to all the 91a requests I have a motion from Sean and a second from Ted. Just disgusted. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? 5-0. Thank you.

Disgusted and embarrassed.