HOULTON, Maine — Houlton has depleted its 2025 legal budget handling Freedom of Access Act requests from residents and defending itself against related legal actions, town officials say.
In a recent letter to town councilors, Town Manager Cameron Clark pointed to those FOAA lawsuits as the “overarching reason” for the increased spending on legal costs this year.
In a pie chart prepared for Monday night’s Town Council meeting, he noted that two-thirds — about $49,402 — of the total legal expenditures for the town came from generic costs.
The remaining one-third of the expenditures, $15,799, paid for services related to legal actions by two specific residents, whose names were listed on the pie chart. According to Clark, those additional costs were what exhausted the remainder of the budget.
But those residents, Craig Harriman and Mark Lipscombe, argue that they are fighting what they view as the town’s lack of transparency. They counter that the town’s increasing legal budget stems from officials’ failure to respond to their public document requests and decision to hire expensive Portland attorneys.
As Harriman and Lipscombe sought documents from the town, they filed legal appeals in Aroostook County Superior Court because they argued that officials did not fulfill their requests in a timely manner.
At the same time, the Bangor Daily News has filed numerous FOAA requests with the town for documents related to its network of surveillance cameras — including its costs, the number and locations of cameras, whether officials used facial recognition technology and who had access to the cameras.
Additionally, the BDN has filed formal FOAA requests for information on local police matters when officials did not respond to more informal requests.
Harriman and Lipscombe may not be the only Maine residents fighting what freedom of information experts are calling an increase in local government secrecy.
A recent study by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida shows a correlation between a dwindling local newspaper presence — including in areas known as “newspaper deserts” — and a reluctance by government officials to release records.
Maine ranked among the states with lower transparency scores.
On an 8-point scale, Maine got a score of 4.29, with a denial rate of 29 percent and an average 32.4 day wait. Researchers requested the same sets of records from state governments, finding that the states with fewer newspapers per capita ignored or denied requests more frequently.
Other New England states’ overall rankings were much higher despite the same denial rate because document wait times were significantly less. In Vermont the wait time is 7.8 days, and in Massachusetts it’s 8.5 days. Alaska ranks 6.57 with zero denials and a document wait of 6.57 days.
Houlton resident Harriman has doggedly persisted through multiple FOAA requests and two court filings, trying to discover how the town used its video surveillance system. In a recent court filing, he said he should not have to file a lawsuit to receive public documents.
Harriman twice filed a Rule 80B appeal, which is a Superior Court filing to challenge actions taken by government agencies. Both times he was seeking to enforce his right to inspect government records under Maine law.
After nearly two years of requests for documents related to the cameras by Harriman and the BDN, recently released access logs for the Verkada-manufactured devices revealed town employees used them thousands of times. The access logs did not directly indicate whether the town has used the advanced facial recognition technology on the cameras, which is tightly restricted under Maine law.
Similar to Harriman, Houlton resident Mark Lipscombe also filed a Rule 80B appeal last month related to documents he never received from his repeated FOAA requests about a police interaction with his minor child.
“These were not my choices; these were the town’s. I exhausted every reasonable channel. I asked for supervision, I filed proper requests, I waited through broken deadlines,” Lipscombe said during a Town Council meeting on Monday night. “At every turn the town chose expensive obstruction.”
Lipscombe noted that he had hoped to avoid the need for lawyers and lawsuits with his FOAA requests.
Detailing his FOAA experience with the town, he said that he tried to work within the system. He attempted to make a complaint with the police chief directly and was told to contact the captain instead. He followed those instructions, leaving messages as a professional courtesy. He did everything the way he was supposed to do it, he said.
“Not one single time did anyone from the police department respond to my attempts at dialogue. The town chose to delay the complaints. I simply filed a straightforward Freedom of Access Act request about my own child,” he said.
The law requires acknowledgement within five days, but it was ignored for over three weeks, Lipscombe asserted.
“The town hired Bernstein Shur, an expensive Portland law firm, to fight the release of the documents about a civil notice served on a child,” he said. “You made that choice to pay downstate lawyers hundreds per hour to help retain police paperwork instead of just following Maine’s transparency laws.”
Clark said during the meeting that he couldn’t comment on ongoing litigation, but that his intention wasn’t to call out Lipscombe as the sole reason for the overage.
“That was not our intention,” Clark said. “The council wanted to see where the legal money was going because I am asking for more money.”
To replenish the town’s legal fund, Clark has requested up to an additional $40,000 from the undesignated fund balance for the remainder of the year. There will be a public hearing on the request on Sept. 8.
