In his memo, Attorney General John Formella did not elaborate on why the state’s defense against two school funding lawsuits is expected to cost $200,000 in the next fiscal year. (Getty Images)
The New Hampshire Department of Justice is projecting it will spend about $200,000 in the next year to defend the state’s school finance laws from a pair of lawsuits.
The estimate, which covers the 2025 state fiscal year, is part of a $6.7 million spending request the department made to the council Wednesday to cover its expected litigation costs.
It’s an unusually high amount for the state to spend on litigation costs, according to Attorney General John Formella in a memo to the council.
Lawmakers allocated $350,000 to the department in their budget for state fiscal year 2025, which runs from July 2024 to June 2025. But the department has already blown through that budgeted amount, and has to free up about $1 million in “reimbursements and encumbrances” to cover litigation costs, Formella wrote. Even after doing so, it is short $6.7 million, he said.
“The majority of this request is based on the funding needs of the Criminal Bureau and the Civil Bureau due to the number of particularly complex and labor-intensive cases that we currently have in these bureaus,” Formella wrote.
The council approved the spending at its meeting; the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee had already signed off on the funds on Sept. 13.
The money includes $1.1 million in estimated expenses for criminal expenses, about $315,000 of which is to continue to prosecute alleged decades-old abuse at the Sununu Youth Services Center.
“As the investigation has proceeded, and as we get closer to trials for indicted defendants, the number of documents requiring review has steadily increased and has far eclipsed the number of documents anticipated at the beginning of the investigation,” Formella wrote.
The department requested an additional $5 million to defend the state from civil litigation. That includes $2.4 million to cover state attorney’s costs during the ongoing lawsuits filed against former youth services residents who were allegedly abused. That expense is again high because of the extensive documents that must be reviewed, Formella said, and the department has deployed outside counsel for part of it.
“This high annual expense stems from the fact that the department is currently handling a larger, more complex civil litigation load than at any time in recent memory, including an unusually high number of complex and high-profile cases,” Formella wrote.
The state requested $1.3 million to defend against two lawsuits. The first, GK v. Shibinette, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, the Disability Rights Center, New Hampshire Legal Assistance, and others, and claims that the state is violating the rights of older foster children by keeping them in institutions rather than providing them with homes and mental health treatment.
The second, Fitzmorris v. Shibinette, claims that the state violated the rights of 3,500 older and disabled people by preventing them from getting home and community-based care through its administration of the Choices for Independence Medicaid waiver program.
In his memo, Formella did not elaborate on why the state’s defense against two school funding lawsuits – Contoocook Valley School District et al. v. State of New Hampshire and Rand et al. v. State of New Hampshire – is expected to cost $200,000 in the next fiscal year. Those two cases have been appealed to the Supreme Court, which has not set a schedule for oral arguments.
The department also asked for $932,000 to cover “other combined expenses for various cases,” Formella wrote, without elaborating.