No Vote, No Problem For New Portsmouth City Clerk

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

Facing a potential political embarrassment, Portsmouth’s City Council found a way out of voting on controversial City Clerk hire Sally Kellar — they checked the fine print.

Turns out, Portsmouth’s City Council is not allowed to vote on hiring or firing any city employee except the city manager, a job currently held by Karen Conard. So the planned vote on Kellar was scrapped at the last minute.

“It’s not our vote to take,” Mayor Deaglan McEachern said.

City Attorney Trevor McCourt said Monday night that Portsmouth’s city charter is clear: All decisions on day-to-day management are made by Conard, not the council. That includes hiring for positions like city clerk. Conard already pushed out longtime Clerk Kelli Barnaby, reportedly telling Barnaby she was not a good fit for the city administration after 38 years on the job.

But Kellar, apparently Conard’s idea of a good fit, has some issues of her own. She was part of the town of Bedford administration that screwed up the 2020 election by “misplacing” 190 absentee ballots and then covering up the blunder for close to a year.

When Kellar and Election Moderator Bill Klein finally let the voters know about the snafu, they falsely blamed the secretary of state’s office and the New Hampshire attorney general’s office. But they got caught when Secretary of State David Scanlan told NHJournal he was never informed about the misplaced ballots.

“Our correspondence and emails do not indicate we were informed of the ballots’ existence before November 18,” Scanlan said at the time.

Months into the scandal, Assistant Moderator Brian Shaughnessy admitted during a Bedford Town Council meeting he came up with a “silence” strategy. His plan to keep the mistakes quiet cost him votes on the Executive Council when he was later nominated for a judgeship.

But as Bedford was under investigation for the 190 ballots during September 2021, Kellar reportedly found another batch of 2020 absentee ballots left in a 2021 special election ballot box. While she did not inform the attorney general or secretary of state about the second ballot find, Kellar’s second find became public knowledge, and Assistant Attorney General Myles Matteson was not happy.

“Bedford election officials should have immediately notified the Secretary of State’s Office and/or the Attorney General’s Office when they were found. Instead, this Office learned about the found ballots through press accounts months later,” he wrote in a letter to Bedford officials. “This is inexcusable. Bedford election officials knew our office had an ongoing review concerning the 2020 General Election regarding the misplacement of ballots, yet did not alert us that they had found more ballots.”

Bedford ended up with election monitors appointed by the Secretary of State to observe the town’s 2022 election operation and make sure it conformed to the law.

Kellar’s hire, as well as hard feelings about Barnaby’s ouster, was causing controversy for the City Council. The council was scheduled to vote on confirming Kellar on Monday night, and more residents were voicing opposition.

“Please vote NO for Kellar. We deserve the best and the brightest talent to run our elections — not Bedford’s bottom of the barrel,” Robin Rousseau wrote to the council.

Ward 1 City Moderator Brian Gibb told the council that Kellar’s performance in Bedford is concerning enough for the council not to vote for her hiring.

“Even the appearance of impropriety could be a challenge for the person amidst so much political strife,” Gibb wrote.

But before the elected members of the City Council were forced into making a potentially unpopular decision in public, McEachern had lawyer McCourt double-check the law one more time. McCourt said the city charter is clear: The council does not have authority over the city clerk.

No vote was held.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.