By Savannah Rude

“It all started with a bad property tax assessment,” Laurie Ortolano said when she recalled what led her to start looking into public records.

Ortolano, a 64-year-old retired analytical engineer who lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, with her husband, said she never expected to be doing what she does now. 

When she and her husband moved to her husband’s hometown of Nashua in 2014 and bought a property, their tax assessment went up 50%, while none of their neighbors’ did, she said. 

“So, we questioned it,” Ortolano said. “They did a new update with numbers, and we had serious reservations about our property being fairly assessed.” 

With an engineering background, Ortolano reviewed the data she had requested and found many inconsistencies. Her biggest realization was that the mayor’s assessment was improperly done. 

“I discovered that the mayor had done a property improvement, pulled a permit for about $100,000, and his assessment hadn’t changed at all,” Ortolano said. “The permit has not been captured properly per the rules of assessing a permit.” 

Unknown to Ortolano at the time was that the mayor lived only a couple of blocks away from her. 

Ortolano said that when she tried to address it with him privately, it didn’t go well. So, she took matters into her own hands and addressed it in a public board meeting. She said he then accused her of slander. 

“I pretty much believe that because of that situation, the city then dug in and they wouldn’t fix our property,” Ortolano said. “I had to go to a full appeal before an appeals board on land.”

Ortolano said it took almost three years for her tax assessment to be corrected.

While she was fighting her own tax assessment case, she filed three right-to-know lawsuits, and in 2021, she helped other property owners file abatements. 

Ortolano said that it has been extremely difficult to obtain records in her city. 

“They have closed down records and City Hall, like it’s Fort Knox,” Ortolano said. “They put up stanchions in hallways that used to be public and offices that are called reporting and records offices are now closed to the public.”

She dove into another right-to-know case involving the construction of a performing arts center in downtown Nashua, Ortolano said. “The city took federal money to fund part of the construction project, a very small amount, and taxpayers bonded the rest of it.” 

When Ortolano requested records about the construction project, she was told none were publicly available, so she again went to court. 

“The city piled five attorneys against one pro se lady,” Ortolano said. “I knew I had kicked a hornet’s nest and didn’t even know the significance when I brought it in.” 

Ortolano said the construction project involved $35 million of taxpayer-funded, bonded and government money and that $70 million of trust fund money was not accounted for properly.

To date, the case is still ongoing, and she said the city has invested more than a million dollars trying to beat her. Federal agents took the case a year ago as well. 

“I’m not complaining about the amount of dog poop on the sidewalk, I’m looking at some pretty big picture things that involve a lot of public money,” Ortolano said. “I think they’re pushing back hard because the city didn’t have good policies, practices, accounting and audit systems to address these issues and I think the city deliberately wanted to hide a lot of this.”

Ortolano’s efforts to hold her government accountable earned her the 2025 New England First Amendment Foundation citizenship award. She said that this experience has led her to appreciate her First Amendment rights much more.

“Sadly, at my age, mid-60s, I really didn’t respect my own rights, and I didn’t fully understand them,” Ortolano said. “I think a lot of us take them for granted and we assume they’re there until they’re taken from you.” 

Ortolano said she often fears telling others to use FOI laws in their state because she was publicly criticized for holding their government accountable. 

“I think collectively we all have to be more supportive of each other when we come out for records,” Ortolano said. “We have to establish a reasonableness among ourselves and our community to respect what people come forward with.”

By Savannah Rude

Elouise McDaniel, an 86-year-old retired school teacher, never thought that exercising her rights would lead to her being sued by her city as a “vexatious requester.”

McDaniel, who was a resident of Irvington, New Jersey at the time and now lives in Virginia, often requested records under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA). She requested records regarding the town’s mayor, Tony Vauss, because she was concerned about his and his administration’s actions.

“When we asked these questions, you couldn’t get any answers,” McDaniel said. “So, someone told me about the open public records, and I read up on it, and that’s when I started sending them in.”

Most of the records McDaniel filed concerned the town’s finances and the amount Vauss was being paid.

“Those are the types of records I send in,” McDaniel said. “So, then the mayor filed a complaint against me.”

Irvington Township in 2021 accused McDaniel of harassment and defamation in the suit and stated that she had filed 75 OPRA requests over a three-year period.

The suit also alleged that McDaniel was making requests “with the sole purpose and intent to harass, abuse and harm Plaintiffs and employees of the Township, including its Mayor.”

McDaniel said she was only exercising her rights.

“I called the American Civil Liberties Union, and I explained to them what was going on, and they took the case,” McDaniel said. “The mayor dropped the case right away when they found out, the city dropped it just like that.”

The plaintiff in the suit was Harold Wiener, Irvington’s Municipal Clerk, who told NBC that he did not request a lawsuit against McDaniel and that she was well within her rights to request records.

Vauss also denied involvement in the suit to NBC. Following the news coverage, the town dropped the suit.

McDaniel continued to request records about Vauss and his administration. But she said that Vauss continued to try to intimidate her.

McDaniel recalled a time when she and a couple of other senior citizens were gathered outside town hall waiting for a meeting. They were handing out flyers to people when she said that Vauss and some police officers pulled up.

“He drove them to that spot, and the cops jumped out of the car, hand on the gun. I was so scared, and we had all the seniors there,” McDaniel said. “Everybody was so afraid, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. No noise, no nothing, you could hear a pen drop.”

McDaniel said she filed a complaint with the public safety department after the incident and continued to request records from her local government.

After the lawsuit and continued intimidation, McDaniel said she wrote letters to New Jersey officials to explain the situation.

“Not one answered or came to my rescue. I let them know what was going on and sent proof,” McDaniel said. “It seemed like they closed their eyes and ears.”

McDaniel said that Irvington is not a wealthy town, which makes misappropriation of government funds even more concerning.

“Did I feel like they failed me? Yes,” McDaniel said. “It’s sad, like what are you trying to hide?”

McDaniel still encouraged her fellow residents to continue asking for answers.

“In order for us to make changes, we have to work together,” McDaniel said. “If you don’t like what’s going on, if the concerns are bothering you like they are bothering me, then you have to, or things will remain the same.”

By Savannah Rude

It’s not easy to sue your own university, but Alex Walters and his colleagues at the Michigan State University campus newspaper found it paid off.

Walters, a 21-year-old student at Michigan State, showed that tenacity in acquiring public records can inform his fellow students. He and two other staffers at The State News, Theo Scheer and Owen McCarthy, sued the university successfully for records, and even created a tool to help other students request records from the university.

Over two years, they filed hundreds of FOIA requests, tackling issues ranging from campus surveillance practices, sexual assault by campus physician Larry Nassar and faculty, hate crimes and internal communications between administrators and board members.

Their work earned them major national journalism awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists Pulliam First Amendment Award and the FOI Award given by the Student Press Law Center and Brechner Freedom of Information Project.

It all started for Walters when he was in high school.

“Nobody inside the administration wanted to unpack serious issues with this kid who had never done this before,” Walters said. “FOIA was a natural way where I’d say, well, if people don’t want to talk to me, I can look at their emails, and it just came about that out of necessity, and it’s just stuck with me ever since.”

Requesting records did not initially interest Walters; it was one of the only tools he had at his disposal for his reporting, he said.

He credits the Student Press Law Center’s letter generator for aiding in his requests at such a young age.

“The idea that I could just plug in the information about my school district and then what I wanted, and it would spit out this fancy-looking letter that I could then just send them,” Walters said. “It flattened out the learning curve a little bit and at least removed the first big obstacle.”

Since starting as a student at MSU, Walters has now filed hundreds of FOIA requests with other student journalists at MSU’s publication, The State News.

One of the main reasons Walter continues to request records and write stories is that, once he receives a record, he often wants to request more, he said.

“I think it’s very rare at this point for the records that I’m writing good stories about to be the first thing that I requested,” Walters said. “Usually, it’s a very slow and often frustrating process of asking for one thing and then, based on that, being able to craft a good request for another thing.”

Walters said that every time he receives a record, he learns about a whole new set of records, and he can carry that expertise and experience into different contexts.

Often, Walters gets inspiration from reading another school’s publication and requests similar records from MSU.

“I think a lot of these places are more similar than they are different,” Walters said. “I think being a consumer of news and being a consumer of the records that we get back just is always inspiring us to ask for other stuff.”

The FOIA process is slow. Walters said some of the records he has requested have taken years to receive, which can lead to missed stories. There is very little in Michigan laws that would allow Walters and The State News to contest timeliness issues, he said.

“I think that creates the biggest and maybe most important tension with this kind of reporting,” Walters said. “The news is something that often happens and develops very quickly, and there’s a shelf life on any given story when it is most impactful and interesting.”

Walters said he has struggled over the years to balance the news cycle and the FOIA process.

“There are things we get through the FOIA process, and by the time we get them, even though they are interesting, especially to people like us who are so nerdy about all this, it’s not even worth it to write about anymore,” Walters said. “The situation has changed, and it’s just not the time.”

While Walters and The State News are unable to sue for records over timeliness issues, they can sue for records that have been denied, which they did when they sued MSU for wrongfully redacted records.

“What led to that was that we were able to find this rare and very lucky overlap where there were records that we wanted that MSU was saying we couldn’t get,” Walters said. “We were not just challenging MSU’s interpretation of one specific circumstance, but we were trying to expand the class of records available under Michigan law at any institution.”

The proposal to change a precedent in Michigan law was appealing to the lawyers who worked on the case, Walters said.

Walters and The State News prevailed in trial court, and after MSU appealed, the court reached the same conclusion. Walters said that MSU decided not to take the case to the Supreme Court in Michigan but let the appellate court decision stand.

Walters said that before his team and he decided to go through with the lawsuit, there were many doubts and questions about whether it was the right decision.

“In the end, what I’ve come to believe is that there’s nothing that we have done as a newsroom that has created a better and more productive relationship between us and the university we cover than suing them,” Walters said.

The lawsuit made it clear to MSU that the team at The State News is serious about its reporting and the work it produces.

These experiences have inspired Walters and his team at The State News to continue strengthening their records request process. While they have a template, inspired by SPLC’s, that anyone can use, Walters said they have started keeping all of their administrative appeals in a collection for easy reference.

“We have sort of a bank of good precedent and arguments from past appeals, and then when we need to write one, we can fall back on that,” Walters said. “Over time, that’ll only grow.”

Walters hopes that other student reporters never shy away from using FOIA in their reporting. Walters will graduate from MSU this May and is seeking a full-time newsroom job where he can continue to use FOIA in his reporting.

“I think a lot of the ways that we talk about FOIA is in this coded kind of legal language that makes it seem intimidating,” Walters said. “But it’s not. It’s easy, and it’s simple, and it’s fun. It’s a good time, and I would hate to see a student journalist be intimidated out of using it.”

By Savannah Rude

When Isabelle Leofanti watched two football players tear their ACLs while playing less than a week apart, she began to question the safety of her high school’s field turf.

Leofanti, an 18-year-old from Naperville, Illinois, played soccer on the same turf throughout high school. She said that while there had been other injuries on the field, it was viewing those two that spiked her concern.

“Watching that made me realize there is a really big issue, and seeing it while playing on that field as a soccer player,” Leofanti said. “Seeing all these different things coming together, and it was just like, this is a problem that needs to be addressed and spoken about.”

Leofanti wrote for her school newspaper at the time, so she started digging. She said her first step was to do background research and see what information was already available to her. After reaching out to several people for interviews, she was met with no response.

“I started seeing a bigger issue when I wasn’t getting any responses from these higher-up people in the district because they normally will respond,” Leofanti said. “I think that I was following up with some of these district officials every couple of days, maybe every three days, before even just receiving a response.”

She was able to finally secure an interview with the district-level executive director of communication services, but only after consistently reaching out for two weeks, she said.

“When I had the interview with the first district individual, a lot of the questions I asked, I was told that they couldn’t answer or they didn’t know, and I thought that was definitely a big issue,” Leofanti said. “I saw there was something wrong, and something I wasn’t getting out of what I was trying to do with just a basic interview. That’s when I realized I need to submit a FOIA request.”

Leofanti leaned on her teachers to figure out which records to request and how to request them, since no one at her school had ever used FOIA, she said. Her first records request was for emails from the Indian Prairie School District. Leofanti used very specific keywords in her request.

“I really kind of narrowed down to like keywords with turf, field, installation, and maintenance or funding,” Leofanti said. “So, everything that I got back was all under those words and those conversations that the district was having that I couldn’t see or I wasn’t hearing about.”

One set of records that Leofanti revealed included censored information about the replacement of the school’s turf field.

“There was a referendum trying to get passed within the school board and there was one question. It was, ‘Where are we at with possibly getting artificial turf at Wabonsee Valley and Equa Valley, and replacing the turf at Natea Valley?’ And they left that blank,” Leofanti said. “I thought that was honestly probably the biggest thing that stood out to me.”

Leofanti said that, aside from some unanswered questions, she was able to obtain almost all the information she needed through her FOIA request, which she attributes to the way she submitted it.

“I went through a couple rounds of writing about how I was going to request this record or how I was going to request what I got back through the FOIA,” Leofanti said. “So, I guess that was a big part of how I got so much information back was making sure that my request originally was really well written and got to the point and very specific.”

The records revealed that the turf field had not been replaced in 16 years, which is unacceptable, Leofanti said.

“This showed a like a difference between what was right and what was wrong, and that was something for me that was really big,” Leofanti said. “I wanted to make sure that I addressed that, especially being a senior and going through the last four years of playing on that field and also seeing so many people going through that and then also hearing different stories about different people getting injured.”

Once published, Leofanti said the story had a huge impact not just on her school but on the entire community.

“I think submitting the FOIA request and also publishing the article with all this information really shined a light on what one person can do and the impact it can have on so many athletes and so many individuals and their safety as well,” Leofanti said.

The story made some district officials displeased because the information they were hiding came to light, Leofanti said. But the story held them accountable and has led to actual changes, she said. Her work earned her a student FOI award given by the Student Press Law Center and Brechner FOI Project.

She hopes that it inspires other student journalists to utilize FOIA in their reporting.

“I just hope people do take advantage of it,” Leofanti said. “If they are in a journalism class and they’re writing for the paper and they’re writing a story but not getting a lot of information back, knowing that you have that right to do so and that it is possible to go and just submit one and see what you get out of it because at the end of the day you’re not doing anything wrong you have the right to do so.”

Leofanti is currently studying Business at Kent State in Ohio. She plays soccer for them and is looking at adding a second major: Journalism. She said the response to this article has led her to consider a double major.

“My experience working as a student journalist and on this article, I just, I found out how crucial my reporting and actions I took for transparency were, I had on my school and like my community, and it was something that reached a lot of people,” Leofanti said. “It’s something that’s wanting like inspired me to keep going with the journalism career path.”