Geno Marconi, the former longtime director of New Hampshire’s ports, has gone to court to settle a question that touches every senior official who serves the state: when a public employee is sued for actions taken on the job, who decides whether taxpayers pick up the legal tab. Marconi argues that the answer is the five-member Executive Council, and that Gov. Kelly Ayotte broke state law by denying his request for state-funded representation without ever putting the matter to a council vote. According to New Hampshire Public Radio, Marconi filed the demand in court this week, asking a judge to order the council to weigh in.
The dispute stems from a civil lawsuit filed in January 2025 by the owners of the Rye Harbor Lobster Pound, a popular seafood shack on the Seacoast. The business claims it was unfairly targeted by port leadership, and it named Marconi in his official capacity as then head of the New Hampshire Port Authority. The suit also named Paul Brean, the head of the Pease Development Authority, along with two government entities. The lobster pound alleges that the Pease Development Authority imposed an illegal concessions fee of 10 percent on its sales, and that Marconi singled out the business with a stream of regulatory burdens that ranged from parking disputes to demands over where the operation could place its propane tanks.
For most top state employees, a civil suit of this kind would trigger an almost routine response. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office typically provides a legal defense, or pays for one, when an official is sued for conduct connected to official duties. Marconi’s situation was anything but routine. At the same time the lobster pound case was moving forward, the Attorney General’s Office was prosecuting Marconi on unrelated criminal charges. In October 2024, he was indicted on allegations that he improperly shared the confidential motor vehicle and boat records of a Pease Development Authority board member. Citing that parallel prosecution, the Attorney General declined to indemnify Marconi or to cover the cost of a private lawyer to defend him in the civil case.
Marconi appealed that denial in April 2025. What followed, according to his new court filing, was a 12-month silence. Then in April of this year, the governor’s office notified him that it was rejecting his appeal. His lawyers contend that state law does not give the governor the power to make that call alone. The statute, they argue, requires that both the governor “and” the Executive Council consider the request. “Neither may avoid this ministerial duty,” Marconi wrote in the filing.
The governor’s office sees it differently. In the April denial letter, Ayotte’s legal counsel, Myles Matteson, told Marconi that the governor sets the agenda for the Executive Council. “As I have indicated to you previously, the Governor controls the agenda of items considered by the Executive Council,” Matteson wrote. In other words, the administration’s position is that if the governor chooses not to bring the indemnification request to the council, the council never gets the chance to vote on it. Marconi’s lawsuit is a direct challenge to that reading of the law, and the outcome could clarify how much unilateral authority a New Hampshire governor holds over a process that, on paper, is shared with an independently elected council.
For New Hampshire residents, the case is more than a personal grievance between a former official and the state. The Executive Council is a body unique to New Hampshire’s form of government, an elected five-member board that signs off on contracts, judicial nominations, and major state spending. A ruling that defines when the council must be consulted on indemnification could shape how the state handles legal exposure for years to come. It also lands at a politically sensitive moment, with Ayotte navigating her first full year in office and facing scrutiny over how she exercises executive power. Readers following the governor’s broader agenda can see related coverage in our reporting on Ayotte’s reelection filing and legislative clashes.
The criminal chapter of Marconi’s story has already closed. Last October, he pleaded guilty to a single count of sharing confidential records. Prosecutors said he shared boating and motor vehicle records as an act of retaliation against Pease Development Authority board member Neil Levesque, with whom he had a famously strained relationship, and then deleted voicemails while he was under investigation. Under the plea deal, Marconi was sentenced to 30 days in jail, all suspended pending good behavior, ordered to pay a $2,000 fine, and required to resign from the job overseeing the state’s ports.
His wife, former New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, faced her own legal reckoning. She pleaded guilty to separate criminal allegations that she tried to interfere in her husband’s investigation, and she paid a small fine while denying that she crossed any ethical lines. Hantz Marconi reached the court’s mandatory retirement age of 70 earlier this year. The intertwined cases drew sustained statewide attention because they reached into the upper levels of two branches of state government at once, the judiciary and the agencies that run New Hampshire’s working waterfront.
The civil case that triggered the fee fight is still unresolved. It has moved through a dismissal and an amended complaint, and while a hearing was scheduled for July 2, no trial date has been set. It is not clear how much Marconi has spent on legal fees over the past 18 months, a figure that sits at the center of his demand for reimbursement. His request for the Executive Council vote has been scheduled for an initial hearing in Merrimack Superior Court in August. The Seacoast governance questions raised by the lobster pound dispute also echo the kinds of infrastructure and authority issues covered in our look at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard utility upgrade, and the broader pattern of high-profile state legal battles seen in the appeal over New Hampshire’s proof-of-citizenship voting law.
What happens next will be watched closely by current and future state officials, because the principle at stake is not unique to Marconi. Any senior employee sued over official conduct could one day depend on the same indemnification process, and the question of who controls it, the governor alone or the governor together with the council, has now been placed squarely before a judge.
For related coverage, see our reporting on Claremont Mayor Dale Girard Switches Party Affiliation From Democrat to Repub….
For related coverage, see our reporting on After Months of Delay.
