At any given meeting, the New Hampshire Executive Council can face 100 separate state contracts to approve or deny. And those contracts can be accompanied by 10 or 20 pages of materials.

It’s a staggering amount of paperwork that can come to 1.3 million printed pages per year. And this month, Gov. Kelly Ayotte is attempting to change that decades-old system and eliminate the printed packets, which her office says costs about $200,000 per year.

But Republican councilors have countered that attempt with complaints of their own, claiming the Ayotte administration has not provided crucial documents to accompany the contracts it wants the board to approve.

On Wednesday, the conflict boiled over at an especially tense council meeting. Councilors accused Ayotte’s departments of withholding doc

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