By Sunayana Prabhu
TRENTON – A controversial new state legislation restricting public access to government records passed out of committee in both houses in Trenton March 11, against strong public opposition from across the state.
Ironically, the hearings were scheduled during National Sunshine Week which celebrates the fundamental role of government transparency in a democracy.
The controversial law (S2930/A4045) rolls back certain provisions from the 2002 state Open Public Records Act (OPRA), which has been used by private citizens and the press to hold government officials accountable at the local, state and federal levels.
Opponents of the bill – residents, representatives of academic institutions, religious and environmental groups, civic, nonprofit and media organizations – lined up outside the State House Annex in Trenton Monday, concerned the new legislation will not only restrict crucial access to government records and hinder investigative journalism but also diminish the rights of the public at large.
Introduced March 4, identical bills S2930 and A4045 were fast-tracked through the state Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee and the Assembly State and Local Government Committee. The bill advanced with the majority of committee members voting in favor of it with amendments.
A hearing by the Assembly Appropriations Committee was scheduled for March 14.
Bill S2930 is sponsored by Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-36, Bergen and Passaic); A4045 is sponsored by Assemblyman Joe Danielsen (D-17, Middlesex and Somerset).
How The New Bill Would Change OPRA
The Open Public Records Act (OPRA) is a state law that allows the public to access, view and copy certain government records. OPRA also affords the public rights and protections to register a complaint or sue a government body that denies a request for records.
OPRA has allowed citizens to access government emails, call logs and public documents – critical information that has been used by citizens and the media to expose corruption in government.
The new legislation would restrict access to emails and call logs.
Wall resident Betsy Cross spoke during public comment at the Assembly hearing on A4045. She emphasized the importance of emails and call logs in uncovering fraud in local government.
Cross said she used OPRA to request telephone records, school attendance sheets and more, using it to win a lawsuit against the Wall Township Board of Education for buying trailers from a company without electrical and plumbing inspections.
“If we hadn’t gotten all that information under OPRA, we would be in a much worse, much worse position,” Cross said. Additionally, through telephone records, Cross discovered the school district was paying for an employee’s “sex chat line.”
OPRA “allows everyday citizens like me to expose corruption,” including “official misconduct, gross incompetence, mismanagement (and) fraudulent practices,” she said.
The bills would also require those requesting records to fill out mandatory forms with detailed and specific information about their requests.
Lauren James-Weir, attorney for the New Jersey Press Association, said the bill “totally obliterates” OPRA, reducing freedom of the press and creating “hurdles for requesters to jump through in order to gain access.”
The bills also eliminate the mandatory fee-shifting provision set forth in OPRA. Currently, if a request is denied, the applicant can hire an attorney to sue the government for the information. If they win, the government is liable to pay the fees, not the applicant. If the applicant loses the case, the attorney does not get paid.
Under the new bills, attorneys would have to take OPRA cases with the understanding that they may not get paid, even if they win.
“This change alone would drastically change the landscape of public access in New Jersey,” said James-Weir, making it extremely difficult for OPRA applicants to find attorneys willing to take their case and many unlawful denials may go unchallenged.
Furthermore, S2930/A4045 includes the creation of a Police Record Access Improvement Task Force that many believe favors the police.
“New Jersey is behind more than half of the other states in the country when it comes to police disciplinary records, and the decades-long fight for transparency deserves substantial action rather than political theater,” said Jim Sullivan, deputy policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union, New Jersey.
“All it (this bill) does is limit access while not increasing access in any meaningful way. Overall, ACLU New Jersey is disappointed both in the context of this bill and the process by which it is moving. It is undemocratic and a slap in the face to New Jerseyans across the state,” Sullivan said.
Industry Leaders Agree
Many other leaders from various fields and professional organizations across the state spoke out against the bill at the hearing.
Renee Steinhagen, director of the New Jersey Appleseed Public Interest Law Center, called the bill “fundamentally undemocratic.”
“Overall, this legislation is particularly troubling in light of the Legislature’s passage last session of the Elections Transparency Act,” said the League of Women Voters Monmouth County in a release. “That Orwellian-named bill opened the floodgates to dark money interests spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in key legislative races to mislead voters in elections less than six months ago.”
Some took the time to explain the importance of OPRA and the transparency it provides.
Taylor McFarland of the Sierra Club explained how OPRA helps citizens and environmental groups keep municipalities and developers honest. Many redevelopment plans are almost entirely negotiated behind closed doors, she said. “Strong OPRA laws are the only effective tool that we currently have to get a peek behind the curtain to monitor government activity around redevelopment plans. Measures proposed in today’s bill will weaken this tool,” McFarland said.
Bryan Sacks, president of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, said unions not only use OPRA for “collective bar- gaining” and to derive information that’s necessary to “al- leviate gender and campus pay inequities” but also, more broadly, to “hold Rutgers accountable to the public and to the student body that it serves.” Sacks offered two exam- ples of “serious issues” that were uncovered by OPRA re- quests in recent years at the university, one involving the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses to top adminis- trators during the pandemic and “a $250 million debt that Rutgers accumulated subsidizing its athletics program.”
“Neither of these stories – and many others – would have come to light if the proposed version of OPRA that is before you today were law,” Sacks said.
The article originally appeared in the March 14 –March 20, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
