The New Jersey Legislature passed, and New Jersey Governor Murphy signed into law, a bill modifying New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act, known as OPRA. OPRA guarantees the public’s right to some government records.
The changes further restrict the public’s access to government documents and data. In particular the new modifications would:
- Continue to limit access to government email and text messages.
- Allow public agencies acting as records custodians to charge heavy fees to release information — without the burden of demonstrating that the released information is complete.
- Render it nearly impossible for New Jersey attorneys to combat instances when records requests are denied by public entities. As proposed, the law disables a current feature of OPRA that allows attorneys to recoup fees from agencies that wrongly deny requests.
Legislators claimed the bill was needed to cut down on commercial record requests and data brokering, but provisions to limit the latter were removed from the final bill and commercial entities can now have their requests expedited — for a fee.
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