A recent public program to discuss residents’ rights under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA) and the Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) attracted a particularly engaged audience in the Community Room at the Princeton Public Library Saturday.

“We thought it would be helpful to offer training for residents on their rights under OPRA and OPMA” (more commonly known as the “Sunshine Law”), said Planet Princeton publisher Krystal Knapp, who along with the library and the non-partisan Citizens Campaign, sponsored the morning program.

While lawyer Walter Luers, a public records expert who has successfully represented many New Jersey residents in public records and public meetings cases, came prepared to do most of the talking, audience members eagerly took him up on his offer to answer their questions as he went along. Mr. Luers, an attorney from Oxford, N.J., who is the president of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government (www.njfog.org), never made it to the end of his notes.

Veterans of the Princeton Fair Tax-Revaluation Group and others concerned with the transparency of meetings held by the Transition Task Force and its subcommittees asked and learned about the proper way to request documents under OPRA, and what does and does not constitute a policy-making meeting under OPMA rules. “There’s not a more powerful tool than the Sunshine Law,” observed Heather Taylor, board member of the American Civil Liberties Union-New Jersey, who was present at the meeting.

OPRA is a New Jersey law that governs public access to government records maintained by public agencies in the state. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey defines a “government record” as “any record that has been made, maintained, or kept on file in the course of official public business, or that has been received in the course of official public business.” Government records come in many formats, including paper records, electronic files, and audio recordings.

Like the Freedom of Information Act, which operates at the federal level, requests for state and local information under OPRA must be made in writing. Typically they should be addressed to a municipality’s “Records Custodian,” or, as a fallback, to the municipal clerk, who is required to forward the request to the appropriate staff member, or tell the resident seeking information who that person is. Once they have received the request, records custodians have seven business days in which to respond by telling the information-seeker whether their request will be filled immediately, or if it requires more time.

Mr. Luers suggested that “more time” could extend to about a month, but not much more than that. He emphasized the importance of using the correct wording in making the original request (including describing the format in which you want to receive the records), and he advised those who find themselves waiting for their requests to be filled not to send in daily requests that will only inundate (and probably aggravate) records custodians. He discouraged the use of the word “information” in a request as too vague, and encouraged listeners to be specific about the time frame they’re asking about.

Mr. Luers counseled using common sense rather than resorting to all-or-nothing anger when working with municipal staff members. Getting at least some of the documents one has requested is “a foot in the door,” and the documents in-hand may often lead to other pertinent records, he noted.

Mr. Luers also reported that obtaining copies of a municipality’s financial register over a period of years is a good way “to see where the money is going.”

Borough Mayor Yina Moore and Township Mayor Chad Goerner will probably be glad to know that Mr. Luers nixed a suggestion that municipal mayors be required to review incoming OPRA requests, saying that it would be an inordinate, and inappropriate, amount of work for them. “Be careful not to burn out your public officials because they’ll tune you out,” he observed. Not riling public officials also means, he said, refraining from using petitions or “four-page emails” to make a request.

The Sunshine Law

“You cannot hold meetings by email,” said Mr. Luers in response to a question about New Jersey’s OPMA. “Coming to a consensus by email is against the law.”

New Jersey‘s OPMA is designed to ensure that decision-making government bodies in the state conduct their businesses in public except in specific circumstances where exclusion of the public is needed to protect the privacy of individuals, the safety of the public, or the effectiveness of government in such areas as negotiations or investigations of individual members. Every public body must publish its meeting schedule by January 10 or within seven days of its annual organization’s meeting, whichever is later. A 48-hour written notice must also be given for any regular, special, adjourned, or unscheduled meeting.

Mr. Luers will lead another discussion on maximizing the use of New Jersey’s OPRA and OPMA in a free “webinar” on Tuesday, March 13, from 6 to 7 p.m. To register, visit http://thecitizenscampaign.com/eventlist/125-webinar.