John Migueis is a resident of Berkeley Heights and contributor to Berkeley Heights Community Watch. For related content, see his op-ed, “The New Bill Restricting Public Access to Records Would Be the Death Knell For Advocacy.”

The Open Public Records Act, as it is currently written, allows working class and middle-class families to request information from government entities and provides them with legal relief in securing these documents when these entities violate the current law in providing access.  

This has led to an explosion of transparency and exposed serious issues with local and state government entities. In the case of Berkeley Heights, it has blown the door open on several significant concerns connected to our school budget, Board of Education ethics issues, legal spending – actually too many to name here. As a result of this increased awareness, the Berkeley Heights Board of Education has been transformed in three short years, with advocates of transparency and data-informed decision-making gaining four seats on the BOE.

This is a drop in the bucket as to how OPRA has helped everyday people get the information they need to improve their schools and community.

In June of this year, the New Jersey Monitor reported on a series of bills seeking to alter the Open Public Records Act fundamentally. Transparency advocates such as John Paff raised the alarm on these proposed changes :

“I’m not saying there are not problems with OPRA, and maybe some things have to be changed, but separating the requestor from legal help, forcing them into a system that has been shown countless times to be inadequate — that being the GRC — seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction of the way we should be going,” Paff said.

CJ Griffin of the Stein Public Interest Center also provided an in-depth analysis of the legislation in an Interview with NJ Spotlight News:

Members of Berkeley Heights Community Watch joined other organizations throughout New Jersey in digging deeper into the proposed legislation and sent letters to local and state officials raising concerns.  

This month, the alarm bells rang again when the Star-Ledger Editorial Board reported that :

“Newly emboldened Democratic lawmakers in Trenton plan to use the last few months of this legislative cycle – known as the lame duck session – to push through scores of bills that would have drawn too much unwanted attention during the election season.

Among them is a bill to reform the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) – a cornerstone of government transparency — which allows citizens, advocates, businesses, and journalists to access public information from state and local agencies, helping us all track how public dollars are spent and how decisions are made.

There is no doubt that the OPRA law needs an update after 22 years, but if this improvement looks anything like the last proposal from the majority party – which was a butchering of the public trust – this is a good time to remind Democratic leaders what good-faith reform actually looks like.” (source)

As a result, Berkeley Heights Community Watch sent a letter to Mayor Devanney, Berkeley Heights Town Council Members, and state legislators.

Soon after, we learned that the NJ Working Families Party, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and State League of Women Voters, spearheaded a letter to Senate President Nick Scutari and State Senator Paul Sarlo. We enthusiastically signed this letter alongside dozens of large and small organizations representing diverse interests.

The purpose in sharing all of this is to ask you to please reach out to Mr. Scutari, your local representatives and encourage them to pause changes on this important legislation so that organizations like the ACLU and League of Women Voters can review and offer feedback to any changes on this important law.

It will only take a few minutes of your time and could be the difference between sunlight or complete darkness for NJ residents concerned about how their government operates.

Here is the letter: