System requires excessive time and money to find documents
For the past five years, New Jersey has had a law on the books that gives citizens the right to dig into the filing cabinets of state, county and local government agencies to extract public information.
Many thousands of New Jerseyans and more than a few journalists have taken advantage of this law, the Open Public Records Act, to ferret out information ranging from the driving records of elected officials to the cell phone bills of appointed ones, from the minutes of executive sessions of municipal governing bodies to the closed-door deliberations of school boards.
All of this information is, after all, a matter of public record, and should therefore be accessible and available to all members of the public. In principle, then, OPRA truly lives up to its name.
In practice, however, the law doesn’t always fulfill its promise.
There are, of course, countless examples of government agencies making it difficult or impossible for citizens (or reporters) to find the information they’re seeking. Records get lost or misplaced; written minutes have a way of becoming illegible, taped ones inaudible; filing systems are so confusing sometimes purposefully, sometimes through sheer incompetence that the information sought will simply never be found.
But more often than not, the problem isn’t that documents disappear or can’t be found. It’s that finding them is a painstaking, time-consuming process. And time means money in this case, taxpayers’ money.
This isn’t a matter of concern when the OPRA request is for a single document or a set of records that can easily be found, photocopied and distributed at nominal cost. But many requests are far more complicated. A really thorough job researching, for example, a complicated land-use issue, zoning case or development or redevelopment plan, may require going back through years of meetings, hearings, deliberations and correspondence some public, some privileged of councils and boards and commissions and committees and subcommittees.
Some of the records uncovered in this process may be voluminous, and the cost of reproducing them is not cheap. Others may be difficult to retrieve, taking up many hours of one or more public employee’s time. The question of who should pay for that time is still an open one. Recently, the Government Records Council, the state agency that enforces OPRA, heard a complaint against the Division of Consumer Affairs, which told a citizen he could have two hours to inspect records for free, but would have to pay thereafter.
As long as the record-keeping practices of state, county and local governments and their agencies run the gamut from meticulously careful to hopelessly chaotic, fulfilling OPRA requests will remain a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s why Assemblyman James Whelan, an Atlantic City Democrat, has introduced a bill that would require all government records to be posted on the Internet, in electronically searchable format.
It’s an intriguing idea. For citizens, it would mean ready, inexpensive access to information that can now take significant time and money to obtain. For government, it would mean having an orderly record-keeping system and saving the resources, but human and financial, now devoted to handling OPRA requests. At the same time, however, there are obvious costs associated with transferring volumes of paper records to the Internet, not to mention the untold damage a talented hacker could do to public records in cyberspace. Security will be a huge issue and security, like everything else associated with this matter, comes at a cost.
The real question, then, is this: How much are we willing to pay to assure public access to public documents? If, as the abolitionist Wendell Phillips once observed, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, the bottom line should be top dollar.

