Last week, Bergen County Assignment Judge Bonnie J. Mizdol issued an opinion finding that the Borough of North Arlington unlawfully imposed a special service charge upon a records requestor who sought records from the Borough's Facebook pages.
The OPRA request at issue in Wronko v. North Arlington sought the list of individuals who had been banned from the Borough's Facebook page, as well as a list of any words that had been censored and the list of page administrators. In response, the Borough insisted it needed to use an outside IT consultant to capture the screenshots necessary to ...
Last week we discussed Exception 1 to OPRA’s personnel records exemption, which permits you to file an OPRA request for a public employee’s “name, title, position, salary, payroll record, length of service, date of separation and the reason therefor, and the amount and type of any pension received shall be a government record.” This week, we explore Exception 2.
Exception 2 provides that: “personnel or pension records of any individual shall be accessible when required to be disclosed by another law, when disclosure is essential to the performance of official duties of a ...
Personnel records are a category of government records that shine significant light on the workings of government (including misconduct and corruption), but unfortunately our Legislature made most personnel records off limits when it enacted OPRA. So, what records can you get?
Section 10 of OPRA makes personnel and pension records generally off limits, but it provides three exceptions. Today, we will discuss the first exception.
The first exception provides that: “an individual's name, title, position, salary, payroll record, length of service, date of separation and the ...
Pursuant to Section 5 of OPRA, a public agency must state the “specific basis” for denying access to government records. Those who request records frequently, however, know that it is not uncommon for a public agency to issue a blanket denial when you’ve requested a volume of records, rather than telling you specifically why each requested record is being withheld. Yesterday, a court awarded attorneys fees to Pashman Stein in litigation against a public agency who had refused to tell Plaintiff John Paff whether there were records responsive to his request and instead kept ...
