Varley, Penna and ….Danielsen?

The Folks Wanting to Destroy OPRA Appear to Have One Thing In Common: Hiding Important Information from the Public

Currently, legislation is being proposed at the state level -championed under the guise of saving money-that would render OPRA meaningless.  OPRA is a law that allows residents to obtain documents from government entities and provides remedies for non-compliance.  Under OPRA, government agencies who refuse to provide information unlawfully are forced to cover the legal fees of suits brought against them by residents.  This is important as, we’ve seen with our very own District, government entities have no issue wasting tax payer dollars in hiring lawyers to hide information that demonstrate bad decisions and their impact. The proposed legislation creates an impenetrable wall that if were in place over the past three years, would have shielded Berkeley Heights from discovering many of the bad actions by our BOE and even important town matters, like Wawa.

The proposed legislation increases the amount of time government agencies can take in responding to requests, changes fee shifting to the point where most Attorneys would not take OPRA cases on behalf of citizens, moves cases away from Superior Court to the GRC (which takes forever to come to decisions), and punishes those who request too much information by banning them from further requests for a year (without defining what “too much information” means).

If Dr. Varley and Angela Penna wrote the OPRA law, it would probably look exactly like this proposed legislation.

In reality, if you look at the individual sponsoring this legislation, the whole thing looks even more Varely-Penna-ish. That’s right – Joseph Danielsen – the man who has a significant personal interest in killing OPRA is riding the mantle of “OPRA is hurting our communities” code for “OPRA is stopping me from doing terrible things in public office I don’t want people to know about.”

From an Article in New Brunswick Today published in 2021:

Assemblyman Joseph Danielsen landed another government job at a local public agency earlier last year, after the Franklin Township Sewerage Authority (FTSA) board hired him to positions that pay Danielsen an additional $87,327 per year in salary.

Danielsen’s official profile on the New Jersey Legislature’s website does not list his 65-hour per week job as Interim Executive Director and Special Project Manager of the FTSA, which holds monthly public meetings that are not well attended.

Multiple requests for comment about the status of the position and Danielsen’s interim role have gone unanswered by authority officials, including a former aide to Danielsen who recently became the board’s Chairwoman.

With the exception of the authority’s website and one local news story online about a sewer line breakage, his interim role has no digital footprint. The job is not mentioned on his Facebook, LinkedIn, Ballotpedia or Wikipedia pages. Source

Below is an email I sent to Angie, Ms. Mattsikoudas (Assembly), Ms. Munoz (Assembly), Mr. Bramnick (Senate), Mr. Danielsen (Assembly), Mr. Kean and Mr. Murphy (Governor):

I am writing about potential legislation that seeks to make changes to the current laws surrounding OPRA.

OPRA has been vital to our work as a collective in exposing OPMA, OPRA, and Ethics violations in our District. 

We submit, on average, close to 3-4 OPRA requests a month to our School District, which has been doing everything in its power to withhold information with extensions on important information taking seven weeks.

Last year we needed to appeal to the State of NJ to obtain the school budget before our Board of Education voted on it.

OPRA allowed us to identify a violation of educational adequacy and bidding laws in a highly controversial reconfiguration of our schools that had no community buy-in, displaced hundreds of students, and led to mass teacher reassignments and resignations.

The District has paid excessive lawyer fees to overly redact records connected to the use of attorneys that violates its own policies forcing residents to sue the District for these records (residents still do not know much our District has spent defending a Nepotism Allegation our Superintendent has now admitted to).

Mr. Danielsen, in a recent article, you reported that we are spending tens of millions of dollars on OPRA- I ask that you please investigate how much of this is due to government bodies trying to fight tooth and nail in preventing the disclosure of documents that should be freely given to the public. 

You also mention that people don't see OPRA as a priority - however if asked a different way, "Do you think residents and news outlets should have access to public documents so as better to inform the public?" - I think you might get a different response.

Removing fee shifting gives an advantage to well-funded government entities that already have access to attorneys paid for with tax dollars.  These lawyers would be more than happy to drive up the legal costs of any OPRA lawsuit to disincentivize attorneys who are capped from choosing to defend residents.

Using broad terms and categories such as "repeat requestors" punishes organizations, such as ours, who make these requests to inform the public and removes vital access to information while creating a lot of room for interpretation that will be abused.

I have no issue restricting law firms that abuse OPRA or companies that use OPRA for profit-except, of course, for journalists, but this would be a death knell for advocacy and information-sharing groups.

NJ has a long history of government corruption, and OPRA has been an incredible resource in trying to repair the damage.  These changes would render OPRA meaningless.

Here are some articles we have written about how our District has withheld information even with the current law in place:

On OPRA: https://bhcommunitywatch.com/tag/opra/

On Ethics VIolation and violations of law: https://bhcommunitywatch.com/tag/ethics/

I would be happy to make time to meet with each of you one to one to discuss this.  I'll even buy the pastries and coffee.

Respectfully,
John Migueis

We received a reassuring reply from the office of Assemblywoman Michele Matsikoudis:

Mr. Migueis,

Thank you so much for taking the time to contact the Office of Assemblywoman Michele Matsikoudis and voice your opposition to A5613, A5614, A5615, and A5616. We greatly appreciate your sharing your thoughts with us. I will be more than happy to convey your message to the Assemblywoman as our office begins to review these bills, which were introduced just recently. Please know that Asw. Matsikoudis views transparency as a key component of good governance, and thus will be reviewing this legislation very carefully.

In the meantime, if you ever have any further questions, comments, concerns, or any issues in dealing with state government, please don't hesitate to reach out to us via email at [email protected]. Thank you again, and I hope that you have a great rest of your day!

Best,

Josh Kutner

We will update this article with other responses if and when they arrive.

If you would like to express your opinions on this issue to our representatives, please email:

[email protected]
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]

To learn more about the proposed changes, read: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2023/06/16/lawmakers-prepare-tweaks-to-public-records-law-that-critics-call-an-assault-on-transparency/

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