Board Games: Not What We Had on our Holiday Wish List

Questions surround recent board decisions and superintendent recommendations…

The Berkeley Heights BOE may be taking advantage of having a new Business Administrator in place, who has not yet had time to review past BOE actions, or they may merely be doing what they do, which is ignoring any and all policy, law, guidance and public comment with which they disagree. It’s more ‘full steam ahead and damn the consequences’. Not surprising when the worst that will happen is a lackluster and half-hearted slap on the wrist by governing agencies.

On the issue of the Request for Proposal (RFP) for architects and law firms, there are a few red flags. First, an RFP is only supposed to be issued after a vote by the board in a public meeting. Our board never did this. One can assume, based on past actions where decisions were made in committee (something expressly prohibited, by the way), that some committee or another decided to move forward with issuing the RFP.  Also, on closer inspection, the RPF for the architect is back-dated to run from July 2023 to June 2024. Why would the district solicit architecture firms and interview them for a contract with dates that have passed?

As of now, the current firm for the district is Solutions Architecture.  They were appointed last January, on recommendation of the Superintendent, to handle specific projects. On the agenda for tonight, the Board will vote to appoint the firm for SDA projects going forward.  There is nothing in the attachments that specifies what the project(s) entail, nor when the project(s) will start or will need to be completed.  There must have been a reason the board wanted to issue an RFP and solicit bids for a contract in the first place, rather than continue to appoint an architect for projects.  Why would the Boar not – using the correct method – vote to issue an RFP and proceed if that was the original intention?

Lastly, and to be completely honest, I didn’t care which architects were hired until, after digging into the board’s lack of a vote on the RFP, these other issues arose. What does concern me, and should concern every tax-paying resident in this town, is the second RFP for the district’s general legal counsel. I don’t trust that the current board majority and the superintendent do not have a plan in the works to retain our current train-wreck of a general law firm.

But that’s not all. Onward, to the issue of Stephen Hopkins position as Custodian of Records and adjacent concerns. Going back, Stephen Hopkins was appointed the Business Administrator’s designee for the purposes of answering an ‘inundation’ of OPRA requests that, purportedly, could not be handled by former BA Julie Kot, and which would otherwise be sent by Melissa Varley to the lawyers to be fulfilled. Angela Penna and Superintendent Varley were vague as to what an acceptable number of OPRA requests would be able to be handled by Ms. Kot, and said we would revisit the appointment and $12,000 stipend for Mr. Hopkins when the “nonsense” stopped.

OPRA requests are requests for public documents, and the time limit for providing these documents, in most cases, is seven business days. The Government Records Council states that requests are to be fulfilled “as soon as possible” but no longer than seven days. Exceptions are made for records that are in storage, hard to find, or that are voluminous in both the request and the responsive documents. Stephen Hopkins, in direct contradiction to this, scheduled responses to be emailed out the afternoon of the last possible day, and very often times that response would not be fulfillment of the request, but denial or a notification that an extension of time was being sought. These extensions have been for an absurd amount of time, as you’ll see below.

I spoke at the BOE meeting on November 16, 2023 where the board was to vote on the resignation of Mr. Hopkins, to take effect on December 1st, 2023. I asked Mrs. Penna what the current number of OPRA requests is, so that the public can have actual data as to how many is considered by the district to be too many. The response was “we’ll get back to you”. After waiting a few days with no response, I sent in an OPRA request to the new Business Administrator, Anthony Juskiewicz. The request was for OPRA requests received for the months of August, September and October, as well as anything received to date in November. In hindsight, the request should have gone to Hopkins, as I had sent it November 22nd. I received an informal response from Mr. Juskiewicz on the 28th that he had received the request and would be working on it, so all was good, right?

On Tuesday, December 5th, at 4:54 pm I received an official letter in response to my request. The email came from [email protected] and it was signed by Stephen Hopkins. The letter stated that an extension of 7 weeks and 2 days would be necessary. Uncertain about who was handling my request – at this point Stephen Hopkins’ resignation had officially been in place for five days – I reached out to Mr. Juskiewicz again, on the 6th, asking for clarity. He responded (on the 7th), “I am the custodian of record and Mr. Hopkins is the designee and has been overseeing the OPRA requests in the past. He has the pertinent information and the history of your request and thus his response.” He also stated that the number of requests was 61, and he inquired whether I needed further information. As best I can decipher, I misinterpreted Mr. Juskiewicz’s initial response to mean he would be handling the request, and that what had happened was that he had forwarded the request to Mr. Hopkins, who was still designee at the time.

On December 10th, I sent the following to Mr. Juskiewicz. “Given the past number of requests, I am curious about the number 61, as it is much higher than we have seen previously, even during a time period when requests were more frequent, for varying reasons. It would be helpful to see the actual OPRA requests, as it may be that the manner of counting is the reason for the difference. For instance, if one requests asks for three items (executive session minutes, Finance and Facilities meeting minutes, and Curriculum Committee minutes), is that being counted as three requests, or one? I would much prefer to have you provide the information attached to my request, even if it means waiting for a longer period of time, as I’m sure you have a substantial amount of work to do as the new BA, the holidays are near, and the budget process has likely started.” This is a lot of back-and-forth so far, but I’m honestly not trying to be a giant PITA with our new BA.

On Dember 12th, Mr. Juskiewicz responded that I would be receiving a letter which would extend the time needed to complete my request. Having already received the ridiculous request from Mr. Hopkins for a 7 week and 2 day extension, at this point I denied the request for an extension and asked to have the records sent by the following afternoon, but did not get a reply.  I asked one last time, noting that extensions that lacked a legitimate reason or were unreasonable could be considered a denial, and the requestor could then file a complaint with the Government Records Council (GRC).  This afternoon, after one last-ditch effort at resolving this, I received an email from Stephen Hopkins – who is no longer the Custodian of Records – stating that my request will not be filled in a timely manner.  As it stands, this afternoon’s email claims that there are “at least ten active OPRAs” and that “Roughly speaking, OPRA requests are processed in the order that they are received” – another of Mr. Hopkins’ games.  Mr. Hopkins states that Mr. Juskiewicz is too busy to get to my request.  This creates quite the catch-22.  If we have a greater number of requests than ever, and the new BA can’t fulfill OPRA requests in accordance with the law, one would expect the Board and the Superintendent to be asking to continue Mr. Hopkins’ role, yet they are not.  Either the requests are too many and too burdensome, or they’re not.  Which is it? 

On the agenda for tonight is a resolution to amend the resignation date for Stephen Hopkins’ role as Custodian of Records from December 1st to December 30th. Are they joking here? They can’t be serious, can they? How can you go back in time and undo a resignation ? He resigned. He is not the Custodian of Records. You can’t change that, lol. The “nonsense” here is on the part of our current BOE majority.  And on that note, let’s make a few things crystal clear. 

1. Had someone “gotten back” to me with the number of OPRA requests that allowed us to be accepting Mr. Hopkins’ resignation, the OPRA request would never have been sent.  Surely, as Board President, Mrs. Penna must have had information about the current number of requests she could share, so that there could be an informed vote by our board.

2. If Mr. Hopkins were not playing games such as scheduling responses to go out at the last minute, instead of responding “as soon as possible”, and deliberately mis-counting requests to inflate the perception of the amount of work to be done, one would be more inclined to be lenient about the definition of ‘timely’.  

3. If the board would take steps to be transparent, such as providing committee meeting minutes, it would cut down on the number of requests being sought.

To wrap up, for those that are still reading, getting our new board members in place will be the best holiday gift of all.  Let’s get back to the business of educating rather than deliberately creating confusion and twisting policy to suit whatever inside agenda is at play in our district.

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