New Jersey’s public records law is a ‘sword and shield’ against corruption, citizens say

Stewart Resmer, a retired Hollywood stunt coordinator and limo driver from California, seems like an unlikely transparency crusader.

But Resmer, who now lives in Wayne, has long kept a close eye on his elected officials, and he’s quick to request records under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act when he suspects they’re hiding something.

Resmer said OPRA serves as the “sword and shield of a functional and healthy democracy and indicator of clean governance.

“We’re at a critical mass right now where so many people are apathetic, unreliable voters, and government just does what they please. This is the only tool we have to fight that,” he said.

Far from a tool utilized just by journalists or lawyers, the Open Public Records Act has been used by regular citizens for all sorts of reasons, and the information they have gotten pursuant to the law has led to corruption probes, criminal charges, and even changes in state law.

Yet several bills now in the legislative pipeline in Trenton would weaken OPRA, with proposals to let government officials cap the number and “scope” of requests people can make, bar people who are denied records from appealing to a judge right away, take more time to respond to requests, redact phone numbers, email addresses, and social media information from records, and exempt volunteer fire companies from OPRA.

This comes as policymakers in recent years have chipped away at the Open Public Records Act and access to public records, and resisted efforts to open more government documents up for public inspection.

The new proposed changes send up red flags for people like Resmer and Anne Mabry, a retired professor whose OPRA requests helped expose financial mismanagement at New Jersey City University and led to a new state law expanding oversight of university finances.

“You cannot be a detective if you don’t have tools to gather evidence, and OPRA is your tool if you’re an ordinary citizen. I can’t imagine this tool being watered down,” Mabry said. “Transparency is the bulwark of democracy. If an ordinary citizen cannot get evidence against someone they know is acting above the law, then we don’t have a democracy anymore.”

Uncovering secrets pols want hidden

Public officials’ lack of transparency has prompted many regular folks to become experts at digging up public records.

Jesse Wolosky, a semi-retired investor from Sparta, filed his first Open Public Records Act request in 2007, after municipal officials decided to start township-wide garbage collection that neither Wolosky nor many of his neighbors wanted.

He sought records to learn details not divulged in public meetings, and his investigation led to surprising revelations (like one trash hauler paying another $60,000 not to compete for the contract), petitions against the plan, a recall effort to oust the council members pushing for garbage collection, and eventually, a voter referendum.

Wolosky lost that fight, with most voters supporting garbage collection. But that introduction to OPRA turned into a years-long crusade, with Wolosky taking on all sorts of fights to shine a light on the shady deals and doings of public officials even far outside his hometown.

His records requests have often landed in court when public officials claim they aren’t required to hand over the documents he wants.

“I have filed, I don’t know, maybe 100 lawsuits — I don’t count them anymore,” Wolosky said.

In Irvington, retired schoolteacher Elouise McDaniel said frustration fueled her OPRA activism, too.

“It was hard to get information. They wouldn’t allow us to ask questions and speak in council meetings,” she said.

OPRA became her go-to tool to find answers to questions Irvington officials dodged in public meetings, including things like the membership and activities of the township’s rent-leveling board and the cost of ads on street sweepers and street signs that pictured the mayor.

“I wrote an OPRA request for the invoice and asked how much did that cost the town — and it cost the town I think more than $7,000,” she said. “And this is a poor town!”

Weary of the scrutiny, Irvington officials sued McDaniel, then 82, in September 2021, accusing her of harassment and malicious abuse of process for filing more than 75 OPRA requests over three years, many of which they deemed “frivolous.” The lawsuit made national headlines before Irvington officials dropped it in April 2022.

McDaniel viewed that lawsuit — as well as ongoing efforts to erode the Open Public Records Act — as a way for public officials to “silence people from speaking out about things that are questionable.”

“How else are we going to get information when we can’t get it from municipalities’ leaders?” she said.

Resmer is similarly motivated.

He pointed to the vague agenda for the Wayne Township Council’s January reorganization meeting that gave the public no inkling that council members would consider a proposed ordinance to make the mayor’s job full-time — with a 647% raise and full benefits. He learned through an OPRA request that the township hadn’t publicly posted the position. Public backlash prompted Mayor Christopher Vergano to pull the proposed ordinance.

Last year, Resmer grew concerned when he read about a state comptroller’s investigation into a controversial 2021 police training conference in Atlantic City that featured conservative speakers, including one who told police in attendance: “Be the calmest person in the room, but have a plan to kill everyone.”

He filed an OPRA request to see if Wayne police had gone and discovered his township paid the company that organized the conference more than $17,600 for training.

“What is that old saying? ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’ That’s just the way I am — when I hear something that doesn’t match up, I got to see for myself what’s going on,” Resmer said.

Behind closed doors

Mabry, who taught at New Jersey City University for more than 30 years, said administrators’ lack of transparency over the school’s worsening debt drove her and a half dozen other faculty members to file OPRA requests several years ago to figure out its cause.

At first, she was so unfamiliar with the law that she Googled to learn the best template and wording that would ensure useful responses. She eventually filed more than two dozen records requests.

“Once we all got the hang of it, it kind of became my job to start filing them. The interesting ones were almost all of them,” she said with a laugh. “It was like: ‘If I turn over this rock, what am I going to find? If I turn over this rock, what am I going to find?’ It seemed like there was limitless lodestones of information.”

The OPRA requests revealed the costs of former school president Sue Henderson’s global travels, administrators’ questionable charges on school credit cards, no-bid contracts the faculty found concerning, and exorbitant real estate spending, among other things.

Mabry and her colleagues shared their findings with the governor’s office, state comptroller, and other officials in 2021.

Last May, the comptroller issued a report slamming school officials for illicitly budgeting nearly $14 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to fix a financial crisis, and when that backfired, allowing the school’s president to resign with a $288,000 severance payment, a car, and a housing subsidy. The report noted that Henderson and other administrators hid their mismanagement from the board of trustees, who declared a financial emergency that led to layoffs and other deep cuts.

Mabry’s ESL program was among those targeted to be cut, and she got a layoff notice. The school later backpedaled and reinstated Mabry and her program, but Mabry decided to retire.

“I was just so done,” she said.

Information everyday people have discovered through OPRA can lead to seismic changes.

Wolosky’s battles in Sparta made enough headlines that he began to hear from people seeking advice on how to challenge officials in their towns.

About five years ago, he filed records requests in Palisades Park after residents told him of their suspicions of fiscal improprieties. His findings prompted the state comptroller to investigate, with that watchdog denouncing a “startling” failure by borough officials to protect public money.

Wolosky also has used OPRA to challenge everything from tax assessments to police tickets for tinted car windows.

Policymakers’ efforts to weaken the Open Public Records Act only steel his resolve to file more records requests, he said.

“Whoever wants to take away transparency, there’s like an alternative motive that they have,” Wolosky said. “Why would you want to be less transparent? Because you have something that you are hiding that you don’t want to be discovered! OPRA is to discover what’s going on behind closed doors.”