Gov. Murphy’s choice on public records bill: Mimic Michigan Dems, or the Louisiana GOP

Gov. Murphy will soon be faced with a big choice: let the Legislature gut out public records law, or to side with the public’s right to access. (Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)

As the Legislature considers a newly revised bill that would revamp our state’s public records law, the choice for Gov. Phil Murphy and the Democrats who rule Trenton is clear: They can emulate Democrats in Michigan, or Republicans in Louisiana.

In Michigan, Democrats are moving toward expanding their public records law by finally extending it to the Legislature and governor’s office, a move the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is expected to support.

Down in Louisiana, Republicans are heading in the opposite direction with a bill that would shield most government records from public view. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is supportive, saying public records have been “weaponized.” 

This may be news to New Jersey voters who continue to give our state’s Democratic leaders control of the Statehouse, but our overlords in Trenton sound more like the conservative Republicans who control Louisiana than the progressive Dems who have pledged to take Michigan in a better direction.

I’ve written numerous times about this attempt to water down the state Open Public Records Act because it may be the most important bill in Trenton right now. Not just because the bill would impair journalists from doing their jobs — though that’s true — but because it would all but eliminate one of the most useful tools our citizens have to learn what their government leaders are doing when they think no one is watching.

The bill has been amended a few times in ways its supporters believe make it a good compromise. It is not. If enacted, it would give towns more opportunities to shield records from the public, punish people who regularly request documents to learn more about their government, and give people with money the chance to get their records faster. And those are just three of the most odious provisions.

Here’s one more: The bill says if a judge finds that a requestor has tried to “substantially interrupt” a public entity’s performance — whatever that means — the judge can bar that person from filing more records requests. I call this the Elouise McDaniel provision, after the senior citizen Irvington hauled to court because she had the temerity to file many records requests.

It’s no secret why legislative leaders — the bill’s sponsors include Sen. Paul Sarlo and Assemblyman Joe Danielsen — want to feed the current version of the Open Public Records Act into a shredder. The law has been used to uncover all sorts of malfeasance by them and their pals.

In Danielsen’s case, the IT company he owns has been at the handful of records disputes, including one from a decade ago when the Government Records Council fined Franklin Township’s fire commissioner and his fire district $17,500 total for “willfully and knowingly” violating the law when it refused to fork over spending documents related to the district’s work with Danielsen’s company.

The Government Records Council’s website indicates a requestor in one of those fights had a bunch of disputes go before the agency over the years (he was on the winning side of a lot of them). I’ve no doubt Danielsen and his friends in Somerset County would have loved to have a judge put the guy on a no-more-OPRAs watchlist if they could.

A Senate committee passed the bill Thursday and an Assembly hearing is scheduled to hear it Friday, which makes critics fear the law’s goose is cooked as far as it comes to the Legislature, which could pass it as early as Monday. That leaves transparency advocates with Murphy’s veto pen as potentially their only hope.

Alas, when Nancy Solomon asked Murphy about the bill Wednesday, he echoed the sponsors’ misleading claims that they seek to modernize the Open Public Records Act, the kind of flimflammery I now expect from a group that last year passed a bill that let them skate on hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged campaign finance violations and called it the Elections Transparency Act.

Still, Murphy has some time to figure out which path he wants New Jersey to follow: The one led by Michigan Democrats who seek to expand their citizens’ access to government records, or the one led by Louisiana Republicans, who want to cloak their actions in secrecy.

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