One of the issues with these subsidies is the lack of accountability, Pfeiffer said. A 2019 report stated that CRDA failed to monitor the actual cost and economic impact of the Miss America Competition when it negotiated the second contract with the organization in 2016, according to an audit of the agency.
New Jersey Assembly leaders pumped the brakes on the steamroller seeking to amend the state’s Open Public Records Act, acknowledging the widespread opposition to a host of changes that would make it more difficult for the public to gain access to public documents.
The bill (A-4045) was to have gotten a final committee hearing on Thursday but was pulled from the Assembly Appropriations Committee’s agenda less than an hour before the meeting was scheduled to start.
A few minutes later, Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex) tweeted a statement that there was not enough time to draft amendments and “have further meetings with members of the public” prior to the meeting.
“We will take the time needed to meet with various stakeholders to modernize OPRA in a way that protects the public from having their personal information, drivers’ license numbers, and other sensitive information available for anyone to see,” he tweeted. “We are working on various amendments to ensure we get the bill right.”
The new legislation would provide for the redaction of personal information from documents, but it would also go much further in making it more difficult for individuals to get public records in the first place.
Urging lawmakers to take a step back
Marc Pfeiffer was the first director of the Government Records Council, which hears certain appeals of record denials. He sent a letter to lawmakers urging them to step back, take more time and get more input before changing the law. “To do this right, you need to gather some real data, you need to talk to a lot of people and give lots of people an opportunity to be heard,” said Pfeiffer, associate director of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
“Consider alternatives,” he said in an interview. “Run them by all those people to see in the real world how they will work and if they are workable. Understand the costs of change. And then proceed … [The Office of Legislative Services] doesn’t have the resources to do all of that in a short period of time.”
Why the rush?
No one has yet explained what the rush is; most bills move more slowly through the Legislature, with ones that involve spending money typically getting at least two committee hearings in each house over the course of several months or more before final consideration.
Referring to Sarlo’s statement, Pfeiffer said moving too fast would be harmful.
“I would suggest there’s no pressing reason to rush anything through in a few months,” Pfeiffer told NJ Spotlight News. “The attention that’s been placed on this has given the Legislature and the governor the opportunity to really rethink how we manage public records in the state of New Jersey in an era of increasing public expectations, of access to information, declining trust in government, increasing technology that provides lots of opportunities as well as challenges. Those are all reasons why you need to do this right and take some time.”
Sarlo didn’t even bother to consult Marc Pfeiffer of the Rutgers-Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, who ran the GRC when the law was enacted in 2002. Pfeiffer’s take is blunt: “Bludgeons create a mess, and rapiers are surgical. This bill uses a bludgeon to try to deal with outliers that exist within OPRA.”
Sarlo didn’t even bother to consult Marc Pfeiffer of the Rutgers-Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, who ran the GRC when the law was enacted in 2002. Pfeiffer’s take is blunt: “Bludgeons create a mess, and rapiers are surgical. This bill uses a bludgeon to try to deal with outliers that exist within OPRA.”
Marc Pfeiffer, a senior fellow at the Bloustein Local Government Research Center at Rutgers University who helped draft the current law in the early 2000s, said reform was “long overdue” but that the bill as written doesn’t solve many of OPRA’s shortcomings.
The lawsuits and failure to pay debts “has the effect of buying them time, which gives them the opportunity to renegotiate things” more in the mall owners’ favor, said Marc Pfeiffer, assistant director at Rutgers University’s Bloustein local government research center.
Altogether, the state’s tax break programs are a confusing jumble piled on top of each other, said Marc Pfeiffer, “it’s getting confusing,” he said.
The issue is the old one of how society balances individual privacy with a valid public interest when public officials or employees are involved,” said Marc Pfeiffer.
Marc Pfeiffer, the assistant director of Bloustein Local, along with the New Jersey Association of Counties (NJAC), presented ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ITS IMPACT ON LOCAL GOVERNMENTS as the first in a series of free virtual workshops NJAC will host in 2024 on a variety of topics that impact county governments across the State.
During a news conference Tuesday afternoon, several members of the workgroup offered their takes on the likelihood of there being enough revenue available by then to launch an altogether new relief program in the current economic environment. “Right now, it’s a wait-and-see,” said Marc Pfeiffer, who’s also the assistant director of Rutgers University’s Bloustein Local Government Research Center.
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