Watch: Congress Candidate Joe Cohn Opposes Bill to Undermine OPRA
Joe is proud to stand with a broad coalition of groups that urged New Jersey’s elected official to vote No on S2930/A4045 and the amendments to it.
On May 9, 2024, Congressional candidate Joe Cohn testified against S-2930, the controversial bill that would overhaul and undermine the NJ Open Public Records Act.
Watch here on YouTube.
On May 10, 2024, candidate Joe Cohn submitted written testimony against S2930/A4045. Full letter below.
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Re: Opposition to S2930/A4045 and their amendments
Dear Chairperson Swain and distinguished members of the Appropriations Committee,
I am writing to express my opposition to A4045. Yesterday, I testified in person against its Senate companion S2930, but I unfortunately had a schedule conflict that prevents me from testifying in person in the Assembly.
Democracies depend on transparency which helps keep citizens informed and the government accountable. Transparency is only possible when the public has meaningful access to public records. I oppose S2930/A4045 and the amendments to those bills because they undermine the public’s ability to effectively access public records.
I’m a civil rights lawyer who has served as the legal director of two ACLU affiliates (NV, and UT) and dedicated the last 12 years of his career to advocating for First Amendment rights through my service to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) where I was its the Legislative and Policy Director until I left the position in December to run for Congress in New Jersey’s Third Congressional District.
A key theme of my congressional campaign is that American democracy is under threat. Across the United States there are bills and ordinances that would restrict voting rights, jeopardize freedoms of the press, restrict what can be taught in college classrooms, take books off the shelves of public libraries and Republicans are on the verge of nominating a man who refused to leave office when he lost his reelection bid. But if we are to have credibility in raising the alarm bells to those threats to our democracy, we must be consistent about opposing policies and practices that undermine democratic values at home.
That’s why I am honored to join a broad coalition of groups like ACLU of New Jersey, New Jersey Citizen Action, the Working Families Party of New Jersey, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, The League of Women Voters of New Jersey, New Jersey Appleseed, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, Garden State Equality, the New Jersey Policy Perspective, the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, and countless other organizations, citizens, and activists in urging you to vote no on A4045 and the amendments to it.
Key problems with the amended version of the bill include:
• It makes fee awards for citizens who win lawsuits against government entities that improperly denied public record requests optional, unless the citizen can prove the denial was in bad faith. First, unless there is a right to collect attorney’s fees upon winning a case, few attorneys will be willing to take on the cases. Second, by allowing the fees when the plaintiff can prove “bad faith,” every lawsuit will now have to go to discovery so a record can be developed to determine whether the denial meets the standard. This dramatically increases the cost of OPRA litigation.
• The bill also sets a cap on attorney’s fees which is unnecessary since courts already have the tools to restrict attorney’s fees to amounts that are “reasonable.” This cap will encourage government actors to appeal cases, especially when the requester is a low-income citizen.
• Shockingly, Section 8, allows the government to sue citizens for harassing them with public records requests. This provision will chill many people with legitimate requests from being willing to make requests. Unlike the government, every day citizens are not prepared to defend against lawsuits.
• The amendments also require such specific detail regarding what is being requested and from whom which will predictably result in many legitimate requests being denied. After all, who can be expected to know the names of particular custodians of records or what their official title is?
• The bill also precludes people from requesting the same records from more than one government agency at a time.
None of those provisions enhance our democracy and all of them place heavy burdens on transparency.
A more fruitful path forward would be to:
• Invest in digitizing public records so they can be filtered, collected, and provided more efficiently;
• Place more records on publicly accessible, searchable databases online; and
• Provide grants to municipalities to increase the staff dedicated to collecting and providing records.
Accordingly, I urge you to vote no on A4045 and its amendments. Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully,
Joe Cohn
Candidate, NJ-CD3
