When New Jersey lawmakers revamped the state Open Public Records Act two years ago, one of the worst provisions they inserted allows public entities to sue people for filing too many records requests.
At the time, critics like myself worried this would lead some public agencies, especially those who think a single records request is a form of harassment, to target citizens seeking legitimate knowledge about the way their government functions.
Sure enough, Cherry Hill’s school district is doing just that. It has sued a city resident, journalist Ben Shore, and wants to ban him from filing records requests with the district for one year because of his “numerous, repeated and vexatious OPRA requests.”
Just how many requests has Shore filed with this Camden County district of 10,000 students?
Fourteen in 12 months.
That’s right, the man Cherry Hill’s school district claims has submitted so many public requests that the district considers it harassment, filed about one a month for a year. And now the district is whining in front of a judge that they’re a victim of harassment by someone they claim has “substantially interrupted” the district’s functions. Cherry Hill’s school district operates on a $256 million budget and has roughly 1,000 employees. It strains credulity to think 14 OPRA requests could have any substantial impact on a well-functioning district of this size.
Shore runs Shore Investigates, a new local news site that focuses on Cherry Hill. Shore told me he has had zero problems filing public requests with Cherry Hill’s municipal government. But the school district is obviously a different story.
“This is an agency that is doing everything they can to not comply with the public records statute,” said Shore, who is 25.
The files Shore has sought are indisputably in the public interest. He has asked for videos of board meetings, legal bills, invoices, other records requests. He has also filed four lawsuits when the district has denied his requests, lawsuits that surely ate up some of the district’s time but probably wouldn’t have if they’d simply provided what he asked for (he lost two and partially won the fourth).
CJ Griffin, a transparency advocate who has represented the New Jersey Monitor in our own public records disputes, is representing Shore in his latest legal battle with Cherry Hill schools. Griffin said that, like me, she worried when lawmakers revamped OPRA about the provision that paved the way for lawsuits against frequent requestors.
“We screamed at the top of our lungs that agencies would unfairly target requestors, and here we are with someone being sued because they filed a whopping 14 requests in a year!” she said.
Griffin this week filed a motion in Shore’s case asking the judge to dismiss it on the grounds that Cherry Hill’s complaint is a classic SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation — meaning a lawsuit designed to punish individuals for protected First Amendment activity.
“Prohibiting someone from exercising their right to file records requests, as well as to access the courts, is an extreme remedy. The Legislature intentionally set a very high bar to obtain such a protective order: when OPRA has truly been abused and there is clear and convincing evidence that the person filing the requests has done to with ill intent, solely to disrupt the agency and not for any legitimate purpose. That is not the case here, where Plaintiff targets a news entity with legitimate reasons for its requests,” Griffin’s brief reads.
Cherry Hill’s lawsuit against Shore also seeks to ban his brother, Daniel, from filing public records requests, too. It appears as though Daniel Shore’s crime is filing a single — yes, one — OPRA request with the district.
Griffin notes that when our last governor, Phil Murphy, signed the OPRA overhaul into law, he noted that the state’s new anti-SLAPP law would help records requestors fight public entities that drag them into court.
“Thankfully we do have a very strong anti-SLAPP law to help people who are targeted fight back, but the stress of being hauled into court simply because you dared to request some public records from your school system is something no one should have to go through,” Griffin said.
Cherry Hill schools is not only going after Shore for his own OPRA requests. They want a judge to shut down a website he created that allows other citizens to file records requests easier than they can on the school district’s website. The district’s claim is that Shore’s website confuses requestors — it cites a single person who requested police documents through the website — and exposes the district to legal liability if a request made through the site doesn’t get to the district in time. Suddenly, the district cares about responding to records requests in a timely manner.
This all comes as the Cherry Hill school district faces a $14.5 million budget deficit that has it eyeing layoffs, programming cuts, and a school tax increase. The average taxpayer in Cherry Hill could see their bill go up by $420 annually just to cover the shortfall, per the district’s business administrator, Jason Schimpf. The district could save a few bucks by halting its ludicrous legal fight against Ben Shore and his push for transparency.
Erin Harrison, Cherry Hill’s attorney, declined to comment.
“We respectfully decline to litigate in the press; we’ll state our positions through the legal process,” Harrison said.
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