New Jersey residents can obtain logs of government-related emails from elected officials’ private accounts under the Open Public Records Act, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday.
The decision closes the legal saga over a records request filed in early 2023 that, among other things, sought the email logs of current and past school board members overseeing the Ramapo-Indian Hills Regional High School.
“Emails related to government business, whether stored on government or private servers, are within OPRA’s reach, so using a private email account will not shield those government records from production under OPRA,” Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis wrote for a unanimous court.
The ruling includes a soft admonition for public officials who use their private email addresses for government business.
“The issues in this case could have been avoided altogether if Board members did not use their private email accounts to conduct Board business and instead used only their government-issued email accounts, as intended,” the court said. “Government agencies should strongly advise their employees, elected officials, and others engaged in government-related business to refrain from using their personal email accounts when conducting government-related business.”
Donald Doherty, who represented plaintiff Alex Rosetti, said the ruling left him conflicted despite his side’s victory.
“Obviously, it is a very good day when the Supreme Court so clearly reaffirms the principles of open government. On the other hand, it leaves me deeply troubled that the case had to go this far. Government candor and honesty have all too often been cast aside for either corruption or expediency on every level,” he said in a statement.
Five years ago, a local government would not have pushed this case to the Supreme Court, Doherty said. New Jersey in 2024 overhauled its public records law in ways that made it more difficult for records requesters to sue agencies that withhold public records.
Among other things, the changes removed provisions that required requesters who successfully sued for records to automatically receive attorney fees from the losing government, neutering the law’s main enforcement mechanism.
Rosetti in January 2023 filed a request with the Bergen County school district seeking email logs from all addresses board members used to discuss school matters.
Email logs show certain metadata about individual emails, like the sender, recipient, date, and subject line. They typically do not include an email’s body text.
After a lawsuit, the school district turned over logs from board members’ government accounts but withheld those from their personal accounts despite the disclosed logs showing those same accounts appeared on certain email chains.
Though the board agreed emails discussing government business were public records, regardless of the account they were sent from, it argued email logs from personal accounts are not subject to the Open Public Records Act.
A trial court judge agreed, reasoning that the board, as an entity, did not have legal authority or access to personal email accounts required to generate logs. Requiring them to generate logs from personal email accounts would unduly burden the board, that judge said.
An appeals court overturned that ruling, relying on precedent that found records created by government officials are still government records even if the government is not the one that holds them.
CJ Griffin, who represented two groups — the New Jersey branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and Libertarians for Transparent Government — that argued in favor of releasing the logs, celebrated the ruling. Griffin has represented the New Jersey Monitor in numerous legal cases.
“This decision sends a strong message to public agencies from a unanimous Supreme Court: government employees and elected officials must not use personal email accounts to conduct government business. If they do, those emails (and logs of emails) will still be subject to public access under OPRA,” Griffin said in a text message. “There is no evading OPRA’s promise of transparency.”
Local officials and the New Jersey League of Municipalities sided with the school district, arguing that logs from personal email accounts would disclose a variety of metadata that ought to be shielded by the law.
Rosetti argued that exempting logs from personal email accounts would effectively allow board members to shield emails from disclosure because it was “nigh-impossible” to request specific emails without first obtaining a log.
And rather than producing a log from the personal email accounts, officials could search their official accounts for personal addresses, Rosetti told the court.
The 2024 changes to the Open Public Records Act significantly raised the bar to obtain government officials’ emails, instituting a test rejected by courts under prior law that requires requesters to specify names, subject matter, and a specific time period to obtain communications like text messages or emails.
Despite its ruling, the Supreme Court said Rosetti’s request and the Appellate Division’s holding were overbroad because they sought a log from officials’ personal accounts, rather than a log of their government-related emails.
“We do not find that logs of entire private email accounts are government records by virtue of the fact that government-related emails might be present in those accounts,” the court said.
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