OPRAmachine Blog

The New Jersey State Senate Government, Wagering, Tourism & Historic Preservation Commmittee is expected to take action on the OPRA and OPMA reform bills this Thursday, June 14th, 2018. The OPRA reform measure under consideration will, among other things, expand attorney fee awards for prevailing OPRA litigants as well as ensuring that subcommitees of governing bodies are subject to more stringent transparency & disclosure requirements under the law. The OPRAmachine team supports expanding the scope of OPRA as well as attorney fee awards, as we believe both measures hold value in ensuring that OPRA can be an effective oversight tool for state and local government. [Read More]

Thanks to the diligent efforts of OPRAmachine administrator Jeff Epstein, we’ve added numerous additional county governments to our database of government agencies today. The additional county governments added today that are now ready to receive requests via OPRAmachine include: Bergen County Essex County Cumberland County Morris County Warren County Sussex County Salem County Hudson County Click on any of the above links to start a new OPRA request or follow requests and responses from these counties. [Read More]

OPRAmachine is proud to announce that our service is now available as a desktop application starting immediately. Our new desktop application provides the same great functionality our users have come to expect on the main OPRAmachine website, but in a new convenient form factor. Depending on the feedback we receive from the community, we may add additional functionality to this app at a later date, so if you’re serious about managing all of your public records requests with OPRAmachine, our app will be something you won’t want to miss. [Read More]

A problem with OPRA requests directed to Lakewood Township (Ocean County) has been resolved by officials from the township clerk’s office, according to an email received by an OPRAmachine user when they reported the problem to Lakewood.

Requests delivered via OPRAmachine sent to Lakewood inadvertently got caught up in the township’s spam filter, preventing any of the requests from getting a response from the clerk’s office.

Individuals who are not residents of New Jersey can file legally valid OPRA requests, a state appellate court ruled. The court ruling was issued by the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court in an OPRA lawsuit brought by open government activist Harry Scheeler, who formerly lived in Atlantic County before moving out of state. This is good news for our international and out-of-state users of OPRAmachine, who have made use of our platform to obtain public information from New Jersey state and local government agencies. [Read More]

Patrick Duff, an OPRAmachine user recently spoke with us to highlight how he is using our platform to conduct public records research regarding the historical significance of South Jersey properties tied to the late civil rights activist Martin Luther King. He also informed us about how one of his public records requests led to a lawsuit against a city government in state Superior Court. Our conversation centered on the Open Public Records Act (OPRA), transparency & open government issues centered on my work with public records and how the three of us have made use of my OPRAmachine platform. [Read More]

On April 5th, 2018 I had the distinct pleasure of joining Bill Watt, the host of WLFR 91.7 FM’s “Watt’s the Move” to talk about my work with OPRAmachine and open government matters in New Jersey. A video of the segment of the show where we dicussed my work with OPRAmachine and its impact can be viewed here. (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d. [Read More]

Recently, multiple users have brought it to our attention that they have been receiving spam links to viruses or questionable websites in response to their OPRA requests. Today, we have taken action to combat the recent rise in spam that has been impacting our users and cluttering request pages. OPRAmachine has increased our capabilities for dealing with spam, and going forward, spam messages that are flagged by our system will be held back before going out to users and being published to request pages. [Read More]

Today marks four months since OPRAmachine was officially launched and made accessible to the general public. Since then, it has been breaking down barriers for access to public information in New Jersey and helping to educate the public about OPRA. Our October 24th, 2017 the launch came after several months worth of technical preparation and trial & error as we learned to work with the open source Alavetelisoftware that powers our backend server as well as the technical challenges of managing the various components of the web service. [Read More]

Some requests filed by users of OPRAmachine have resulted in litigation against public agencies for their denial of requests. All of these lawsuits have been filed after requests were originally sent out through our platform. Here are some notable cases of interest: Rozzi v. Office of the Attorney General We have encountered heavy resistance from the state attorney general’s office, as the office has refused to provide emailed responses to OPRA requests submitted by our system. [Read More]