OPRAmachine Blog

There will be some planned downtime this weekend as we work to complete scheduled server maintenance and upgrades to the OPRAmachine service. Full service will be restored by Monday. Thank you for your patience as we work to make OPRAmachine even better!

Expect intermittent downtime over the weekend (Saturday June 15th, 2019 through Sunday, June 16th) as we complete maintenance and software upgrades on OPRAmachine systems.

UPDATE: We have completed the updates ahead of schedule and site access has been restored. Please reach out to our support team if you encounter any issues.

We’re asking users to please be careful when filing new OPRA requests so as to avoid sending duplicates of the same request to public agencies on OPRAmachine. Duplicate requests can complicate things for the administration team as well as government agencies. Often, what will happen is that the government agency will respond to the first request but not the second, while the second request will still show up on OPRAmachine as awaiting a response, which then requires our administrators to take action to remove the duplicate request so as to not skew the statistics produced by our site. [Read More]

OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi spoke at the May 30th, 2019 meeting of the Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Rozzi’s remarks were made in response to Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thornton’s May 24th ruling in favor of OPRAmachine and its users. The county attempted to deny all requests submitted via our website after one of their employees failed to redact information, despite our attempts to work with the county and rectify their mistake. [Read More]

PRESS RELEASE FREEHOLD, NJ – Monmouth County Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thorton ruled on Friday that the county broke the law by refusing to process certain public records requests under a new policy enacted last year, rejecting all of the county’s arguments in favor of refusing to respond to public records requests that will be automatically published online. “This ruling makes clear what we knew from the start: Monmouth County’s unlawful attempt at tightening access to public records because of the negligence of their employees was a blatant attack on the public interest and undermined the public policy of transparency enshrined in New Jersey’s OPRA law,” said Gavin Rozzi, an Ocean County web developer & journalist who founded OPRAmachine in 2017. [Read More]

Government agencies can’t deny public records requests because they’re automatically published online, Monmouth County Superior Court Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thornton ruled. Our ongoing dispute with Monmouth County has been resolved in favor of OPRAmachine and our users with the recent ruling from Judge Thornton. Last summer, Monmouth County started refusing public records requests submitted by users of OPRAmachine. They adopted a new policy that stated they will deny any public records requests that are submitted through a service that automatically publishes their response online, demanding that users provide direct personal email addresses instead. [Read More]

Esther Surden of NJ Tech Weekly recently interviewed OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi about the impact of the site in a feature article published in May. Gavin Rozzi was a journalist in Ocean County and finishing up his education at Stockton University when he came up with the idea for OPRAmachine. OPRAmachine is an open-source platform that lets citizens easily file requests for public records to their local governments, and it makes the requests and answers available to the public. [Read More]

OPRAmachine experienced some downtime this week due to some complications with our server infrastructure. We have taken steps to fix the problem and apologize to any users who were unable to access the site.

We will be undertaking additional upgrades in the near future and will keep the community posted.

As a part of OPRAmachine’s 2019 Sunshine Week initiatives and in response to several inquiries from users, we wanted to take a minute to share how we are protecting the privacy of our users. 1. We never publish your email address Your private email address is never revealed to the government or other users when you use OPRAmachine. All a public agency would be able to see is the unique OPRA request email address from the requests. [Read More]

I am writing in response to Jonathan Frodella’s article that appeared in the January 17th, 2019 edition of the New Jersey Law Journal entitled “Victims of Serious Crimes Need More Protection Under OPRA.” Mr. Frodella - whose article was written from the perspective of an attorney that advises municipal clerks - contends that services that automatically publish public records requests and responses such as OPRAmachine, which I founded in 2017, serve to create a “complication” for custodians of records by not requiring individuals to certify whether or not they were convicted of an indictable offense due to the remote possibility of a convicted criminal requesting information about their victims. [Read More]