New Jersey’s 22-year-old Open Public Records Act, OPRA, is an important public policy that has problems. Many of them are related to age, which has exposed difficulties in dealing with new technologies, the commercial demand for data, administrative complexity, costs, privacy concerns, and loopholes.
It is widely acknowledged that OPRA needs fixing. Recent legislative hearings highlighted that. But debates about changes often involve accusations between parties, making productive discussion impossible. Reforms attempted in private by a few groups fail because they do not consider different viewpoints or unintended impacts. This causes more public distrust in government.
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