We close Sunshine Week by featuring Jennifer A. Borg, Esq.
Ms. Borg is General Counsel and Vice President of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of The Record. She is a recognized authority in First Amendment and open governance matters, particularly as they affect newspapers, and has recently served as Chair of the New Jersey Press Association. She also has litigated numerous OPRA lawsuits with successful results. Ms. Borg was featured in the ABA Journal (July 2014) for her expertise in OPRA and public records access issues. Pashman Stein regularly serves as co-counsel with North ...
Today’s Sunshine Week profile features Rich Rivera, a police practices expert who uses OPRA to monitor police misconduct and the use of force by police officers on citizens. Mr. Rivera is the Chairman of the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey’s Civil Rights Protection Project, which addresses the community’s needs relating to police services and police interactions. He is a former Board Member of the ACLU of New Jersey, where he co-authored the report “The Crisis Inside Police Internal Affairs.” Pashman Stein has litigated several cases on Mr. Rivera’s behalf.
Today’s Sunshine Week profile focuses on Pat Gilleran, a client for whom Pashman Stein has litigated many OPRA matters. Pat is an open government and animal rights activist. Pat’s litigation has been instrumental in forcing non-profit business improvement districts to comply with OPRA’s provisions. Presently, Pashman Stein is defending an appeal on Pat’s behalf relating to video footage from a surveillance camera outside the Bloomfield Municipal Building. While the trial court ruled in Pat’s favor and held that the footage was subject to OPRA, Bloomfield has refused ...
Continuing with our Sunshine Week theme, today’s blog focuses on Harry Scheeler. Recently, CJ Griffin of Pashman Stein secured a victory on Mr. Scheeler’s behalf against the Office of the Governor, which had denied access to RSVP lists for those attending Governor Christie’s Town Halls.
Interview with Harry Scheeler:
- When and how did you initially become interested in the open government movement?
I first became interested in open government as a teenager. In the early 1990s the police department in my hometown was given cell phones for the purpose of calling judges for ...
It’s Sunshine Week– a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. This week on the blog we will feature some of Pashman Stein’s clients who are open government activists or journalists and highlight some proposed changes to the New Jersey Open Public Records Act (OPRA) that are currently pending in the Legislature.
Today we feature Collene Wronko, an open government and animal rights activist from Middlesex County. Ms. Wronko and her husband, Steve, have led a group of dedicated activists who have used OPRA to ...
News broke this week that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used her personal email account to conduct government business while she was Secretary of State. Unfortunately, this practice occurs quite frequently at the local levels of government and it has the potential to undermine government transparency, as it allows public officials to conduct public business behind closed doors. New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (“OPRA”) is broad enough, however, to require such emails to be produced.
OPRA defines a “government record” as any document (including ...
