Pashman Stein Walder Hayden P.C. recently secured a victory in Matt Mills v. Township of Monroe, a case that challenged the sufficiency of a public agency’s search for emails responsive to an OPRA request.
In this case, Mr. Mills requested emails sent to or from various township employees and officials relating to the township’s EMS services. After the township responded to the request and produced emails, Mr. Mills noticed that not everything was produced. After he followed up, the township produced more emails, but Mr. Mills was still aware of other emails that were not ...
Last year, in Paff v. Township of Galloway, 444 N.J. Super. 495 (App. Div. 2016), the Appellate Division issued a rather shocking decision —in essence, the court held that even though OPRA includes electronically stored information is in the definition of “government records,” an agency has no obligation to extract that data because it would be “creating a new record.”
Mr. Paff’s request involved a log of emails that included the “to,” “from,” “subject,” and “date.” The agency admitted that it could print the log and it would take only two to three ...
