The Democratic-controlled State Legislature—after a slight pause and huge outcry—is determined to undermine what transparency remains in our state and local governments by pushing through two bills (S2930 and A4045) that will make it much harder to obtain records under the Open Public Records Act ("OPRA"). We strongly urge Gov. Phil Murphy to conditionally veto all of the amendments we describe below or veto the bill altogether.

The bill creates a slew of procedural hurdles, while gutting the law in at least four important ways:

• It limits mandatory fee-shifting, thus making it financially risky for attorneys to take on important, meritorious appeals from OPRA denials.
• It allows government agencies to sue requestors for seeking records who have "the intent to substantially impair the performance of government function," an undefined standard that could easily be weaponized to retaliate against requestors and chill legitimate requests.
• It shifts the burden onto the requestor to prove a fee from an agency for fulfilling an OPRA request is unreasonable; without discovery and fee shifting it will be difficult to challenge any fee.
• The bill prohibits requestors from sending the same request to multiple agencies and allows agencies to deny a request for this reason.

There are innumerable issues of public concern that we wouldn't know about without OPRA—Bridgegate, the failure of various state agencies to prepare for disasters like Superstorm Sandy, and the numerous stories involving police brutality, discrimination settlements, secret raises, scandals in government programs, abuses or negligence by agencies, violations of the Open Public Meetings Act, or hiring and payments to vendors.