A primary purpose of the recently-enacted amendments to OPRA is to make OPRA compliance by public bodies more efficient and less costly, thereby saving taxpayers’ money. Various provisions in the new law are aimed at this objective. For example, there are some new exemptions from what is a government record; there’s language that enables custodians to refer requestors to a website for the documents sought; and there are sections permitting the denial of duplicative requests as well as requests for records that are also the subject of discovery in litigation.

But the law also potentially creates a lot of new work for custodians. I’ll delve into these in detail in subsequent posts, but here are a few examples:

-Custodians must ensure they’ve redacted from records “personal identifying information,” which covers several additional types of information, such as credit and debit card numbers, bank account information, month and day of birth, telephone numbers, the street address of a person’s home, and a personal email address.

-Metadata is exempt, except for the “portion that identifies authorship, identity of editor, and time of change,” so custodians will have to take the time to go through metadata to identify this public information.

-OPRA now says that government records “shall be made available to the public on a publicly available website to the extent feasible,” and the custodian must provide the requestor with directions to assist in finding these records on the website.

-There are new requirements for fulfilling requests for a “commercial purpose.” Such requests must be answered within 14 business days, but if a commercial requestor would like to receive the record within 7 business days, the custodian must provide the record, and may charge a special service fee for it.

In addition to creating new work, I anticipate that these and other new provisions in the statute will generate legal disputes as well. I’ll discuss potential legal issues posed by the legislation in future posts.