This article reports that the Clifton Board of Education spent around $7000 over 2 months for 47 hours of work by a law firm on OPRA requests. This is a reminder of a problem that’s rarely discussed–it’s expensive for public bodies to comply with OPRA.

The article says that the law firm billed the Board for tasks such as analyzing OPRA requests and reviewing and redacting documents. Public bodies clearly need such legal services. As this blog has shown, so many OPRA requests raise difficult legal issues or present the risk of litigation. If anything, the amount of legal work cited here, approximately 23 hours per month, seems low. Larger public entities undoubtedly generate much more OPRA legal work on a daily basis.

Charges for legal services are just one of the costs of OPRA compliance. There are many other significant expenses that must be borne by the public body. Many agencies employ one or more individuals to serve exclusively as records custodians. OPRA litigation costs can be substantial, particularly where the public body must also pay the requestor’s attorney fees. And there is a major cost, in terms of the efficient provision of government services, when public employees must put aside their normal job duties while they spend time locating and reviewing records that may be responsive to an OPRA request.

This report by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection illustrates how expensive OPRA can be for large agencies. The report shows that, due to the large volume of requests, DEP has a separate office, with a 12-member staff, dedicated to OPRA requests. The report also says that DEP’s yearly costs of processing OPRA requests have been around $3 million.