EMERGENT APPEAL TO DECIDE IF ORANGE SCHOOL BOARD QUESTION GOES TO VOTERS

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

With less than two weeks until voters go to the polls on Nov. 7, whether City of Orange voters will get to choose an elected school board as opposed to an appointed one is once again in the hands of the courts.

Last November, voters in a public referendum overwhelmingly favored being able to choose their own school board members rather than having them picked by the Mayor, which is the current system. But a state court judge set aside the result, finding they were not provided with sufficient information to understand the ramifications of the change.

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NEWARK PLANNER WINS GENIUS GRANT

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

Photo by John D. & Catherine T.  MacArthur Foundation/CC BY

PLANewark salutes the selection of Damon Rich, as one of 24 MacArthur Foundation fellows for 2017. Rich is a designer and planner who shares the PLANewark vision of building a vibrant and reinvigorated Newark through equitable and sustainable environment and land-use practices.

He and the other honorees will each receive a $625,000 “genius” grant, bestowed annually on creative people, working in any field, who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Rich was chosen for “creating vivid and witty strategies to design and build places that are more democratic and accountable to their residents.”

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STRIKE SAID TO TEST FUTURE OF UNIONS

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

When 40,000 Verizon workers—including about 4,600 in New Jersey—went on strike last year, I read a lot of news stories about it and on my trips to New York City, I saw people walking the picket line. The strike ended after almost two months, with both sides claiming victory and it appeared the workers had come out ahead—winning pension increases, ratification bonuses, new call center jobs and other concessions.

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GETTING A SWAMP MALL INSTEAD OF A COMMUTER TUNNEL

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

Many New Jersey commuters are experiencing a “summer of hell” marked by cancelled and delayed train service due to the deteriorating rail link to New York City. They might want to know why the state has not been able to get its act together to build a badly needed new train tunnel, even while it has been pushing relentlessly to build a mall in the Meadowlands.

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RESOUNDING WIN FOR GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

A unanimous decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court has overturned a lower court holding that would have allowed the government to deny access to vast swathes of information kept on its computers. Click here to read the decision.

The lower court had interpreted the state Open Public Records Act, aka OPRA, as mandating public access only to discrete records and not to information per se.

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FIRST GORSUCH OPINION OPENS DOOR TO DEBT COLLECTION ABUSES

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the newest addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, recently authored his first opinion and it is one likely to have negative repercussions for large numbers of people who find themselves unable to pay their bills.

Henson v. Santander Consumer USA, decided on June 12, concerns the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act or FDCPA, a federal law that is meant to protect against abusive, unfair, and deceptive practices in the collection of consumer debt– debt incurred primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.

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COURT NIXES RULE LIMITING UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

A two-year-old rule that makes it harder to collect unemployment benefits in New Jersey has been struck down in court.

On May 1, a three-judge Appellate Division panel invalidated N.J.A.C. 12:17-2.1 as arbitrary and capricious, finding it illogical and confusing and calling it a “linguistic morass, one that cannot be readily or sensibly understood and applied.”

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NEW HOPE FOR anti-SLAPP BILL

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

The New Jersey Assembly has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would protect people who speak out on public issues from baseless lawsuits meant to intimidate them into silence.

The legislation, A-603, targets SLAPP suits, the shorthand for what are known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

SLAPP suits, which often occur in the context of opposition to real estate development projects, pitting people from the community against a wealthy corporation, are meant to deter opposition because of the high cost of defending them, even if they are eventually thrown out for lack merit or withdrawn once the developer or other SLAPP plaintiff has succeeded in quelling critics.

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CHIPPING AWAY AT OPRA

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

A bill moving through the New Jersey Legislature threatens to undermine the Open Public Records Act, known as OPRA.

OPRA’s defining characteristic and its great strength are its presumption of public access to all government records and the information they contain, except for 24 expressly exempted categories, and the ability to recover legal fees when access is wrongfully denied. The exemptions encompass such areas as personnel records; advisory, consultative or deliberative material; criminal investigation and victims’ records; trade secrets; security measures and procedures whose disclosure would jeopardize safety; and records subject to attorney -client privilege. A specific “Personal Identifying Information” exemption already exists for four kinds of crucial identifiers: Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, drivers’ license numbers and unlisted phone numbers.

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NJ JUSTICES TO DECIDE MAJOR OPEN RECORDS CASE

Posted on by Mary Pat Gallagher

What is probably the most significant case in years affecting public access to government records and information was argued before the New Jersey Supreme Court on Feb. 28.

Unless the lower court decision Paff v. Galloway is reversed, members of the public will have diminished access under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA) to the vast quantities of information stored electronically in government computers.

The case is viewed as so critical to the public right of access to electronic data that it has drawn the participation of an international data rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), whose mission is defending civil liberties in the digital realm.

Paff--Twitter

At issue is an OPRA request for all emails sent during a two week period in June 2013 by the Township Clerk and Chief of Police of Galloway Township in Atlantic County. The requestor, John Paff, a longtime advocate for government transparency, did not seek the emails in their entirety but only a log or list of the sender, recipient, date, and subject for each of them.

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