may 4,2018
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, A municipal judge in Hackensack dismissed the latest complaint by Ridgewood Councilman Jeffrey Voigt against one of his constituents on Thursday. Voigt alleged that resident Anne Loving violated a September agreement between herself and Voigt when she filed anonymous OPRA requests for his emails. That agreement was set after the two traded harassment complaints late last year.
Judge Anthony Gallina said that without the opinion of a handwriting expert, there was no probable cause to find that Loving had penned the anonymous Open Public Records Act requests, and found that OPRA requests did not constitute harassment, as they lacked any “offensively course language,” or were “otherwise made to cause alarm.”
In 2017, Loving, her husband and another resident filed separate complaints accusing Voigt of harassment after he posted copies of their requests for Voigt’s council emails on social media, thus revealing “personal information” such as their phone numbers and addresses online.
Voigt counter-charged that the residents had filed the deluge of OPRA requests simply to harass him.
At that time Prosecutor Linda Schwager persuaded the residents to withdraw their claims, citing the lack of evidence to prove a criminal act. Judge Roy McGeady had reached the same conclusion and was prepared to dismiss all claims from both sides.
This time Voigt alleged that five separate OPRA requests for his emails submitted to the Ridgewood village clerk between September 2017 and February 2018 under the name “Victoria Burpee” had in fact been filed by Loving in an attempt to further harass him. Voigt was unable to prove “Victoria Burpee” was Anne Loving.
Clearly the councilmen does understand that every citizens right to OPRA and is attempting to use a short term legal agreement to curtail, the use of the Open Public Records Act ie OPRA and suppress public information.
In the Open Public Records Act the NJ Legislature finds and declares it to be the public policy of this State that:
government records shall be readily accessible for inspection, copying, or examination by the citizens of this State, with certain exceptions, for the protection of the public interest, and any limitations on the right of access accorded by P.L.1963, c.73 (C.47:1A-1 et seq.) as amended and supplemented, shall be construed in favor of the public’s right of access;
all government records shall be subject to public access unless exempt from such access by: P.L.1963, c.73 (C.47:1A-1 et seq.) as amended and supplemented; any other statute; resolution of either or both houses of the Legislature; regulation promulgated under the authority of any statute or Executive Order of the Governor; Executive Order of the Governor; Rules of Court; any federal law, federal regulation, or federal order ;
a public agency has a responsibility and an obligation to safeguard from public access a citizen’s personal information with which it has been entrusted when disclosure thereof would violate the citizen’s reasonable expectation of privacy; and nothing contained in P.L.1963, c.73 (C.47:1A-1 et seq.), as amended and supplemented, shall be construed as affecting in any way the common law right of access to any record, including but not limited to criminal investigatory records of a law enforcement agency.
