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Officials must honor public right to know
The public has a right to know how the people they
elect and employ are doing their business.
Recognizing that right,
lawmakers in the Garden State passed the Open Public
Records Act, which requires the people paid by the
taxpayers to make available to citizens the records
memorializing their work, its results, and the
deliberations that led to decisions they make.
There is mounting evidence of
belligerent indifference to that law.
Suzanne Penna of Berkeley
Township waved some of that evidence at the county's
freeholders recently.
She asked for what is clearly
a public record: the Ocean County College budget.
She got from the college a one-page column of
figures that was far from the college budget.
Freeholder James F. Lacey
interceded for her and got her what she asked for in
the first place. Penna no doubt is grateful to Lacey
and certain that OCC officials ignored the Open
Public Records Act.
With good reason. Penna is a
frequent critic of the OCC administration. The law
makes no distinction between those who support and
oppose the policies and practices of public
employees and office-holders. The duty is to make
the record public, regardless of who is asking.
So, too, Robert K. Haelig Jr.
of Toms River. He is in court now trying to pry
public records from the hands of Toms River Regional
school officials.
He's being stonewalled
because, like Penna, he has been critical of the
decisions made by school officials.
Haelig has gotten an elaborate
series of brush-offs in his request to be promptly
provided with records he has obtained with no
similar delay or excessive demands for money in the
past.
We urge Superior Court
Assignment Judge Eugene D. Serpentelli to set an
example in the Haelig case that will warn other
officials that public records do not belong to
public employees, they belong to the public.
We need point no further than
this week's meeting of the county's freeholders for
an example of how the system should work.
Betty Vasil is the clerk of
the county's freeholder board. Haelig asked her for
information about the salary histories of several
county employees, including hers.
He used that information to
complain to the freeholders about pay increases
given to those employees, including her. Vasil could
have employed the tactics of the champions of delay,
linger, and wait. Instead she did what the law
requires — and took some public heat as a result of
obeying the law.
Freeholder John C. Bartlett
Jr. had no trouble explaining that Vasil's pay raise
was due to the fact that she was promoted from
deputy clerk to clerk of the freeholder board.
Bartlett, we hope, will make
sure that Ocean County College record-keepers
understand their legal duty to disclose. And Vasil's
example should not be lost on those at the Toms
River schools, where she is a member of the Board of
Education.
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