Open Records Law Makes Salaries Difficult To Check

The Record
November 11, 2007
By Allison Pries and Andrea Alexander

Want to know how much police and other public workers in your town are getting paid?

Finding out may be harder than you might think.

A team of Record reporters recently visited 10 town halls seeking complete 2006 payroll information on all employees. But even though state law requires that pay records be available for "immediate access," not one town was able to comply.

The exercise showcased how the state Open Public Records Act, a law designed to shine daylight into the workings of government, falls short of that goal. It exposed how competing interpretations of OPRA slow the process for the public. And it found that municipal governments are not adequately prepared to comply with the law.

"This is one of the bedrocks of government -- for people to know what government is doing," said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck. "People have to learn that, albeit it might seem minor, they must respond."

Governor Corzine's office defends OPRA as a work in progress.

"It was a process to get here," said Corzine's spokeswoman Lilo Stainton. "Just the whole assumption that things are going to become public. It changes the way that people probably approach their jobs. I think it's clear that a full scale, full government change may take some time."

But the lack of ready disclosure cuts deep in a state where soaring property taxes consistently rank as the No. 1 concern in polls and where salaries paid to government workers are the biggest part of local budgets.

The Record requested the right to inspect payroll records in Bergenfield, Dumont, Demarest, Englewood Cliffs, Haworth, Leonia, Mahwah, Pequannock, Ramsey and Wayne.

The team of reporters encountered a range of problems:

• Cost: Demarest charged $102.25 for a nine-page copy of its 32-employee payroll. Half of the document was handwritten. "I'm not going to go out and buy a computer system for someone who wants a record," said borough Treasurer and CFO Maureen Neville.

• Redaction: Most clerks said the available payroll records contained employees' Social Security numbers and other personal information, so they would have to cross out that information before releasing it. That process usually added to the cost.
• Vendors: Towns that contract with payroll vendors pass along often steep fees for producing the information. Wayne said it would have cost $500 to get the payroll from ADP. Bergenfield estimated it would run $450 and Borough Clerk Catherine Navarro Steinel asked for a $150 deposit to find out the exact figure.
• Delays: Most towns don't have the information at the ready, causing delays that ranged from days to months. For instance, a request was filed in Wayne on June 14 and the payroll was available Oct. 2 on paper for $50.

As delivered, the Wayne files were a pile of mix-and-match components, not one record providing a tally of the total compensation for the town's 550 employees. Wayne is now working with ADP to develop a report so the township can answer any future payroll requests, said Mayor Scott Rumana.

"It sounds great to say 'just give them the information,' but then there are technical and technology issues to deal with," he said. "The practical application of the law became a great problem."

The township, however, did initially produce an employee roster that had some -- but not all -- payroll information. Overtime was not included, which added $19,497, for instance, to the 2006 compensation of sewer line maintenance foreman David Hunziker, whose annual base salary was $61,492.

Overtime often adds as much as 10 percent to annual compensation for police officers, even in sleepy northern Bergen County towns.

In Dumont, Chief Financial Officer Terrie Giotis said the borough does not have time to create a file that no one may ever request.

"It is hard to anticipate what everyone wants, plus you have your regular work to do," she said.

In some instances, towns came close enough to suggest that the standard set by the law is attainable. Four towns, Demarest, Leonia, Englewood Cliffs and Mahwah, did provide information within a week.

Both Pequannock and Englewood Cliffs provided complete electronic spreadsheets -- Pequannock at no cost, and Englewood Cliffs for $85.

Pequannock payroll administrator Jean McCrystal said she keeps the file on hand to show residents, because of past requests.

"It's easier to maintain than to start from scratch every time," she said.

'Immediate access'

The Open Public Records Act of 2001 promised to improve citizen awareness of government actions by better defining what is a public record and setting standards for how those records are made available. One key provision established a class of documents -- payroll, budgets, vouchers and contracts -- and promised that they should ordinarily be available for "immediate access."

Record reporters tried to get detailed payroll information -- including overtime, longevity pay and other compensation -- from the 10 towns, but not one maintained it in a readily accessible format.

"Payroll is a lot more than salary and overtime information," said Catherine Starghill, executive director of the New Jersey Government Records Council, created by OPRA to make sure the law works for citizens. "When you are asking for 100 employees' salary information under immediate access, it isn't practical for a town to provide that volume of salary information immediately."

But Tom Cafferty, an attorney who represented the New Jersey Press Association when OPRA was drafted, said the law makes it clear that compensation of public employees must be disclosed.

"You need to look at what did the Legislature mean by the word salary," Cafferty said. "I think they meant you have a right to know what people on the public payroll are paid, in plain, simple terms."

The problem cited by most clerks was that no one was available to pull the documents upon request -- and even if someone was available, the documents usually contained personal information that needed to be redacted.

Barbara Hawk, head of the Municipal Clerks' Association of New Jersey, said problems occur because lawmakers "didn't ask the people who do it" when they drafted OPRA.

She said towns run into "manpower" issues when they are inundated with requests.

"When you are pulled off to do something else the rest of your work just sits there," Hawk said.

Cafferty said filling OPRA requests should not be considered extra work for town employees.

"To the extent that the justification is that this is something over and above our duties, that is just a serious misunderstanding of the law," he said.

Wayne Clerk Kathy Pusterla said municipal clerks are responsible for records they don't control, adding another level of bureaucracy to the process.

"You are responsible for getting records but you have to rely on the department heads,'' she said. "You don't have control over the documents somebody wants and you can get fined [if you don't provide them].''

But none of those problems should stand in the way of the public's right to access records. OPRA has no provision limiting the number of records that can be sought and no clause that allows the "record custodian" to decline a request because they are too busy or need to interact with other departments to get a record.

"The right of public access is equally as important as other tasks," Cafferty said. "It's not something [clerks] should do when they have a spare moment."

Beth Mason, president of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, said charging for information the public has a right to view amount to taxpayers getting billed twice for the same service.

"Why are we paying them again?" she said. "Government records are not there to make money for the government entity."

Cafferty was equally outraged.

"I can't fathom how one can argue that information that should be ordinarily immediately available generates a special service charge because it involves an extraordinary expenditure of time and effort," he said. "Clearly the Legislature said this is stuff you should have at your fingertips."

NJ FOG, which advocates for transparency in government, released a report on OPRA in September that said the law "is in need of fundamental repair to its substantive provisions if it is to deliver on its promise of leading New Jersey into a new age of open and accountable government."

"People need to start thinking about if OPRA needs to be scrapped altogether," said Suzanne J. Piotrowski, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Public Affairs and Administration. "Or if it needs to be seriously revised," Piotrowski said.

The report also found that OPRA is hindered by understaffing and under funding of the Government Records Council.

Charged with providing OPRA training and mediating disputes, the GRC receives approximately 250 complaints and 1,200 inquires per year.

"For a staff of eight, that's a lot," Starghill said.

Additional workers and a bigger budget -- the agency currently gets $771,000 per year from the state -- could free up Starghill to hold more training seminars, she said. Last year the GRC offered about 45 classes.

"It's getting everybody to change how they think," Starghill said.