New Jersey, which is consistently ranked among the least transparent states in the country, has never been what we would call “forthcoming” with its dirty little secrets. On Monday, both the State Assembly and the Senate will be voting to gut the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) and essentially send our state into even deeper depths of darkness.

Advocates for the two pending companion bills (S-2930 and A-4045) argue that OPRA requests, especially those filed on behalf of data-mining companies and other commercial enterprises, are costly and time consuming to complete.

We get it. We have a great relationship with all our municipal clerks, and we fully understand their concerns about the amount of work, time and energy that it can take to fill these requests, especially when they come from people who would seek to abuse the system. That having been said, OPRA is one of the only tools that we as residents (and, yes, as journalists) can utilize to peek behind the state’s heavy curtains, and inconvenience alone cannot be allowed to negate the value of legitimate transparency.

At the top of the very long list of things wrong with this legislation is a provision that would make it nearly impossible to get access to governmental emails or other digital records without knowing exactly who created them and when. Right now, you can ask for emails that contain certain keywords over a specific date range, which is exactly how we uncovered the fact that a local assistant superintendent of schools planned to utilize his position in the district for personal financial gain.

In that same vein, metadata (a term that literally means “data about data”) also would be excluded from the public record under the new law. In other words, if you are lucky enough to get email records, or any documents, you would have no way of knowing whether they were altered or edited in any way.

Anything labeled as a “draft,” including notes generated to prepare a final report, policy or piece of legislation, would no longer be available, either. Drafts give the public a way to see the thought process behind largescale capital projects like major developments, park improvements and changes to the infrastructure. What would stop government from labeling everything as a draft, so that nothing would be public?

Logs of telephone calls, emails or texts would no longer be available to the public. The public would have no way to find out if, say, your local elected official was conducting personal business out of their public office.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance: a government agency that wished to keep certain records out of the public eye could simply say, “it’s on the website” and leave it at that. They would no longer be required to provide direct links or offer up specific documentation.

Even beyond these numerous informational barriers, however, is the fact that residents should have to expect to have to cover their own legal costs in the event of a successful OPRA appeal going forward. This cost-prohibitive measure will be enough to prevent private citizens and local news organizations from fighting back against governmental agencies that knowingly and intentionally violate whatever remains of the state’s transparency law.

We already can’t have the home sales with the names on them thanks to the well-intentioned, but ill-implemented, Daniel’s Law because it might have the name of a cop, judge or prosecutor on it. Because of this, it is already becoming more and more difficult to simply verify that someone running for office lives in the district, and has lived there long enough to run. Now the public can’t even keep an eye on them after they get elected.

We can’t rely on government agencies to self-report. It takes each of them two to three years to issue their reports — crime statistics are two years delayed, the AG’s office takes three to complete a report on corruption in a tiny municipality, and just this week we got an independent report on the state’s response to Covid (four years later).

Selfishly, this hurts the newspaper industry at a time when it’s already struggling. Ad revenues are low, but readership is up — because we take the time and effort to dig in on where your tax dollars go. We won’t be able to do that effectively under this new law.

The purpose of OPRA was to shed more light and transparency on government. It isn’t perfect, but our state falls far down the list of transparent in comparison to others. NJ OPRA was a flashlight in the darkness of government, and when what we need is a spotlight, this bill plunges us all into darkness.