More Thoughts on the Paff v. Galloway Opinion

In a recent post I called this new Appellate Division opinion the most important OPRA court opinion issued in years. What’s so significant about a ruling that OPRA does not require a town to create a log describing the emails of certain employees? Because in doing so, the court put to rest the notion, aggressively advanced by many requestors, that OPRA can be used to force public bodies to produce reports from the information contained in computer databases.

Since OPRA’s enactment, many requestors have claimed that the statute requires that custodians perform research and collate information for them. Although the courts have consistently rejected such OPRA requests, no court had dealt with the related question  of whether OPRA imposes on custodians the duty to query the agency’s databases to produce whatever report the requestor seeks. The Appellate Division has now made clear that OPRA does not have such a requirement.

This ruling has real, practical consequences. As I’ve noted before, handling OPRA requests is quite costly. One significant cost is that when agency employees are creating new reports for requestors, they are not performing their other responsibilities, and government efficiency suffers. The harm to government operations is clear if, as the requestor argued in the Galloway case, OPRA mandates that public employees spend their time serving as research staff for all requestors.

Fortunately, the court recognized that this is not the intent of OPRA and confirmed that custodians do not have to create reports, lists and other compilations for requestors.

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