Latest OPRA Roundup: What We Learned (and Didn’t) from the Berkeley Heights School District
Shauna Williams
From time to time, NJ 21st requests all OPRAs sent to the Berkeley Heights School District. In the latest report there were four requests. (Sort of.)
One OPRA request asked for all bids and/or bid tally for the Mountain Park drainage project from June 14, 2022. In response, the District provided the one bid that had been received, by GM Builders Group for $167,786. That bid subsequently went into negotiations.
A second request asked for copier and mail machine lease and service agreements. Responsive documents showed a lease and service agreement with Atlantic for copiers, with a monthly lease plus maintenance cost of $8,895 per month. FP Mail comes in at $2,867.40 per year.
BOE Representative Natasha Joly asked for the GPA presentation given to the Board, including comparison documents for surrounding districts. The documents provided were the slides from the presentation. Within the slides was a link to the comparison documents, however, in the format of the response from the OPRA Custodian, the link was not active. We were unable to see the documents. Hopefully Ms. Joly could.
Lastly there was my own request for legal bills for the first quarter of 2024. This is where the "sort of" comes in. I had sent in four separate requests, one for each quarter. The reason for this is that the previous business administrator would deny or delay requests that ask for too much information. Only one of these four requests was fulfilled, and even then, it was a partial list. The response included only the bills from the Porzio law firm, and the Chaudry law firm. There were no bills provided for our main attorneys at the time - Cleary, Giacobbe, Alfieri, Jacobs.
In addition to an incomplete set of documents, I received an incorrect Letter of Response. The letter I received was addressed to another individual and was regarding a request for the budget. What then followed was a series of rather unprofessional emails. If you're into petty, you can see those here. Legal bills can be viewed here.
To date, I have not received any additional documents from my OPRA request on May 16th.