By ROBERT LINNEHAN
The Evesham Township Solicitor John Gillespie and Evesham Township Manager Tom Czerniecki are currently reconfiguring an e-mail communications policy in the wake of a Burlington County Prosecutor’s ruling.
Mayor Randy Brown called for an overhaul of the 1976 Open Public Meetings Act as well, stating that the law was created before e-mails and other social media platforms were in play.
“The media is driving governments into the inability to use e-mail. E-mail is a great form of discussion. I know the OPMA and that everything I have ever put down in an e-mail could possibly show up in a newspaper,” Brown said. “I know that everything I’ve ever communicated in an e-mail isn’t in violation of the OPMA.”
It’s a gray law, he said, and one that the legislators of New Jersey aren’t looking to clarify for municipalities in the state. Brown said he finds no reason to ever communicate by e-mail moving forward.
“If the state of New Jersey is really interested in transparency, they need to redo the OPMA and redo the act to fit 2011 standards,” he said.
Brown said that he had already disabled his township e-mail account and would no longer be using it. He and Gillespie also scolded the local media coverage of the issue and said newspapers didn’t bother to get the whole story.
E-mails are not tools for secrecy, Gillespie said, but tools for transparency. They create records and trails while telephone conversations do not.
On Friday, Aug. 12, Burlington County Prosecutor Robert D. Bernardi said several members of the Evesham Township Council did “unwittingly run afoul of the prohibitions contained in the OPMA (open public meetings act),” earlier this year when e-mails were exchanged that discussed a possible planning board ordinance that would allow Conner, Strong and Buckelew to build a helipad near Route 73. The members of council came under investigation when the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office received a formal complaint from John Paff, who inquired as to whether or not e-mails violated the open public meetings act.
However, the prosecutor also ruled that the members of council would not be fined for their actions and wrote in his decision, “While I conclude that township officials inadvertently convened a ‘meeting’ for purposes of the OPMA, I find insufficient evidence of any specific intent to violate the statute warranting the pursuit of sanctions by this Office.”
He did say in his ruling that the council would be “on notice” for future possible violations of the OPMA.
Also coming out the prosecutor’s ruling, Czerniecki said he hoped that people would see that the prosecutor specifically said that there was no evidence that council “fast tracked” the helipad ruling.
Gillespie and Czerniecki are currently overhauling the general guidelines for e-mail usage for township business. Czerniecki said the township is looking at a “read-only” e-mail system as well as some other changes.
