NYC NOW - May 21, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Plus, after being fast-tracked through the legislature, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy must now decide whether to place sweeping restrictions on the state’s Open Public Records Act, which requires local and state agencies to provide the public with access to government records. Changes would make it harder to get government emails, give clerks more reasons to deny citizens who request them and even let the government sue people it thinks are asking for records too often. WNYC’s Michael Hill speaks with editor of the New Jersey Monitor, Terrence T. McDonald for the latest.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Tuesday, May 21st. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Card travel this Memorial Day weekend is projected to exceed pre-pandemic levels for the second year. That means lots and lots of traffic. WNMC's Ramsey-Khalifah shares the best and worst, times to head out for the holiday. Public transportation is always the best bet, but many New Yorkers will be getting behind the wheel for the long weekend. AAA crunched toll data from the MTA and determined the best times to leave the city on Thursday or Friday,

the early mornings before 11 a.m. or after 7 in the evening. Driving back to the city at the end of the weekend, try to arrive before 1 p.m. on Sunday to avoid gridlock. Anytime after 7 p.m. on Monday will save you a headache too. Drivers around the country will be facing lots of traffic. AAA projects 44 million drivers will leave town this weekend. The Jerseyans can now access birth control without a prescription. The state's Board of Medical Examiners and Board of Pharmacy has approved the new rule. Pharmacists can now directly provide hormonal contraceptives, including injectables, pills, patches, and rings.

Providers must first determine if a patient qualifies to get birth control by administering a health screening questionnaire. Patients will get an initial three-month supply with refills for up to nine more months. To enroll in the birth control without a prescription program, pharmacists must first complete a four-hour training program. 74 and sunny now, mostly sunny and much warmer today than yesterday, a high of 83 today, than tomorrow, even warmer, sunny in 87, and then Thursday a 50-50 chance of showers and storms in a high near 90. Stay close. There's more after the break. NYC.

It's now up to New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy, to decide whether to place sweeping new restrictions on the state's Open Public Records Act. Changes in a bill, fast-track through the legislature this month, would make it harder to get government emails, give clerks more reasons to shoot and request for public documents, even let the government sue people it thinks are asking for records too often. Governor Murphy hasn't said if he'll sign the bill.

Joining us now is Terrence T. editor of New Jersey Monitor. Terrence, many of the people talking about this are journalists, but the potential impact goes well beyond journalism. Why should everyone else care that New Jersey might scale back access to open records? Well, reporters aren't the only ones who use the Open Public Records Act, we call it Oprah. I encounter tons of non-journalists who use the law on a pretty regular basis to find out all sorts of things about their government that no one else is asking for. This has become especially prevalent in recent years as media, organizations have largely stopped doing the kind of local reporting that they used to.

And private citizens using Oprah to obtain government records is very often the only kind of accountability that lots of local officials face. This bill tries to tamp down a technique reporters use pretty often sending requests for records to any agency that might have them. Would you give some examples of why journalists would do this? Sure. I mean, this is an incredibly important technique because public entities will very often send you elsewhere if you ask them for records, even if they have the records. This is especially prevalent

in cases where police shoot someone. Sometimes local officials have the records. They email them to prosecutors. And so there's like sort of a tug of war between the two over who actually wants to release the records. It's also used in large-scale investigations like NJ.com's force report, where the reporters collected police records from the state's 500 plus municipalities. So prohibiting someone from asking for records from more than one public entity at time will really add to an already glacial response time from the towns. Terris, there's another provision in this bill that bars requestsers from getting most sorts of metadata. What's metadata and how can it be useful?

So when you create, say, a Microsoft Word document, that document includes some information about when the document was created that we call metadata. Dustin Raciope, who's now at Politico, New Jersey, used metadata when he was in investigating the state schools development authority to prove that the woman who used to run the agency was making up job titles for people after she hired them. Many of them were friends and family members. So without access to metadata, you can say goodbye to that kind of accountability reporting. There's been a lot of talk about getting rid of something called fee shifting. What exactly would that accomplish? If a public agency denies my request for public records and I sue them and win in court,

The agency is now required to pay my legal fees. This is the chief enforcement mechanism for the law because it's intended to discourage public agencies from withholding public records because they know that if they lose, they'll pay all the legal fees. The bill would make it not mandatory, which means lawyers will be much less likely to take on these kinds of disputes because even if they win, they may be out a lot of the cost. So some of the major media organizations may decide to foot the bill for lawsuits in the future, but a lot of these cases are won by small media organizations like mine or citizen journalists who will not be able to pay these kinds of legal expenses. And Terrence, what do we know about whether Governor Murphy will sign this bill? We don't know much.

He has 45 days to sign the law, so he has until about the last week of June or it just becomes law. Terrence, real quick, if public agencies made more information available, wouldn't it mean that we wouldn't have to file as many requests as we do now? That is correct, yes. And that's one of the things that the bill's supporters say that the bill will, quote, unquote, modernize the law by allowing public agencies to put their information online. But they're allowed to do that right now. There's nothing stopping them from doing that. Exactly. Terrence, Steve McDonald was editor of New Jersey Monitor.

He's also the winner of two society professionals. Journalists Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act, known as Oprah. Terrence, always good to have you. Come back and see us, my friend. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this evening.