U.S: The Secrets of New Jersey

By LAURA R. WALKEROCT. 26, 2014

IN his very first promise as governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie pledged on Inauguration Day in 2010 to shine daylight on the workings of his government. “Today a new era of accountability and transparency is here,” Mr. Christie said. “Today, I will sign executive orders that will make our finances, our budgeting and our processes more transparent for all citizens to see. Today, change has arrived.”

But that change never did arrive. The Christie administration has defended itself against at least 22 lawsuits from watchdog groups and news organizations seeking information under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act. One of those lawsuits was filed by WNYC. Our reporters have requested dozens of documents from Mr. Christie, and those requests have been met with silence, resistance or outright refusal.

For example, we’ve asked about taxpayer spending on Mr. Christie’s travel out of state. He has been away for some part of more than 100 days in 2014, often to raise money for Republican candidates. In the process, he has built name recognition and constructed a political operation that appears to be laying the base for his own presidential run. Most of these trips are paid for by campaign groups or the Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Christie chairs. But some are paid for by the state, and a security detail always travels with the governor. The public has a right to know how much taxpayers spend on this travel.

In response to an open records request for information about just two days of his travel, the Christie administration sent us a document so heavily redacted as to be all but meaningless.

During the New Jersey Legislature’s investigation into the George Washington Bridge lane closures, it came to light that state employees at the governor’s office were engaged in political activities during Mr. Christie’s 2013 re-election campaign. They kept a list of potential mayors who might support him; they compiled information about those officials and visited them to ask for their endorsement. We filed an open records request to see that list of mayors.

The administration argued that this information is exempt from open records act disclosures, and denied our request.

One of our reporters also asked to see written notifications from the governor’s ethics officer to executive branch employees about participation in partisan political activities during his re-election campaign. After all, by law, election campaigns must be run separately from the offices of government.

That request was denied for similar reasons.

If Mr. Christie has politicized his office, he’s hardly the first elected official to do so. And no party has a lock on government secrecy. As WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein has reported, the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has persuaded the Federal Highway Administration not to release New York’s financing plan for a new Tappan Zee Bridge. Years after the plan was drawn up, it remains a secret.

Open records laws like New Jersey’s — called freedom of information laws in other jurisdictions — are key tools for reporters and citizens in learning whether laws are being violated, what officials are doing and what it is costing taxpayers.

When a request for public documents is denied in New Jersey, the only recourse is to appeal to a council appointed by the governor that has yet to rule against him, or file a lawsuit against the government. The Christie administration is losing many such cases and being told not only to release the documents, but also to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs.

The open records law was explicitly designed to create incentives for elected leaders to act transparently, and to punish them for violations. But Mr. Christie is using the state attorney general’s office to fight the lawsuits, causing delays and running up costs that are ultimately borne by the taxpayer, not by the governor. From January 2012 through Aug. 7 of this year, the administration paid more than $440,000 to reimburse lawyers in open records cases.

The right to know is a pillar of democracy, and Mr. Christie may well be asking us to elect him president in two years. It’s time he stopped fighting the public’s requests for information and fulfilled his own promise to usher in “a new era of accountability and transparency.”