Visit a municipal clerk's office and you will likely hear griping about the Open Public Records Act.

"We hate OPRAs here," a Kearny clerk's office employee muttered to a reporter for The Jersey Journal picking up a request for a list of all town salaries.

OPRA, enacted in 2001 by the state Legislature to replace the old Right to Know Law, allows anyone to fill out a form and receive certain public documents within seven business days, usually with the clerk acting as a go-between.

But clerks across the state say the law is being used – abused, some say – by for-profit businesses seeking to have public workers perform their data collection for them.

"Any company that wants to drum up business, they just come here and get all the public records that are available and then they're on the way," said Kearny's municipal clerk, Pat Carpenter.

John Mitch, the Woodbridge clerk and president of the Municipal Clerks' Association of New Jersey, said data mining for private companies has become a time-suck for clerks everywhere.

Mitch used the example of a swimming pool company that files OPRA requests seeking all the pool permits filed in a town. The company then uses that information, collected by taxpayer-funded workers, to identify new customers, he said.

"Requests like that ... have increased, which really does affect our work that we're doing," he said. "We're responding to commercial requests."

HOBOKEN ON TOP

Hudson County's 12 municipalities saw more than 9,000 OPRA requests last year, a 9 percent increase from 2013. Hoboken saw the most, with 2,383, followed by Jersey City at 1,375 – a record number, its clerk says. Union City processed 1,258 requests and North Bergen had 1,190. East Newark, the county's smallest municipality, with fewer than 3,000 residents, processed 47 OPRA requests last year.

For Robert Byrne, Jersey City's clerk, OPRAs have become "a monster," the number more than doubling in Jersey City since 2009, when the clerk's office saw only 607.

He also cited private companies filing OPRAs as a problem, noting that requests to his office come from as far away as San Francisco, from a company seeking a list of unclaimed checks and bonds in order to return them to their owners.

"Hopefully we've peaked," Byrne said.

Byrne now has two part-time clerks working on OPRAs and two full-time employees offering their assistance. The city, meanwhile, hired an attorney to handle non-routine requests, such as for city worker emails or the mayor's schedule, while Corporation Counsel Jeremy Farrell issued a memo in November urging department heads, in routine cases, to hand over public documents without forcing citizens to file official requests.

Mitch said clerks have expressed their concerns to state legislative leaders, but he doesn't know how to avoid complying with data collection requests without gutting OPRA entirely for the average citizen.

There isn't a way, nor should there be, according to Walter Luers, president of the Foundation for Open Government. Luers disputes that companies that use OPRA to obtain data are abusing the system, saying their requests are as vital to the public interest as a newspaper obtaining salary information for city officials.

Using Mitch's example of a pool company using OPRA to find out who in a town has a pool, Luers said that company's efforts "absolutely benefit the town."

"It makes it more likely that people are going to get their pools fixed, keep their pools up to code," he said. "Yes, the licensed companies are making money on that, but government is creating that market. Government creates that market by saying you can't have a pool without a permit."

Curtailing a company's access to public documents would be next to impossible, Luers said.

"Are clerks supposed to conduct investigations into the purpose and the identity of each person?" he said. "Limiting OPRA is a big mess. Any solution would be really messy."

'POTENTIAL ABUSE'

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, whose city saw the most OPRA requests of any Hudson County municipality last year, said she doesn't know if data collection is a problem. Zimmer credits the city's "very active and engaged community" for her city's high number of requests for public documents. The city government is politically divided, with Zimmer allies holding a slim majority on the nine-member City Council.

"I think it also shows there's potential abuse of the system, and there are people that are going on fishing expeditions and kind of misusing the process for political reasons," she told The Jersey Journal. "I've been shown boxes and boxes (of documents) that have been OPRA'd and people haven't even come to pick them up."

Despite the intense media focus on Hoboken last year – in January, Mayor Zimmer alleged that Gov. Chris Christie's administration threatened to withhold Hurricane Sandy relief funds in exchange for her support for a politically connected real-estate deal, a claim Christie denies – the number of OPRA requests Mile Square City saw last year was not much different than in years past.

Between 2005 and 2014, the city saw an average of 2,200 OPRA requests annually. Newark, which has five times the population as Hoboken, had 3,468 requests in 2014.

Zimmer said the city has two clerks and city attorneys working on OPRA requests. While the mayor said she's "concerned" about politically motivated public-records requests, she's resigned to them.

"I don't know if there's really anything we can do about it," she said.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.