Dear Sir or Madam:

The Borough is in receipt of your May 15, 2023 OPRA request seeking “All
CAD data involving EMS response including Response Times, Name of Agency
Responding and Disposition” dated January 1, 2020 up to and through the
present.   

Please be advised that your request in its current form must be denied. 
The Borough Police Department has advised that this request would require
review of approximately 5,000 documents  - a task that would be
unreasonably burdensome to and substantially disruptive of Borough
operations. See New Jersey Builders Ass’n v. NJ Council on Affordable
Housing, 390 Super. 166 (App. Div. 2007) (holding that N.J.S.A. 47:1A-5(g)
allows consideration of the demands on governmental agency operations
imposed by the document request at issue).  Unless your request is
modified to be more specific or narrow in scope, the Borough cannot
fulfill this request as drafted.  Lastly, without more information, the
Borough is unclear as to the source of support for the asserted common law
right to access.  

Thank you.

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The Borough of Spotswood is in receipt of your Open Public Records Act
(OPRA) request. 

The Office of the Clerk has been inundated with requests for public
records during the last two months and will require additional time to
fulfill your request.  N.J.S.A. 47:1A-5.i. The Borough is in the process
of the cumbersome task of reviewing a substantial amount of documents,
including emails and other electronic documents, that require a
substantial amount of time in the foreseeable future to complete.  The
Borough also must have documents reviewed by legal counsel to ensure only
documents that are recognized as government records are produced and
appropriate redactions are made. This is a time-consuming process that is
exacerbated by the overwhelming amount of OPRA requests submitted to this
office on a regular basis.   

In addition to balancing the review process to prepare responses to
countless OPRA requests, I must also attend to the statutory duties of my
office. I also must, over the next few days, focus on the upcoming primary
election. Thus, it will be impossible for the Borough to dedicate time
towards fulfilling your request during that time period.  

The Borough is working diligently in reviewing documents that are
responsive to your request, as well as countless others.  The time
required to ensure a full and accurate response to your requests
constitutes a substantial disruption to the operations of the Clerk’s
Office, but we are working as quickly as possible.  The Borough has even
authorized additional support to the Clerk's Office solely because of the
substantial disruption caused by the influx of OPRA requests over the past
three months. Thus, the Clerk's Office will be providing documents
responsive to your requests, on a rolling basis, over the next 30 days.

If you would like to narrow the scope of these searches, please advise. 
Otherwise, please allow us the time to conduct the necessary time to
review your requests.

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