As you are aware, I am the Business Administrator for the Pinelands
Regional Board of Education (the “Board”), which conducts and supervises
the schools of the Pinelands Regional School District. As such, I am in
receipt of your March 14, 2022, OPRA request, which sought the following:

1.) Email logs of Melissa McCooley from 2018-present.
2.)Email log of Nicholas Brown from 2018-present.
3.) Email log of Erin Lichtenwalner from 2019-present.
4.)Email log of Troy Henderson from 2019-present.
5.) Email log of Gina Frasca from 2018-present.
6.) Email log of ALL Pinelands Board Members from 2018-present

Please allow this letter to serve as notice that I will require an
extension of time until April 1, 2022 to respond to your request for the
purposes of notifying you of a special service charge which will be
applied to your request due to the voluminous nature of your request, and
the extraordinary amount of time it will take to collect and review the
information responsive to your request. Again, I will provide you with the
amount of the special service charge by April 1, 2022.

The extension of time to calculate this amount is necessary due to the
fact that I have been finalizing budgets for Pinelands Board of Education,
Little Egg Harbor Board of Education, and Bass River Board of Education,
and I will be out of office for the rest of the week. OPRA allows for the
Records Custodian to advise of the need for an extension pursuant to
N.J.S.A 47:1A-5.i. Specifically, OPRA states that, “the requestor shall be
advised by the custodian when the record can be made available. If the
record is not made available by that time, access shall be deemed
denied.” 

--
Nicholas Brown
School Business Administrator
Little Egg Harbor School District
Pinelands Regional School District
Bass River School District
(609) 296-1719 x 1013
[1][email address]

References

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1. mailto:[email address]

As you are aware, I am the Business Administrator for the Pinelands
Regional Board of Education (the “Board”), which conducts and supervises
the schools of the Pinelands Regional School District. As such, I am in
receipt of your March 14, 2022, OPRA request, which sought the following:

1.) Email logs of Melissa McCooley from 2018-present.

2.) Email log of Nicholas Brown from 2018-present.

3.) Email log of Erin Lichtenwalner from 2019-present.

4.) Email log of Troy Henderson from 2019-present.

5.) Email log of Gina Frasca from 2018-present.

6.) Email log of ALL Pinelands Board Members from 2018-present

On March 23, 2022, I advised you that I would require an extension of time
to respond to your request until April 1, 2022 to advise you of a
potential special service charge. This extension is necessary to search
our email servers, and convert the files, so that they can exported to an
e-mail log. OPRA allows for the Records Custodian to advise of the need
for an extension pursuant to N.JS.A 47:1A-5.i. Specifically, OPRA states
that, “the requestor shall be advised by the custodian when the record can
be made available. If the record is not made available by that time,
access shall be deemed denied.” I also advised that due to the volume of
documents I anticipated would be responsive to your request, a special
service charge may be applied, after reviewing the amount of documents.

OPRA and the New Jersey Government Records Council provides that whenever
a records custodian asserts that fulfilling an OPRA records request
requires an “extraordinary” expenditure of time and effort, a special
service charge may be warranted pursuant to N.J.S.A. 47:1A-5.c. In this
regard, OPRA provides: “Whenever the nature, format, manner of collation,
or volume of a government record embodied in the form of printed matter to
be inspected, examined, or copied pursuant to this section is such that
the record cannot be reproduced by ordinary document copying equipment in
ordinary business size or involves an extraordinary expenditure of time
and effort to accommodate the request, the public agency may charge, in
addition to the actual cost of duplicating the record, a special service
charge that shall be reasonable and shall be based upon the actual direct
cost of providing the copy or copies ...” (Emphasis added.)
N.J.S.A.47:1A-5.c.

Pursuant to N.J.S.A. 47:1A:5(b) and N.J.S.A. 47:1A:5(c) and due to the
amount of time it will take IT to export the hundreds of thousands of
e-mails into an e-mail log, which equates to a likely minimum charge of
$1,901.70 . This charge equals an hourly rate of $63.39 for the IT
Professional times 30 hours, so that the IT professional may convert and 
export the e-mails.(Both of these rates equal the hourly rate of the
lowest paid people who are qualified to export the e-mails and view and
redact for confidentiality, which due to the confidential nature of this
information, is me). See N.J.S.A. 47:1A-5(c). In addition, the IT
Department had to purchase a special program to complete this request,
which cost the District $9.00. Therefore, a deposit in the amount of $
950.85 is required to proceed with your request. Upon receipt of same we
will begin compiling the documents you requested, please note that once
the e-mail logs are completed, an additional special service charge will
most likely be assessed for my time, to go through each individual line of
the log, which again, will be hundreds of thousands of lines, and redact
for confidentiality. If the conversion to a e-mail log does not take the
full thirty (30) hours, you will be charged or reimbursed accordingly.

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