New Jersey local governments are not meeting in public view often enough, according to a report released Wednesday by an open-government advocacy group. The New Jersey Foundation for Open Government released its report during Sunshine Week, an initiative of the American Society of Newspaper Editors intended to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Authors Suzanne J. Piotrowski, a Rutgers-Newark professor and Erin L. Borry, a graduate student, call for toughening up the state’s 1975 Open Public Meetings Act. Among other things, the Act requires public notification of meeting schedules. The authors also say closed-session meetings should not be used to consider routine matters. Under the current law, such meetings, where the public is barred, are to be used only for a handful of reasons including labor negotiations, discussing personnel decisions and, in some cases, real estate deals. But, the report says, the use of closed meetings is “at times excessive and unjustified.” For instance, the report said, council members in Ocean County’s Barnegat Township, were in closed session when they decided to change the name of a street, the report said, citing a 2003 article in the Press of Atlantic City. The report, funded by a grant from the National Freedom of Information Coalition, also calls for a requirement that minutes of public meetings are accurate and produced within a specified amount of time and that local governing bodies be required to hear public comment at meetings. Several states already have such requirements. The recommendations also call for making penalties for violations of the Open Meetings Act higher currently, they are $100 for a first offense and $500 after that and for making attorney fees recoverable for people who go to court to prove governments have violated the law. Additionally, the report calls for consideration of a government agency that would rule on violations. Deborah Kole, the staff attorney for the New Jersey League of Municipalities, said many of the new report’s recommendations codify what already exists. She said that, generally, the other changes make sense as long as they’re not used to target officials who make honest mistakes. “If occasionally a mistake is made, it seems to me that’s different that willfully disobeying something,” she said.