EDITORIAL: Coalition report highlights need for NY info law changes

May 7—The public owes a debt of gratitude to the New York Coalition for Open Government.

The volunteers behind the non-profit organization, which advocates for greater openness and transparency in government statewide, have continued to press for changes in New York's flawed system of maintaining the free flow of public information.

It takes a lot of work to do the sort of advocacy and research they've been doing and lately, they've been working extra hard.

Last week, coalition members released the results of a large-scale effort to test just how well 70 state agencies responded to Freedom of Information Law requests.

Coalition members sent requests to those agencies because they fell under Gov. Kathy Hochul's 2021 pledge to make state government more transparent.

Coalition members essentially found a mixed bag.

On the plus side, the coalition reported that 88% of the 70 agencies acknowledged the group's FOIL requests in a timely fashion, meaning within the five business days required under state law. As to actually turning over the information requested, the coalition said 60% did so within 20 business days and 83% complied within 30 business days.

That's the good news.

The bad news is most of those agencies were unable to explain how they tracked requests and even fewer kept request logs. Of the agencies that responded to the coalition's request for information about requests that had been denied and appealed, the group's analysis showed members of the public were successful in getting the records they were initially denied, via appeal, only 35% of the time.

"What this report shows is very few of them can tell us how many requests they've received in a year, let alone what the average response time was," the coalition's founder and President, local attorney Paul Wolf.

The coalition's latest report shows what members of the New York media often find, it's still too difficult to get public agencies in New York to follow freedom of information rules already on the books.

Clearly, in keeping with Hochul's pledge, the state can and must do better.

Some state lawmakers have introduced bills aimed at making the system more responsive, including one that would require public agencies in New York to track information requests, denials and appeals in keeping with a tracking program already in place at the federal level.

The coalition also supports another bill — and we do, too — that would create an independent hearing officer process to allow an entity separate from state government to enforce open meetings and Freedom of Information laws. Coalition members say the system would operate similarly to the state's current tax assessment challenge process, which seems like a reasonable approach.

"There should be some other way to address open meeting law complaints, FOIL complaints, short of going to court and we believe there should be a hearing officer system created," Wolf said.

Who would argue?

From our viewpoint, only public agencies that don't want to be bothered abiding by Freedom of Information laws or have documents in their position they don't want the taxpaying and voting public to know about.

Like so many things, real change tends to happen only when regular people get involved so we invite our readers to do their part by contacting their elected representatives in Albany and encouraging them to get moving on the passage of these bills.

For a full list of proposals, visit the coalition's website at: https://nyopengov.org/legislation-action/.

Remember, as always, it's your right to know.