Today is the halfway point of the annual Sunshine Week, to promote openness and transparency in government nationwide. While today’s forecast for Albany is for clear skies and unusually warm temperatures on this last day of winter, there is no sunshine. There is never sunshine on New York State’s government.
A coalition of good government groups is pushing for improvement in the 50-year old state Freedom of Information Law, FOIL. As an op-ed from Reinvent Albany published today by the Daily News says, there are four bills being urged. We support all four and a lot more.
But don’t hope for much. Traditionally only one house will pass a FOIL reform measure, claiming credit, while their colleagues across the Capitol do nothing. However, it seems that there may be joint action on at least the bill dealing with FOILs involving commercial interests.
We have bumped up against this ourselves when seeking the written development agreement between the state Empire State Development and Amtrak for the Farley General Post Office Building/Moynihan Train Hall.
ESD redacted and withheld information and documents that “are trade secrets or are submitted to an agency by a commercial enterprise or derived from information obtained from a commercial enterprise and which if disclosed would cause substantial injury to the competitive position of the subject enterprise.”
It was laughable, as “commercial enterprise” Amtrak is a government-owned railroad that has a monopoly and doesn’t compete with anyone. The bill likely to pass will limit such withholding nonsense to three years, before the info has to be handed over. What a tiny, pathetic step.
Regular readers know that we fought long and hard to get public access to the transcripts of Donald Trump’s Manhattan Stormy Daniels hush money trial, which like all state court proceedings, are wrongly treated as copyrighted material by the stenographers’ union. It was only a one-time exception. Just nuts. The Legislature should pass a law freeing all such transcripts.
In general, there are three kinds of government records: Those that must be published, those that may be published and those that cannot be published. The third is the smallest group, like grand jury materials, juvenile justice files, documents related to individuals’ health care and personal financial information or home addresses, phone numbers and children’s names.
The rest of it should by default be published automatically. All government records are on computers, so putting everything on the internet should be simple, with protected private information redacted.
President Trump, who says he has the most transparent administration in history, is now publishing the JFK assassination files. Good. But locally, Mayor Adams is refusing to release the World Trade Center 9/11 records held by city agencies.
When he was governor, Andrew Cuomo’s administration had a grudging response to FOIL requests. However for the past few years he has been fighting state Attorney General Tish James using FOIL to get records related to the sexual harassment probe she conducted.
Now that Cuomo has experienced it from the other side, maybe he’s changed his attitude. We hope so.