Group cites District 13 for rejecting info request

A nonprofit group named District 13 one of 57 governing bodies on Long Island that did not comply with a Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, request submitted as part of a project by the group, which aims to improve governmental transparency across the state.

Reclaim New York, an organization that works for government reform and accountability, submitted more than 250 FOIL requests for 2014 expenditures to local government entities on Long Island, as it plans to do in the rest of the state. Of the 57 entities that were listed as non-compliant, 18 were in Nassau County. Nine were school districts. Five districts ignored repeated FOIL requests, the group said, and four, including District 13, denied them.

James Pyun, an attorney for the district, said the request was denied because of how it was presented. “Based on guidance from legal counsel and the New York State Committee on Open Government, the district determined that Reclaim New York’s blanket request for vendor payments was ambiguous,” Pyun said. “We did not maintain records in the format requested, and the records may retain personal information concerning employees or parents that could not be redacted without unreasonable time and effort.”

Reclaim New York announced on Tuesday that it is filing a lawsuit against three entities in Nassau County — the Town of Oyster Bay, the Elmont Union Free School District and the Manhasset School District — for non-compliance with the law. A spokesman for the organization said that more lawsuits could be filed against other entities that were deemed non-compliant, but the first three were chosen because of their histories of transparency problems. The group vowed to continue its effort until it received the documents it asked for from every local government.

The state’s Freedom of Information Law, passed in 1974, is based on a presumption of access. Its purpose is to give any member of the public access to public documents. By law, recipients are allowed five days to confirm receipt and then 20 days to comply with the request or to deny it. On a case-by-case basis, recipients can extend their time to supply the information, but only if they guarantee that they will fulfill the request.

“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to beg to see how local government spends their money,” said Brandon Muir, Reclaim New York’s executive director. “This lawsuit and others combine with our grass-roots effort to put every public official and taxpayer-funded entity on notice that the days of spending money in the shadows are over.”

Muir said that more than 200 entities on Long Island were compliant, a rate of 80 percent. That’s 10 percent lower than the compliance rate in the Hudson Valley, the only other region targeted by the project so far. In Valley Stream, Districts 24 and 30 were listed as compliant, while the Valley Stream Central High School District’s request was categorized as “in progress.”

The FOIL requests were all sent during the first week of March, signed by activists who disclosed that they were working for a transparency advocacy group.

The project comes as 97 percent of New Yorkers said in a recent poll that government corruption is a problem. “New York lacks local citizen-driven oversight,” said Muir. “Transparency is not a hope. It is not an idea. It is the law.”