Ever since Mayor Adams took office, the City Council has done admirable work standing up to the mayor. It has overridden more mayoral vetoes than any Council in recent memory. It established its own Charter Commission to respond to the mayor’s. And it has held countless oversight hearings on the failures of the Adams administration. But what’s been missing from the Council’s efforts?
Any attempt to improve the city’s Freedom of Information Law.
If the Council does nothing, it will blow a historic opportunity. Councilmember Gale Brewer’s Intro 1235, which would require city agencies to report on how many FOIL requests they’re fulfilling, has been endorsed by major government watchdogs and media groups and is cosponsored by half the City Council. But despite wide support, the Council has sat on the bill since its hearing in June.
It’s obvious that NYC has a huge problem with transparency — Reinvent Albany’s report, NYC Government Flouting Freedom of Information Law, showed that NYC government failed to close 16% of FOIL requests within a year. Some agencies, such as the Department of Correction, took more than a year on average to respond to requests.
NYC agencies are receiving more FOIL requests via the city’s OpenRecords portal than ever — 85,000 in 2024 compared to 41,000 in 2018 — but agencies have done little to adapt to increasing demand, making the city less responsive to basic requests for government transparency.
Under Intro 1235, agencies will be required to provide more information on FOIL compliance than ever before, helping New Yorkers understand where the city is falling behind. The portal will require all agencies to use the portal and report on the date requests were received, whether requests were granted or denied, the grounds for denial (if any), and the status of appeals.
Importantly, the new portal will also allow the public to receive automated updates on the status of their requests, and to do their own analyses of portal data, such as the number of requests agencies have responded to.
This will be a major leap forward for transparency in NYC. The city’s current OpenRecords portal, while possibly the best in the country, is not living up to its full potential because about half of all requests aren’t even tracked on the portal. Agencies have the ability to publish public records so that if they are released to one, they are released to all, but they don’t routinely do so. This leads to duplicative requests, and extra work for the public and agency staff.
The portal has not been codified in law, meaning it could be taken down by a future, unscrupulous administration at any moment. And the data shows that agencies are still not doing enough to respond to increasing FOIL demand. It’s time for a complete restart of NYC FOIL compliance.
The corruption scandals within the Adams administration show the need for an overhaul of FOIL. Part of the reason for Adams’ indictment was the effort to hide the truth — the mayor allegedly ordered subordinates to create fake paper trails to hide bribes he’d received from businessmen and a government official in Turkey. Nearly every single Adams administration scandal involves some kind of alleged cover-up, showing the need for transparency bills like Intro 1235.
Historically, governments have used scandals as opportunities for reform. The current federal Freedom of Information Act itself rose, famously, out of the Nixon administration’s attempts to hide the Watergate scandal. Rather than allowing the status quo to continue, Congress created new disclosure requirements, tighter timelines, and established penalties for noncompliance by the federal government. When President Gerald Ford vetoed the bill, Congress overrode the veto.
Here in New York State, Gov. Hochul and the Legislature used former Gov. Cuomo’s resignation to establish a new ethics panel, and in 2018 the state also used rising concerns about the influence of money in politics to establish a new public campaign finance system. But the Council has passed virtually no good-government legislation that would help make NYC government more transparent and less susceptible to undue influence.
Transparency matters. Transparency is how we find out whether or not our tax dollars are going to worthy causes, or whether they’re being used at all. Transparency is how we find out what corporations are doing to the environment, whether or not our trains are arriving on time, or whether police officers did everything they could to avoid the use of force. It’s time for the Council to act on one of New Yorkers’ best tools for increasing transparency, and pass Intro 1235. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Speaker is the legislative director of Reinvent Albany.
