Sunday\u00a0marked the beginning of \u201cSunshine Week,\u201d a week in which the nation focuses its attention on government openness.\u00a0 The \u201cWeek\u201d makes it clear that it is important to maintain an open government, in order to ensure the proper relationship between public officials and the citizens they are pledged to serve.<\/p>\n
The critical tool for holding policymakers accountable, as well as ensuring that the public is educated on policymaking, is the Freedom of Information Law.\u00a0 The Law operates on one basic concept \u2013 that government information should be accessible to the public.\u00a0 Without a strong open access law, it is virtually impossible for the public to adequately participate in, and monitor, governmental decision making.<\/p>\n
Weaker laws can result in public officials losing their way.\u00a0 It was one year ago, that the Cuomo Administration was called out for its policy of requiring the deletion of state governmental emails after 90 days.<\/p>\n
At first, the governor\u2019s office argued that the policy was simply due to technological limitations.\u00a0 When faced with the fact that the federal government \u2013 which has far more emails than New York \u2013 now has a seven year retention policy, the justification has changed.<\/p>\n
But the Administration did not back off and the policy went into place.\u00a0 Later last year, the governor vetoed two bills that were designed to make it easier for the public to get access to government records.<\/p>\n
One bill would have required that state agencies not drag their feet on disclosing information to the public; another raised the likelihood of penalties if the agencies wrongfully denied the public access to public information.<\/p>\n
Both proposals were advanced by the state agency responsible for ensuring government openness \u2013 the Committee on Open Government.\u00a0 Both proposals were part of the agency\u2019s annual analysis examining what should be done to improve governmental accountability.<\/p>\n
Both bills passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support.\u00a0 But both were vetoed by the governor.<\/p>\n
Why?\u00a0 The governor argued that there were technical defects in the bills.\u00a0 The governor followed up with an executive order requiring that state agencies respond more quickly to FOIL requests.
\nUnfortunately, the governor\u2019s executive order does nothing to ensure openness by local governments (also covered by FOIL) and does nothing to punish state agencies that ignore the FOIL.<\/p>\n
The governor vetoed those bills saying that he would not agree to any legislation that did not comprehensively overhaul the state\u2019s Freedom of Information Law.\u00a0 In short, he was saying that it was his way or there was no way.<\/p>\n
This session the governor proposed legislation that he said would comprehensively improve public access to its own government.\u00a0 Last week, a coalition of civic groups sent a letter to the governor and the legislative leaders identifying instances in which the governor\u2019s proposed legislation would weaken the Freedom of Information Law, not strengthen it.<\/p>\n
For example, the bill makes it harder for citizens to obtain attorneys fees in the event that they are successful in taking a state agency to court for failing to appropriately disclosure public records.<\/p>\n
Pledging to make New York\u2019s notoriously secretive state government more open has become a staple of promises by candidates for public office.\u00a0 In his 2010 campaign book, \u201cClean Up Albany,\u201d then-candidate Andrew Cuomo pledged \u201cto make the State government the most transparent and accountable in history.\u201d<\/p>\n
It turns out that that pledge remains unfulfilled.\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope that this \u201cSunshine Week\u201d stimulates Albany\u2019s leaders to throw open the windows of state government, not keep the curtains closed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sunday\u00a0marked the beginning of \u201cSunshine Week,\u201d a week in which the nation focuses its attention on government openness.\u00a0 The \u201cWeek\u201d makes it clear that it is important to maintain an open government, in order to ensure the proper relationship between public officials and the citizens they are pledged to serve. The critical tool for holding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1644,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions\/1644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}