Mechanicville pays more fees for its FOIL denial
City has continued pattern of not fulfilling requests
The city has again paid legal fees for denying a Freedom of Information request.
City Council Commissioner Barbara Mcguire took the city to court after it denied her access to fellow Commissioner Anthony Gotti’s text messages to city staff. In a settlement agreement between attorneys last fall, she got the text messages. And the city was ordered to pay $9,700 for her attorney, which it has done.
“The city is playing games,” Mcguire said. “(The city) does whatever it likes. It’s like the wild, wild west. But (city officials) aren’t mad at the attorney for denying my request, they are mad at me for winning.”
This is the second time within a year that the city had to pay legal fees for denying FOIL requests. Last summer, former city attorney Val Serbalik was reimbursed $3,460 in legal fees when the city denied his 2019 FOIL request. That was more than originally ordered by Supreme Court Judge Thomas Buchanan in February 2020. But since the city didn’t pay the $2,560 in legal fees, Serbalik had filed another motion, which ultimately upped the total to $3,460.
Mcguire, city public safety commissioner, said her FOIL tangle with the city also started back in 2019 when Gotti requested all of her emails and text
messages that contained references to him.
Mcguire complied, even though she does not have a city-issued cell phone, after then-city Attorney Paul Aloy told her she must, as her private cell phone messages regarding city business are part of the record.
In November 2019, Mcguire FOILED for all of Gotti’s text messages to employees sent between midnight and 7 a.m. When that request wasn’t fulfilled, she narrowed it down to ask for exchanges with a specific employee at any time. The city denied her FOIL, she said, because Aloy told her “we don’t possess the employee’s phone.”
“I had extensive conversations with Paul Aloy,” Mcguire said about the denial. “I told him he couldn’t have it both ways.”
Aloy did not respond to a Times Union request for comment about the denial.
Frustrated, Mcguire hired attorney Kevin Luibrand. She did get the text message; and in a conference with Supreme Court Judge Ann Crowell and
current city attorney Lyn Murphy, won attorney fees.
“Once we filed the lawsuit, the attorney for the city recognized they should have provided to Barbara the information that was requested,” Luibrand said.
He said it’s unusual for a city official to have to FOIL to get information about the city they serve, but he has seen it before.
“It tends to fall under politics where people try to block other leaders from information,” he said. “She’s a citizen like everyone else. If someone is requesting public information, whether it’s a council member or not, it is not relevant. She is a citizen and they are denying her access.”
At December’s City Council meeting, Murphy, who did not return a phone call for comment, said the city settled with Mcguire before the judge heard oral arguments because the city “wanted to avoid additional attorney fees.”
She also said she would not discuss it further because to do so would be “improper.”