Public information, period
Government officials who are in the habit of trying to hide public information should take note of a case that will cost Mechanicville taxpayers for that very sort of behavior.
Supreme Court Justice Thomas Buchanan found that the city and Commissioner of Accounts Kimberly Dunn didn’t just withhold information; they were downright “obstinate.” But it’s city residents who will pay for it.
Val Serbalik and North Main Street LLC filed requests under the state Freedom of Information Law to find out the costs of the city’s renovation of its senior center. Public space. Public money. How much more public could the information be?
The city has yet to provide the information after more than six months, despite a legal limit of usually no more than 20 days. The city came up with an interesting defense for its foot dragging: Its former attorney — who happened to be Mr. Serbalik — once told it that “the consequences were not serious” for failing to comply with FOIL requests in a timely fashion.
Mr. Serbalik says he only advised To comment:
that courts weren’t concerned with minor violations of time limits, but “never told them they don’t have to answer a FOIL.”
Justice Buchanan was rightly unimpressed with the city’s argument and told it to release the information — and pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs.
Sadly, this behavior isn’t unusual. In Troy, Mayor Patrick Madden took months to disclose how much the city paid a former Glenville police chief, Michael Ranalli, to review a Troy Police Department internal affairs finding that a sergeant lied about the circumstances that led to his fatal shooting of Edson Thevenin. The city is facing a federal civil right lawsuit from Mr. Thevenin’s wife. Mr. Ranalli disputed the internal affairs finding, but Mayor Madden refuses to make his report public. And it was only last week, nearly three months after the Times Union filed a FOIL request and the day after it appealed an initial denial, that the city produced a singlepage, undated invoice for $ 3,768 from Mr. Ranalli. Again: public money, public information. Why is this so hard?
Why, too, couldn’t the city of Saratoga Springs simply say where a new, long- awaited Code Blue shelter will be located? Certainly city residents, homeless or not, deserve to know. Inexplicably, the city wouldn’t provide the information last week.
The public doesn’t need more lawsuits. It needs a stronger hand in prying loose public information.
Recently amended state law requires courts to award legal costs to plaintiffs who win FOIL lawsuits — if the judge finds the public officials had no “reasonable basis for denying access.” That was a good start, but it’s still an unfair playing field: Governments have lawyers on staff and budgets for litigation. Citizens don’t.
If governments wrongly deny information, they should know that they’ll always have to pay for it — and that the elected officials who cost the public all that money in legal awards will have to explain why to taxpayers. That just might be the incentive they need not to break the law in the first place.