Dec 31
2024
Using public records to unlock stories
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Before he retired to the west coast of Mexico this fall, my Investigative Post colleague Bruce Rushton made a salient observation: New York has a particularly weak open records law because it has no teeth.
By teeth, he meant that in New York there are virtually no penalties for bureaucrats if they ignore or delay responding to a records request for information the public has a right to see. In other words, there’s no incentive for the government to be transparent despite our Freedom of Information Law saying it ought to be.
That’s a problem I ran into headfirst this year, again, and again and again. After a year of banging my head against the opacity of state government, I have come around to Bruce’s view: New York is decidedly non-transparent. Time and again this year, I found myself asking for what I thought was routine information or readily-available documents, only to be told I’d have to fight to get a hold of the records.
Still, I was able to dig up some good stories this year using the Freedom of Information Law.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomTake, for example, my story earlier this month about the swanky hotel stays and expensive steak dinners enjoyed by the outgoing CEO of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. That story came about after I noticed some odd budget lines allocated to Henry Wojtaszek’s office and filed a FOIL request. The oddities turned out to be normal. But in the cache I received were a year’s worth of his travel receipts and, voila, a pretty interesting story.
Some of my FOIL requests revealed how secretive and backwards the open records law can be. That was the case with the Buffalo Tesla factory.
In the course of reporting on the local plant all the way back in early 2023, I noticed that a state agency, the Fort Schuyler Management Corp., owned some 100 acres of land behind the sprawling South Buffalo facility. I wanted to know what the agency, or Tesla, planned to do with the land, so I filed a FOIL request in March 2023. After several months of delays, Fort Schuyler finally got back to me: There weren’t any big plans for the 100 acres, but Tesla was making plenty of upgrades to the publicly-owned factory. Did I want those records instead? Yes, I replied, give me everything you’ve got.
That turned out to be 4,222 pages.
The records started rolling in last fall. First, peeking through the redactions, I found a story about a secret, multi-million dollar fund the state was maintaining for Tesla so the company could upgrade the factory however it liked. Then, I noticed in other records that Tesla was installing solar panels on the factory’s roof — but not solar panels that looked like anything the company itself manufactured. Tesla, if you’ll recall, originally came to Buffalo to make Solar Roof tiles. Production issues, which I reported on in January 2023, caused them to mostly shut down those manufacturing lines and use the factory space for desk jobs instead.
After another FOIL request, I got my answer: Tesla had imported Chinese solar panels to install on its own factory. Consider it an ironic footnote in the long-simmering Buffalo Billion scandal.
More than a year had passed by the time I had gotten all of the records pursuant to my original request. For months, I had been dealing with a private attorney hired by Fort Schuyler. Because the request had taken so long, I wanted to know what the government was paying this guy. Despite being polite on the phone, he had redacted nearly every page released to me in one way or another.
After yet another FOIL request, I got my answer: $50,493.50.
That situation is a microcosm of my year: On one hand, New York’s toothless FOI Law allowed bureaucrats to delay, redact and waste taxpayer money. On the other hand, the law allowed me to expose them for doing so.
Other delayed FOIL requests netted me other good stories this year.
Last summer, for example, I asked Buffalo City Hall for a cache of records about Braymiller Market after former Mayor Byron Brown’s aggressive push to grant the business a $561,000 bailout loan. After receiving my request, city employees ignored it. After a few months of waiting, I appealed. The city attorneys ignored my appeal.
Finally, in June, as the one-year anniversary of my original request approached, I wrote to the city lawyers and bureaucrats with an ultimatum: Stop ignoring my FOIL request or I would publish a story about how they flouted the law.
The bureaucrats chose to get to work. By Aug. 30, I had a flash drive of Braymiller Market records in my hand. Those documents yielded a story about how the downtown grocery store was behind on mortgage payments, vendor payments, taxes and otherwise failing badly. Less than two months later, the store was closed.
The records made it clear that City Hall knew Braymiller Market was struggling from the very beginning and did everything it could to hide the depth of the problem from public view.
It also took the better part of a year to get the state Department of Environmental Conservation, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office and the Genesee County Economic Development Center to turn over some 10,000 pages of records related to the massive STAMP industrial park under construction in Genesee County.
By the time I finished combing through all of those pages, I netted yet another big story: Staff working for Hochul and Sen. Chuck Schumer pressured regulators at key points to approve permits for the industrial park, violating environmental laws and putting the neighboring Tonawanda Seneca Nation at risk.
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Another FOIL success: Gaming Commission records I obtained showed Western OTB hired not only the outgoing CEO’s son, but the incoming CEO’s former political fixer, whose consulting firm pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud.
When my colleague Bruce was still here, he and I would debate just how bad New York’s law is. Surely other states had worse laws, I would argue, thinking of my experience with South Carolina’s open records act. During my two years in Myrtle Beach, I was able to access records but only after I wrote a check. Thankfully, that’s something New York officials rarely make me do.
But after this year, it seems obvious to me: New York’s law badly needs teeth.
Until state lawmakers bone up and add some, I’ll continue filing requests and calling out the bureaucrats when they don’t comply. I may even sue, as we did the Federal Bureau of Investigation this year.
Along the way, I’ll probably come across some good stories. Stay tuned.
