New York News Publishers Association

Mark C. Mahoney, Editorial Page Editor,

The Daily Gazette

It’s your government. It’s your right to know what it’s up to

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
 – Thomas Jefferson

The people can’t exercise their control over the government without being informed. But in an odd twist, it’s the government that serves as the gatekeeper to much of the information that the citizens need to carry out their civic responsibilities.

To some government officials, transparency is inefficient, inconvenient and intrusive. It exposes their flaws, their failures, their fears, their secrets and their schemes, their omissions and their crimes.

That’s why government officials often try so hard to withhold or hide information from a vested public and a prying press.

And it’s why each year at this time, during “Sunshine Week,”  journalists, citizen rights advocates, government watchdog groups and other dedicated individuals commit themselves to reminding people of their right to know, offer guidance in securing it, and encourage citizens to fight to preserve that right.

The fight for your right to know isn’t just a philosophical exercise. In real, practical, everyday matters, government and the citizens are at odds over disclosure of information that directly affects all of our lives.

KEEPING US IN THE DARK

Throughout the state every year, government officials are withholding public documents such as budget information; draft reports and contracts; meeting in closed-door executive sessions on matters that are required by law to be discussed in public; using phone calls, emails and texts to conduct public business outside the earshot of the citizens; withholding information about police discipline and delaying or denying the release of body camera footage in public incidents; failing to post items of public interest on meeting agendas; failing to disclose unethical conflicts of interest; failing to notify the public of meetings with enough time to allow them to attend; and holding meetings in venues too small to accommodate citizens.

And every time they choose to ignore transparency, the people lose a little bit of the power they’re entitled to have over their government.

If the citizens are unaware of their rights or are unwilling to exercise them, government officials will continue to exploit them — to the detriment of a free and open democracy.

THE BATTLE FOR ACCESS

New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and Open Meetings Law (OML) are notoriously flawed, both in terms of protecting the public’s right to know and enforcing it.

Last month, a coalition of 10 good government groups advocated for a package of bills to reverse that.

It includes legislation requiring all agencies to report their FOIL activity; require entities that submit records to state agencies that are excepted from disclosure under FOIL to periodically reapply for the exception; make it easier for citizens to recover FOIL attorneys fees; reduce agency response times to FOIL requests; and require agencies to allow for electronic appeals of request denials.

On top of that, nearly 40 organizations are pushing to ensure that provisions established during the pandemic to expand public access to government meetings through video conferencing and hybrid meetings remain in place.

The federal government also has a transparency law, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), that covers access to federal meetings and documents. That process, like the state process, is plagued by delays in the release of information and restrictions on public access to documents and meetings.

Our focus here has been on state transparency laws because they most directly affect citizens in New York and because citizens have the best opportunity to advocate for enforcement and expansion of transparency laws through their representatives in state government.

We hope during Sunshine Week to not only educate you about your rights, but inspire you to push the clouds of secret government away and let the sunshine in.

Niagara Gazette Editorial Board

Celebrating public input during Sunshine Week

On the surface, it might sound like a small thing.

From our view, whenever a group of residents, voters and taxpayers push their government to not only listen to their concerns but also address them, we think it is always an important thing. 

That's exactly what happened back in January when seven residents attending a meeting in the City of Lockport in Niagara County stood in solidarity behind their elected officials to prove a point about appropriate accommodations for public meeting space. 

Those residents took their stand during a Lockport Common Council work session after Mayor John Lombardi III made the decision to move the meeting to a small and cramped back room inside city hall. Lombardi also opposed a council suggestion that the city government's meetings, work sessions included, be held in council chambers where there was more room for the public to comfortably attend. 

“We get more work done back here," a defiant Lombardi told a city alderman. "There’s certain things we hash out back here that the public doesn’t need to hear. If it’s up to me, it will stay right here.”

Well, in the end, it wasn't up to the mayor because the residents, with help from a statewide good government and transparency advocacy group, eventually convinced him to reverse course. 

Williamsville attorney Paul Wolf, president emeritus of the New York Coalition for Open Government, said the small meeting room violated the state’s Open Meetings Law. He also noted it is not conducive to the needs of individuals with disabilities. 

“To force members of the public to stand around a conference table where members of the city council can sit and members of the public cannot, is not an appropriate space for a meeting,” Wolf said. “The fact that some city council members think this setup is OK is shocking. If other meeting spaces are available with more room and seating available, they should be used.”

We're happy to report Lombardi has since relented, allowing all public meetings in Lockport to be held in council chambers where there's more space for members of the public to attend. 

We think the entire situation is a good one to highlight as New York state heads into Sunshine Week. Starting Monday, across New York, residents, journalists, media outlets and good government advocates like Wolf's coalition will be celebrating the importance of open government, freedom of information and emphasizing how sunlight is often the best disinfectant for democratic accountability. 

It is the perfect time to celebrate the work of the New York Coalition for Open Government, a non-partisan, non-profit group whose members are united by a passion for open government and protecting the public's right to know about the inner workings of its government. 

Wolf and his group have proven to be a valuable resource for citizens and journalists alike. 

In addition to helping Lockport residents convince their mayor to do the right thing by accommodating the public's interest in public meetings, the coalition has been involved in numerous successful efforts to promote change for the better when it comes to opening up meetings and improving the process for obtaining public information in the Empire State. 

For example, for 57 years since its formation in 1968, the Erie County Legislature did not allowed public comments during their meetings.

Thanks in part to the hard work of coalition members, that all changed last year when county lawmakers agreed to allow members of the public to address them for up to three minutes each at the start of legislative sessions. 

At the state level, the coalition helped get two important open meetings law changes signed into law, including one requiring meeting documents to be posted online at least 24 hours prior to a meeting and a second requiring meeting minutes or a recording to be posted online within two weeks of any public meeting.

This is a real record of accomplishment for an organization without any paid staff members, driven entirely by the passion and commitment of its all-volunteer supporters. 

The coalition continues to work on several other important efforts, including a push to mandate live streaming of meetings and posting recordings online, requiring a minimum of two hours of annual training on Freedom of Information and open meetings laws for members of public bodies and amending the state's Constitution to include a provision on the right to open government. 

As we embark on Sunshine Week, we salute all of the residents, coalition members and journalists who put in the work all year to ensure members of the public have ample access to the proceedings of their government and to public information.

While some elected and appointed officials have attempted to suggest otherwise, it's always a cause for celebration when members of the public and the press embrace and assert one of their most basic rights — their right to know. 

Advance Media New York's Editorial Board

Don’t turn back the clock on police discipline transparency in NY

Six years ago, after the caught-on-video murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the New York state Legislature passed 10 police reform bills in three days. One of them made once-secret police disciplinary records available to the public under the Freedom of Information Law.

Before passage of this law, records of complaints or findings of law enforcement misconduct that did not result in criminal charges against an officer were almost entirely inaccessible to the public, or to victims of police brutality, excessive use of force or other misconduct. Secrecy also made it impossible to call out the police internal affairs failures that protect them.

Now, two Central New York legislators want to make those records secret again. It’s a step backward for transparency and accountability.

State Sen. Chris Ryan, D-Geddes, and Assembly Member Al Stirpe, D-Cicero, are co-sponsors of a bill that would seal “unfounded,” “exonerated” or “pending” claims against law enforcement officers. That would cover the vast majority of police disciplinary records — essentially reversing the 2020 reform.

Stirpe argues that allegations of police misconduct should be proven before they are made public. Except police misconduct is rarely proven.

For example, only 21% of misconduct complaints against the NYPD were substantiated by the agency that investigates them. The rest were deemed “unfounded,” within NYPD guidelines or undetermined.

However, many of those “unfounded” claims look credible to the public, says the good government group Reinvent Albany, an opponent of the Stirpe-Ryan bill. Gothamist reported several instances of police using force against individuals where video evidence corroborated their misconduct claims, yet their claims were ruled “unsubstantiated.”

The public also has lost faith that police departments are able to discipline their own, and for good reason. The New York Times reported that in 71% of serious misconduct cases over 20 years, NYPD officers were given lesser punishments than recommended, or none at all.

“The worldview reflected in this bill is one where officers must be constantly on guard from false accusations, but the reality is that police rarely, if ever, face serious repercussions for actual violations,” Reinvent Albany wrote in a memo in opposition to the bill.

Stirpe voted for the 2020 police reform bill. He paid lip service to the driving force behind it. “I’m for accountability. Everybody has to be accountable,” he told staff writer Jon Moss earlier this month. Making police discipline records secret again does not advance that goal.

What’s really at play here is politics. Stirpe and Ryan are up for reelection in November and are courting the support of police unions. They’ve been in Stirpe’s ear on this issue “since day one,” he said.

The lack of transparency disparages all police departments and officers, while protecting a small number of cops who need attention. Accountability measures, such as the use of body-worn cameras, protect the overwhelming number of good cops.

Six years ago, the editorial board urged lawmakers to “keep the pressure on” for police transparency and accountability. “Momentum for police reform could well stall,” we wrote. “Police unions will push back. Elected officials, accused of being soft on crime, could lose their nerve.”

That’s exactly what this legislation represents: a loss of nerve to rein in police who act with impunity. The legislature should not pass this bill, and if it does, Gov. Kathy Hochul should veto it.

Miranda Spivack,
Author of “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back" (The New Press 2025) and is vice president of the D.C Open Government Coalition.

Photo credit: Dan Gross

Removal of federal data affects us in our hometowns

Federal data on rising hunger, on long term trends in maternal and infant mortality, information about preparing for disasters - gone.

Freedom of Information Act offices eviscerated across the federal government.

The Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk  insisted it was not required to open up its records to the public, even when courts found otherwise
Getting information of many types from the federal government – which has never been easy – is now a nearly impossible task.

And even if the government does answer a request for its public records, how reliable will the information be? The disappearance from government websites of decades of data on health, diseases, education, criminal justice, civil rights are among the many datasets that the Trump administration has dumped. The experiences of two key government agencies are emblematic of this information chasm. Experts who track certain data found that more than 3,000 pages of information were removed from the Census Bureau website, and similar losses occurred at the Centers for Disease Control.

Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump has taken several steps – via executive order, and by making public statements - to demand that federal agencies ditch their data. So even if FOIA offices were somehow miraculously reinvigorated, they will have less and less information to give out. And that is information that your tax dollars already paid for, and by all rights, belongs to you.

The bottom line is that public is being kept in the dark and decision making is hobbled. Yet the outcry over disappearing data has been limited mostly to academics, scientists, finance people and others who regularly mine government data and documents to inform their work.

One of the biggest challenges that open government advocates perpetually face is how to build support for the idea that open government is government for all - not just for the experts or the academicians.
But there are many ways to enlist broad support for open and accurate information from the government.

For starters, show how government secrecy and disappearing data have a direct effect on your neighbors and their communities.

Take for instance the move in April 2025 by the CDC to stop collecting long term data on maternal and infant mortality. Might this not be information that people beyond the medical profession, those making decisions in state and local government about how to allocate public health dollars, and pregnant women and their partners might want to know?

Or what about a decision to end a Justice Department database that tracks law enforcement misconduct? Wouldn’t it be helpful for residents of communities to have this information, along with state and local governments and federal agencies who might be hiring and need to know the backgrounds of applicants?

Data collection on food insecurity - that is to say hunger – has also been limited by the federal Department of Agriculture. The agency said in announcing the end of the program that it had other sources for the information.Groups that track the data say the USDA’s move has made it difficult to understand the breadth of hunger in the United States and push for policies to end it.

Data about the state of public schools in the United States is also among the missing.

Federal infrastructure data is disappearing. That sounds wonky, but here’s why it matters: “It’s made it harder to track conditions at prisons, decide how to increase security in cities during large events and plan natural disaster responses, according to researchers, and state and local government employees…” said a report from NOTUS.

The American Statistical Association predicted extensive damage to democracy due to disappearing data in a report issued in December.  “Federal statistics are a core democratic institution, supporting free and fair elections, fair and impartial courts, informed civil discourse, and other vital functions that are not easily replicated by the private sector.”

The disappearance of government information can also put more power in the hands of private entities and businesses, themselves often exempt from public records laws.

“Removing government databases can also transfer power from public to private entities, strengthen monopolies, hobble innovation, and promote autocracy,” according to a recent New England Journal of Medicine article.