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ALBANY-Sen. Joseph Bruno finally got off the dime in making state government more accountable.
Bruno announced Monday that the Legislature has reached agreement with the New York Newspaper Publishers Association on legislation that would help stop government stonewalling of requests made under the state's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).
The long-awaited agreement finally puts some teeth in the enforcement of the state's public access laws and help guarantee that FOIL requests are responded to promptly by government agencies.
The bill states that the court may assess against a government agency, reasonable attorney's fees and other litigation costs incurred by the FOIL petitioner, if the agency had no reasonable basis for denying access to the information, or if the agency failed to respond to a request or appeal within the time defined in the law.
The legislation builds on a law, enacted last year, to strengthen the state's FOIL law. Newspapers throughout the State praised the FOIL initiative as a major reform and have been advocating for the additional FOIL changes included in the agreement announced Monday.
Bruno said "that it also ensures that taxpayers will not be forced to pay for frivolous lawsuits related to FOIL requests. After a week and a half of rain, this agreement on FOIL will help bring more sunshine to New York State."
"This legislation would encourage citizens to enforce their rights under the Freedom of Information Law, knowing that if they prevail, a government agency that violated the law would have to pay their costs," Diane Kennedy, president of the New York Publishers Association, said. "As it stands, agencies sometimes ignore requests for documents, secure in the knowledge that the law makes it nearly impossible for citizens without significant financial resources to fight for access."
"Current law offers no mechanism in place to protect a citizen's right to hold an agency responsible for denying a reasonable request for information," Bruno said. "This bill would provide a means of enforcement to discourage agencies from dismissing legitimate requests. In order to ensure that our citizens are informed about how our State operates and how our agencies make the decisions they do, we need to safeguard their access to that information. If access to information is denied, then we need to provide some recourse so that citizen is able to pursue his or her right to know, and this legislation will do just that."
The Assembly passed their version of reforming the "sunshine" law in March during "Sunshine Week" but the senate version has been stalled by Bruno who was doing his own stonewalling in bringing the measure to the floor for a vote.
There has been little recourse for the public if public officers and agencies unreasonably relay or fail to grant access to public records and the court has held that if a petitioner was forced to sue in order to try to gain access to public records, they could only petition to receive reimbursement of their costs if they could show that the documents requested were of significant interest to the general public.
The bill passed Monday clarifies that documents in question have to be made available even if they are of limited interest to the public. 5-22-06
© 2006 North
Country Gazette
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