May 31 – How have New York state agencies fulfilled Governor Kathy Hochul’s 2021 pledge to make the Empire State’s government more transparent?
Not so good, according to a report released this week by the watchdog group Reinvent Albany.
In its report, “Open New York 2024: Rating 66 Agency Transparency Plans,” Reinvent Albany found in the first quarter of 2024 that most plans were “incomplete and disappointing.”
Six agencies, including Hochul’s own executive chamber, have not yet published their transparency plans, as the governor previously instructed them to do. The other five agencies that failed to submit plans as of May 28 included the City University of New York, the Division of the Budget, the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Renewable Energy Situation.
“Unfortunately, most agencies have provided less detail for 2024 plans than in 2021, and more than half have not described how they are complying with all basic transparency mandates, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Open Meetings Act, or Open Data Executive Order 95 of 2013,” Reinvent Albany said in a press release upon the release of her report.
Reinvent Albany’s review of transparency plans found that the number of reporting metrics related to requests for information under New York’s Freedom of Information Law has fallen sharply since 2021, from 22 agencies three years ago to six this year.
Reinvent Albany and other watchdog groups in New York asked Hochul in September 2021 to issue an executive order requiring all government agencies to develop annual transparency plans that include compliance checklists related to FOIL caseloads and response times and compliance with the law at open meetings. The groups argued the plans would make it easier to track agencies’ performance on response times and backlogs.
Reinvent Albany said it is “disappointed” overall by the lack of a plan for Hochul’s own office, and especially disappointed by the Budget Department’s failure to update its database of discretionary funds since July 19, 2023 . The database was considered a “priority” under the law. the executive chamber’s 2021 transparency plan.
“It is unclear whether the Executive Chamber still plans to create a dashboard of how the transparency plan commitments have been achieved by the agencies,” Reinvent Albany said in his report.
In releasing the report, Reinvent Albany reiterated its support for the state legislature’s passage of several transparency reform measures that have also been endorsed by other watchdog groups such as the New York Coalition for Open Government.
The three most important bills on Reinvent Albany’s agenda include:
—FOIL Reporting Act, which would require state and local agencies to report data about their FOIL process to the Committee on Open Government (COOG), which would publish data on its website and at data.ny.gov.
—Open Data for Barment Lists, which would require the Department of Labor (DOL), the Workers Compensation Board (WCB), and the Office of General Services to publish lists of excluded companies and individuals as open data. The current DOL “list” of people and companies excluded by the WCB is virtually useless due to a limited, clunky search form.
—Open Meetings Law Improvements, a bill that would require agencies to hold hybrid meetings, ensure in-person and remote access for the public and members of government agencies, and close loopholes that result in less public attention to meetings and delayed access to the material For discussion.
