A poster over at SpeakupWNY shared the automatic response one receives when, prompted by Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan, one writes to Mayor Byron Brown to complain about the city stonewalling the media on Freedom of Information requests.

Here it is:

The Mayor’s Office has received your e-mail regarding the August 9, 2009 column written by the editor of the Buffalo News.

Let me make this statement as clearly as possible: The Mayor’s Administration has obeyed and will continue to obey the law, whether it involves Freedom of Information (FOI) law issues or any other issue. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary.

It was the editor who brought politics into her argument regarding the release of public documents and the upcoming mayoral primary election. But, as the editor knows well, if the paper truly has a quarrel regarding FOI and the availability of public documents from the city, the paper has plenty of legal recourse to follow. To date, the paper has not done so.

So this is not about obeying the law – the Administration, in every instance of processing a FOI request, whether from the Buffalo News or any other media outlet, has followed the letter of the law, without exception. This was clearly a political statement by the paper.

There are always two sides to every story. On Sunday you heard one side and now you have the other side.

Thank you for sharing your comments with us, we always appreciate the input we receive from the public.

Sincerely,

Peter K. Cutler
Director of Communications
Office of the Mayor

Paragraph 1: True enough.

Paragraph 2: Not true enough. There is indeed evidence that the mayor’s office has ignored the law on FOIL requests. Artvoice has often been made to wait more that five business days for acknowledgment of a FOIL request, in violation of the law, and more than 30 business days for the information we’ve requested, in violation of the law. On a few occasions, we have never received the information requested or an explanation as to why we have not—again, a violation of the law. Based on Sullivan’s column, it sounds like the News has similar problems with the mayor’s office. I don’t always rush to defend the Buffalo News, but I’m pretty sure Sullivan and reporter Jim Heaney would not say they’ve been stonewalled unless it’s true.

Paragraph 3: I’m not sure where Cutler see politics in Sullivan’s column. But I don’t doubt he does: It’s primary season, so he’ll imagine that any criticism of the Brown administration is steeped in politics. As to the existence of legal recourse, he’s right—the News can take the city to court. In doing so, the News guarantees that the wait for the release of public documents will be prolonged even further. If the court finds the city has stonewalled the News (or Artvoice, or an individual citizen), the city receives a slap on the wrist. This is a good state to be a journalist generally speaking, in terms of law, but FOIL has no teeth, and neither do our open meetings statutes or our campaign finance law.

Paragraph 4: Again, that clearly not true, and again, there’s nothing political in Sullivan’s statement. She did not endorse the mayor’s opponent in her column. I doubt very much that her paper will, either.

Paragraph 5: In fact there are at least two sides to every story, usually far more than two. Cutler’s side of the story is full of holes.

Paragraph 6: Well, I suppose that’s pro forma but it certainly rings false. Is the mayor’s office truly grateful for this criticism? Does the mayor appreciate it?

Good for Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan, calling out Mayor Byron Brown for his administration’s habit of stonewalling on the release of public records to the press.

We’ve been complaining about the problem for two years, and we published a cover story about the problem in February 2008. One AV editor was forced to FOIL minutes to a meeting of the Planning Board, which usually posts its minutes online, when the links to the minutes he needed were broken.

I had always imagined that Brown administration officials treated us more poorly than they did the News, because we’re smaller and have fewer resources with which to demand our rights under the law. I guess I was wrong.

Out of fairness, however, one city agency has always responded quickly to FOIL requests: BERC, under both Rich Tobe and his successor Brian Reilly, has never dragged out the process past deadlines, always provided the documents requested. The law department, too, under Alisa Lukasiewicz, was generally quick to respond, at least if the documents requested had been generated in the law department.

As I write this post, the Great Lakes Health system is conducting a private retreat at the Hyatt Regency downtown. The event is closed to the public and press. The retreat follows a half-hour “open meeting” conducted by GLH board chair Robert Gioia, and board members Edward Walsh, Jr., Sharon L. Hanson, and Kevin E. Cichocki, D.C.. At the end of the brief presentation (click here for the outline), the two reporters present were told to leave. Below are screen shots of the various “breakout” meetings taking place in private.

	And let’s not forget lunch…

Wonder what’s on the menu?

When you visit the Great Lakes Health Web site and read that they are “unveiling a bold new healthcare delivery system for Western New York,” what they really mean, obviously, is that they are “unveiling” it to one another, behind closed doors.

The Western New York public will then have the opportunity to live, and die, with their decisions.

The Great Lakes Health Board of Directors will hold an open meeting tomorrow morning, June 30, at 8:30am in the Hyatt Regency, Two Fountain Plaza in Buffalo.

This replaces the last open meeting that was abruptly canceled Wednesday, June 10 at Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

Click here to read the press release, sent to Artvoice from Buffalo General Hospital Corporate Administration via fax last week.

These meetings which have been taking place behind closed doors since late 2007, are finally being listed on the GLH Web site. This slow inclusion of the public comes despite the fact that the group had spent over $160,000 on marketing between May 15,2008, and April 30, 2009.

Click here to see the 38 pages of invoices from Stand Advertising to Kaleida Health—including Web site work—obtained by Artvoice subsequent to a FOIL request.

Here’s an Excel spreadsheet, illustrating the accumulating costs associated with controlling the message offered to the public by the group that is “unveiling a bold new healthcare delivery for Western New York.”

In the year and a half Great Lakes Health (formerly Newco, formerly Western New York Health System) has been in existence, there has been only one public forum held at the downtown library (May 12, 2009)—populated largely with members of the GLH leadership, as well as a handful of citizens who were petitioners on a lawsuit that successfully called for more transparency from the secretive group.

On April Fool’s Day we filed a FOIL request with Great Lakes Health System of Western New York, the entity formerly known as Newco, that was created by the Berger Commission to consolidate private not for profit Kaleida Health and Erie County Medical Center, a public benefit corporation.

Last Wednesday (May 20), we received some of the documents we requested on a disk. This was a gracious gesture, since at 25 cents a page, we would have had to pay over $30 for hard copies of the legal bills paid by Western New York Health System (WNYHS) and Kaleida Health to the law firm Garfunkel, Wild & Travis, P.C., of Great Neck, Long Island from November 1, 2007 through April 1, 2009. Click here to see all 128 pages of legal bills.

It appears the firm took in close to $400,000 handling various legal matters for the new entity, including around $165,000 representing Great Lakes Health in the Reese v. Daines case, which was brought seeking openness to board meetings and records for the press and public after Freedom of Information requests had been denied to this newspaper.

That’s the case they lost on September 12, 2008, when Hon Patrick H. NeMoyer ruled that WNYHS must “adhere to the requirements of the Open Meetings Law until such time as the hospital merger is completed and ECMCC is dissolved as a public benefit corporation.”

Rather than accept that ruling and abide by the law, the entity now known as Great Lakes Health decided to battle on in the courts, in the interest of darkness and secrecy, and wound up losing that too, unanimously, in the Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York in Rochester on May 1, 2009.

The only thing they got from the appeal was a reversal of Judge NeMoyer’s ruling that awarded attorney’s fees to Peter A. Reese, who argued the case against WNYHS. Had they simply paid Reese’s bill, it would have saved them a lot of money, judging by the $480/hour Garfunkel, Wild & Travis attorney Leonard M. Rosenberg charged them, for example.

If you download the pdf available above, check out invoice number 197668 dated January 31, 2009. Rosenberg made almost $15,000 for thirty hours of work that was laughed out of court. Lower members of the firm brought that one bill to $24,160.21. That amount is typical of the sums paid on a monthly basis to a law firm located on Long Island by the group that claims it is “unveiling a bold, new model of healthcare delivery for Western New York.”

Isn’t it also nice to hear that partner Robert Andrew Wild was named Board Chair for United Way of Long Island according to the law firm’s Web site? I wonder how much he donated to the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, after sucking so much money from the area in a failed attempt to keep the residents of our region completely in the dark about the future of our health care.

Meanwhile the matter of Reese v. Daines is headed for the textbooks. An updated civil practice law book published by Matthew Bender & Co., will be covering the successful Article 78 petition, so all New York State attorneys can learn from the case. Even the high priced ones in Great Neck.

Artvoice has obtained this email sent today from Buffalo Niagara Partnership President & CEO Andrew Rudnick, imploring the receiver to forward it to “colleagues, friends and family, especially those who are registered voters in the city of Buffalo – and ask them to forward it along to others.”

Even though it didn’t land in my email directly, we thought it would be a nice gesture to shine a light on it for all our readers.

This intimate appeal is in addition to the over $30,000 in assistance the Buffalo Niagara Partnership and/or their offshoot Buffalo Students First (which has yet to file a DBA, as we learned in court today) has spent promoting the incumbent school board candidates in tomorrow’s election. The incumbents did not authorize the support from Buffalo Students First, and the assistance they provided was over the $25 limit prescribed by law—by at least $30,000 as of April 30.

Tomorrow, May 5, elections for the Buffalo Public School Board will be held.

Please forward this email to colleagues, friends and family, especially those who are registered voters in the city of Buffalo – and ask them to forward it along to others. Buffalo School Board elections (given they are months from “general election day”) have dismal turnout, and races often have been decided by a few hundred votes. Thus, each vote can make a big difference.

The Partnership is supporting at-large candidates Dr. Catherine Collins, Florence Johnson and Christopher Jacobs. We believe these candidates are the best qualified to manage the schools’ $600+ million budget, will stand up in favor of reform in the system and are not beholden to the efforts of Buffalo Teacher Federation President Philip Rumore — which for too long have obstructed the change that is in the best interest of Buffalo’s school children.

Why should you care? Even if you don’t have children in the Buffalo Public Schools?

1). Buffalo is our region’s core  — and the success or failure of the Buffalo Public Schools is directly linked to how the city fares. Currently:

Buffalo is the nation’s third-poorest city, according to the U.S. Census.
The Buffalo metro area has the highest black male jobless rate (51.4 percent) among American’s 35 large cities, according to figures cited by Professor Marc V. Levine of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nearly two-thirds of adults in Buffalo function at the two lowest levels of literacy, meaning they can’t function at the minimum level of literacy employers in our region require for any job higher than entry level.
Thirty-five percent of Buffalo Public School children don’t graduate high school.
2). At a time when many students are not graduating from high school prepared for postsecondary education and work, 60 percent of the new jobs being created require advanced training or a college education. If our region’s workforce can’t meet employer needs, we will lose existing companies, and will not be able to recruit new businesses to invest in our region.

3). The availability of high-quality human talent is a top issue facing businesses today. Nationwide, business leaders increasingly place improving public education at the top of their list of priorities because they believe the education system in the United States fails to produce graduates prepared to compete both locally and in a global economy.

Buffalo’s young people deserve a better future, and our employers need them to graduate from public school prepared to contribute to the local workforce – in order ensure their own businesses have future viability in our community. Public education in the city is one place to start, and the Buffalo Public School Board elections will play no minor part.

Please vote tomorrow for Dr. Catherine Collins, Florence Johnson and Christopher Jacobs. Thanks – a lot of our future depends on the outcome.
Andrew J. Rudnick
President & CEO
P:  (716) 852-7100
F:  (716) 852-1756

Jody Vohwinkel, Executive Assistant to the President & CEO
jvohwinkel@thepartnership.org

The Partnership extends its thanks to the member businesses in its Leadership Circle.
These companies represent the Partnership’s most significant financial supporters.

WIVB Channel 4 reporter Rich Newberg just reported on today’s lawsuit during the 5pm broadcast. Tune in WIVB at 6pm tonight for more details.

Buffalo school board elections are tomorrow, May 5. Don’t forget to vote.

At 5:55pm yesterday, after our weekly print issue went to press, look what showed up in my email inbox. It’s a letter from Michael J. Looby, legal counsel to the Buffalo School District. Nice of him to stay in touch.

Attached are those highly sensitive financial disclosure papers that I requested on Monday, April 20, and was allowed to see, but not copy on Thursday, April 23.

Is it a coincidence that Looby responded just a few hours after receiving this Show Cause Order?

“Campaigns report required information in eclectic ways,” he writes, “not necessarily using a standardized form. Accordingly, until seeing the actual filings, it is not possible to ascertain if a given report might contain information which we are prohibited from transmitting, or which is statutorily exempt.”

Translation: It took the legal staff of the BPS nine days to reach the same conclusion I came to in half an hour last Thursday—that there were no Social Security numbers included in the 24 pages that constitute the candidates’ financial statements.

Looby then followed up with an email to me at 6:36pm yesterday, asking me to forward the attachment to another petitioner named in the Show Cause Order. It’s the same 24 pages of documents with a different cover letter, asking me again to remit $6.00 for the PDF. So, looks like I’m up to $12 in debt to the Buffalo Board of Education for essentially the same information.

At this rate, he could just fill up my email inbox with the same documents, over and over, until my bill equals any shortfall in next year’s school budget.

Read it and weep, folks. Today’s the deadline for candidates to file their April 30 updated financial disclosures. Prediction: The incumbents drop theirs off at the William Street Post Office at 11:59pm tonight. They will arrive at City Hall on Saturday. On Monday, the BPS legal cousel will begin the laborious task of scouring them for SS numbers. The school board election will take place on Tuesday, so no one will know in time just how much money was poured into the attempt to elect the incumbents to their $5,000/year positions.

Unless, of course, the 11am court date Monday compels them to release this clearly public information in an immediate manner.

This week I wrote about Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto’s fruitless efforts to obtain financial information from three of the city’s alphabet soup agencies:  BERC, BURA, and BNRC. For more than a month, he’s been seeking the following information:

■ a list of all outstanding loans, including borrower names, dates, and amounts loaned, amounts owed, and whether loans are current or in arrears;

■ a list of all loans that have been written off, as well as a list of collateral used to secure the loan and its disposition;

■ a list of all properties the agencies own;

■ a list by name of all the agencies’ officers, directors, and employees, along with their job titles and salaries for the last three years;

■ a list by name of all those possessing cell phones, Blackberries, beepers, etc., paid for by the agencies, along with providers and cost for the past year;

■ a copy of any audits or reviews of the three agencies, whether by private firms or government agencies.

He’s received nothing, and now the Council is threatening to subpoena the information.

In the article I forgot to mention this great irony: LoCurto is on the board of BURA.

BURA won’t provide basic information to its own board members?

Wednesday, Artvoice Editor Geoff Kelly posted a dated list of city employees and what they earned. This provoked touchy responses from some city hall employees, as well as from Michael Hoffert, Vice President, AFSCME Local 650 AFL-CIO—comparing the article to supermarket tabloid-style journalism.

But what makes me pig-biting mad is that the information we printed is not some top-secret document, highly classified in the interest of national security. There were no “deep throat” sorts of meetings in dark parking lots to obtain it. That information is the property of every city resident—indeed, every American.

How people handle the truth is often very telling.

Some people thanked Geoff for posting the information, and asked that we look into other organizations. We’ll try, but here’s how you can help: Download this sample-foil-request-for-records, tailor it to suit your particular request, and send it off to the public officer of your choice. There are thousands to choose from in New York alone.

You can do it via email or snail mail. You don’t have to be a journalist, or a lawyer, or a judge. All you have to be is curious about your government, and possess the tenacity to fill out a one-page boilerplate, address it to the records officer or the head of whatever agency you choose to learn about, then put it in the mailbox or click send.

By law, you must receive a response either granting your request, or explaining—in convoluted legalese—the reason the information is being denied. At which point, you will be directed where to appeal the denial. Go ahead and do so. It takes two seconds, and if nothing else, you’ll have the satisfaction that some lawyer in some state office is actually doing some work for his taxpayer-funded salary and benefits.

In most cases, you’ll be surprised by what gets exposed. Sometimes, even a denial can tell you a lot about an organization. Bottom line? It’s all right there under our noses. All we have to do is ask for it.

Judging by the letters we receive, and the letters to the editor at any of our local papers, there are a lot of you out there who are frustrated and suspicious of the whole culture of secrecy cultivated by the powers that be. While writing a letter to the editor can be cathartic, and sounding off on a blog can help further public discussion, don’t forget you too have the power to demand answers from the top. Knowledge is power, and gaining knowledge is an enabling act. Remember, our government, and by extension, our public agencies, were created and should remain “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Shame on any American who would criticize the release of public information. To do so is to advocate an ignorant populace. Generations of men and women have given their lives that we might live in a society where the freedom to petition authority is protected by law. Let freedom ring!

Good luck with your searches. Let us know what you find out. And God Bless America.

Newsweek has an interesting article about secrecy that’s well worth reading. Read why, according to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, secrecy isn’t just antidemocratic, it’s stupid.