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?

Four items of interest:

—Byron Brown wins the endorsement of Goin’ South, the South Buffalo political organization stacked with city employees. No surprise there; there was no chance that Ray McGurn and Goin’ South would buck the mayor and his allies Brian Higgins, Mark Schroeder, and Tim Kennedy. Still, it’s a show of force for Brown.

—Mickey Kearns wins the endorsement of the Police Benevolent Association. No surprise there, either: What was Bob Meegan to do, spin around and embrace a mayor who keeps dragging the PBA to court and losing? (It’d be informative to get a breakdown of the City of Buffalo’s legal expenses fighting the PBA over the past three years, including time spent by the Corporation Counsel.) The PBA is Kearns’s first union endorsement, but how much good will it do him? There are 700-odd cops in the BPD, plus support staff, but lot of cops live and vote in the suburbs. Nonetheless, Kearns needed an endoresement like this and now he has it.

—Jim Heaney reported in Sunday’s Buffalo News that the FBI, US Attorney, Erie County DA, and New York State Police are all in some manner or another investigating Buffalo’s City Hall. Some are looking at Brian Davis’s finances, some at BERC and One Sunset, some at the city’s use of HUD money. Heaney did well to confirm these investigations are occurring; it’s hard to get beyond a no comment on these matters. His article also offers a review of the cavalcade of scandals rolling out of City Hall over the past few months.

—Most interesting to me, however, is this story by Susan Schulman, about a Cleveland developer whose East Side housing project was nixed after the Jeremiah Project, a group run by the influential Reverend Richard Stenhouse, failed to win a contract to oversee minority hiring on the project. (For the sake of argument, I’m leaving alone the merits of NRP’s project. In any case, Stenhouse’s objections seem thin, since the Jeremiah Project has been lead agency in similar low/mod rental housing development themselves.) Schulman is admirably careful about what she implies in her story, but it reads to me like a classic Buffalo shakedown: Stenhouse, in a position to stall a project, seeks a part of it. When he doesn’t get the contract, he helps to kill the project.

Why is this much more to me interesting than Heaney’s article? Because, whereas a local developer might take this setback stoically in hopes of working another day, a developer from Cleveland may not fear the consequences of speaking out. This is the sort of thing that raises eyebrows at the FBI.