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?

Today Buffalo’s Common Council reached a deal that will end a three-month old fight over 2009 capial spending between the Council’s five-member majority and Mayor Byron Brown.

The crux of the fight had been that the mayor wanted money for infrastructure improvement projects—curbs, sidewalks, road repairs—in a single, citywide pot that he ouwld control. The five members of the Council majority argued that in the past two years the mayor had divided that pot of money inequitably, punishing political foes and rewarding friends. So the Council earmarked that money, making pots specific to each district.

The mayor, furious, vetoed the pots of money for four of the five majority members, while leaving pots of money for the four coucnilmembers who support him. (He also left a pot of money for the Niagara District, hoping to peel Niagara’s David Rivera away from the majority. That didn’t work.)

Unable to overturn the mayor’s veto, the Council instead delayed the sale of bonds to finance the mayor’s capital budget. Today, after weeks of bullheadedness on both sides, the ongoing negotiations (and they were ongoing, no matter what mayoral employees Peter Cutler and Peter Savage kept telling the Buffalo News) yielded a compromise: The five individual pots of infrastructure improvement money the mayor had left in the budget for Niagara, Ellicott, Masten, North, and University districts would be returned to a citywide pot totaling $3.4 million.

Which the mayor will control.

It’s not an absolute return to the mayor’s original proposal—the Council’s amended budget had made some other, minor changes that mayor did not or could not veto—but it’s close.

Lovejoy’s Rich Fontana told the Buffalo News that councilmember were assured that the $3.4 million would be spent equitably across the city’s nine districts.

The compromise will be ratified tomorrow afternoon, when the Council votes to aprove the bond sales.

By Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News

The Adam Zyglis cartoon above prompted this testy response from Peter Cutler, Mayor Byron Brown’s communications director, in today’s Buffalo News:

For the second time in two years, News editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis depicted Mayor Byron Brown’s State of the City address with negative imagery.

During his address, the mayor acknowledged challenges that still confront Buffalo, but he appropriately highlighted significant progress that has occurred over the past three years.

Buffalo’s situation is not unique. The long economic decline of former manufacturing- based regions like ours is well documented. But current mayoral administrations in cities like Buffalo are compelled to make decisions and enact policies that address the aftermath of such decades-long decline that produces current problems in their cities.

In his speech, Brown outlined policies that have had a positive impact on the city’s condition, helping to lower crime and stabilize city finances. He also spoke of new initiatives that will continue this progress despite national economic problems. This is what voters elect their leaders to do and it is what they expect them to accomplish.

The Zyglis cartoon was a cheap shot. It unfairly questioned the dedication of many hard-working people in the public and private sectors who are making a difference in pulling Buffalo out of decades of decline toward a future of growth and opportunity.

Watch out, Adam. That’s two. Disseminate one more nasty cartoon about the mayor and he’ll send the Buffalo Police Department to knock down your door and confiscate your pens and drawing pads.

A couple months ago, fed up with the City of Buffalo’s policy on sharing public documents, I wrote a piece about it. Basically the city’s policy is this: There is no such thing as a public document that can be shared with a citizen without that citizen filing a formal request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). The City of Buffalo, in fact, pretends that New York State law compels the city to require a formal FOIL request, even for something so innocuous as the minutes of a meeting that are normally posted online but, for some reason or another, have not been.

That’s nonsense, according to the state’s Committee on Open Government, as I wrote in my article. But the policy allows the city to control and delay the flow of information. In the case of the news media, the policy gives the administration time to anticipate potentially negative stories. The policy forces journalists to pursue information through back channels, which opens their sources to the repercussions that attend breaking the administration’s lockdown policy on sharing information.

The FOIL process comes with built-in delays: The recipient of a request has five business days to acknowledge receipt of your request, even in these modern times when most FOIL requests are filed by email. The recipient has 20 additional business days to provide the information you’ve requested or offer a convincing explanation why they can’t. The city often ignores even those fairly generous constraints.

Why am I rehashing all this today, besides that it’s a frustration that nags at me each and every morning?

Because yesterday afternoon at 5:29pm, I filed a FOIL request with Peter Cutler, Mayor Byron Brown’s director of communications, cutting out the middle men. (This is how it goes usually: You ask the person who might have a document if you can have it; he or she tells you to file a FOIL with Peter Cutler; Cutler forwards your request around and copies in Assistant Corporation Counsel Cavette Chambers; they mull it over; when and if they respond, Chambers forwards the appropriate documents and explanations to you.) The requests asks for all budgeting and expenditure documents related to the Mayor’s Impact Team since January 1, 2006.

I thought that, if only for my own amusement, I’d track the city’s response time. So today is Day 1.

You can read the text of my FOIL request to Peter Cutler after the jump…

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