Town is dragging its toes on a requirement for all metropolis companies to add information requests and information to an internet public portal, additional delaying transparency from metropolis companies, good-government advocates mentioned.
The invoice, which was handed within the Metropolis Council final November, requires each municipal company to decide into the town’s Open Data portal for information requests.
The up to date invoice formally requires each company to take part within the portal and now will embrace Freedom of Info requests made to the Metropolis Council and the 5 borough presidents’ workplaces.
The regulation would make it simpler to file information requests and supply extra transparency on delays. Businesses could be required to add responses inside a sure timeframe, permitting the requestor — oftentimes journalists — 14 days to publish a narrative with out it being shared broadly, in response to Rachael Fauss, the senior coverage advisor on the nonprofit Reinvent Albany.
She and different good-government advocates helped craft the invoice and are actually involved as a result of a report on its implementation due in June has nonetheless not been launched.
“The regulation would completely put us on higher footing to truly monitor the companies and see what they’re really doing on FOIL,” she mentioned.
The invoice, launched by Manhattan Councilmember Gale Brewer, lapsed into regulation on Dec. 25, 2025 — “a Christmas current for the advocates who fought for it,” Fauss joked.
“Should you get each company on the open information portal to start out proactively releasing information, you will get some higher information about what the precise issues are,” she mentioned.
“How are you aware what the issues are if no one’s wanting systematically at them on the metropolis degree?”
‘Nothing’s Taking place’
A spokesperson for the Division of Data and Info Companies, Kenneth Cobb, mentioned they deliberate to launch the plan to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Speaker Julie Menin in mid-November, however didn’t reply a query about its delay.
Brewer advised The Metropolis Reporter the Council deliberate to carry a listening to on the regulation’s delay in January.
“Nothing’s taking place,” she mentioned of the initiatives the invoice deliberate. She mentioned she thought the Mamdani administration “must be higher.”
New York Metropolis authorities is notoriously gradual round Freedom of Info Legislation requests, typically delaying for years earlier than releasing data.
A 2025 evaluation from Reinvent Albany discovered that the town authorities receives round 170,000 FOIL requests a yr, and 16% have been nonetheless open a yr later. Knowledge from the present Open Data portal confirmed that response occasions have been slowing, which they blamed on staffing points.
Journalists typically depend on the Freedom of Info Legislation to acquire schedules, emails, renderings, and some other information to tell their reporting — however the delays can typically render the info ineffective as soon as it lastly arrives.
And it can also maintain very important data from the general public.
In September 2019, The Metropolis Reporter requested information and outdoors contracts associated to a 911 system improve from the town’s expertise company.
Since then, the town’s Workplace of Expertise and Innovation has prolonged the deadline 60 occasions. The most recent projected response date is Dec. 1 of this yr.
Noel Hidalgo, the manager director of BetaNYC, an open authorities advocacy group, mentioned this regulation would ideally give everybody a greater sense of how the town works.
“We’re in a second in time the place authorities data is among the few issues that you could really belief,” he mentioned. “FOIL is our final recourse in regard to transparency and operation.”
