Tag: Transparency

Mar 5

2024

Lawsuit accuses Erie County Sheriff of stonewalling

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Erie County Sheriff John C. Garcia. Photo by Garrett Looker. The Erie County Sheriff’s Office is being sued for jail records. Again. The Partnership for the Public Good, which asked for records last May, filed suit in December after its request for documents for the downtown holding center and Alden lockup was refused. It’s the third time since 2018 that the sheriff’s office has been sued over jail records. In the two previous cases, courts ordered the sheriff’s office to provide requested documents.  “They don’t give up stuff they should give up,” said Nan Haynes, who sued the sheriff in[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Oct 3

2023

Buffalo’s stonewalling city government

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Mayor Byron Brown’s administration has long been hostile to requests for public documents from journalists.  In recent months, that hostility has grown worse. Since this summer, the mayor’s law department and several of his commissioners have broken state law time and again in their responses — or failures to respond — to document requests by Investigative Post reporters. Brown’s administration has failed to abide by the state Freedom of Information Law’s most basic requirements to respond to requests in a timely manner.  The city’s top attorney, Corporation Counsel Cavette Chambers, has refused to answer our reporters’ formal appeals when Brown’s[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 8

2023

Transparency, Roswell Park style

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Last week, the new chair of Roswell Park Cancer Institute’s board of directors pledged the state-funded center to “an unprecedented … level of transparency and accountability,” after the board voted to make public a critical report it has kept secret for over a year. And yet the board took the vote in executive session — a proceeding closed to the public. When asked why discussion of the matter and the vote were hidden from public view, Leecia Eve, the new board chair, told The Buffalo News, “No particular reason.” That’s what continues to pass for “transparency” at Roswell Park.  Even[...]

Posted 7 months ago

Jan 31

2023

Government meetings are secret – and legal

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State law mandates that local legislative bodies conduct their business in public. But a loophole allows elected officials to caucus in private, and a new report finds that many legislative bodies do. The Erie County Legislature is among those that not only caucus, but discuss public matters, according to a new study released by the New York Coalition for Open Government.  These “secret meetings” held behind closed doors throughout the state’s local governments “completely gut” the Open Meetings Law, leaving the public in the dark, according to the report.  “The public meeting becomes just a show or just a sham.[...]

Posted 1 year ago

Aug 17

2022

Police union pressing to suppress records

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Buffalo’s police union is making headway in its efforts to put a lid on the release of officers’ disciplinary records. Last Friday, lawyers for the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association filed a lawsuit against the City of Buffalo, asking a judge to order the city to honor an arbitrator’s decision curtailing the public’s right to learn about allegations of police misconduct. If successful, the lawsuit would require the city to destroy all records of a misconduct complaint against an officer unless the department’s Internal Affairs Division finds the officer guilty.  That would eliminate records of almost all complaints and the investigations[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Aug 2

2022

Ruling in iPost stadium lawsuit

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More details of an engineering study assessing the condition of Highmark Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills, have been made public following a ruling in a lawsuit brought by Investigative Post. The judge, however, ruled in favor of Erie County’s insistence that portions of the study  remain confidential because of security concerns. Investigative Post filed a lawsuit against Erie County in state Supreme Court on Feb. 28 seeking the study after the county provided only a heavily redacted copy of the study in which 170 of its 182 pages were blacked out. The county essentially argued that it was withholding[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Jun 15

2022

Hochul’s lack of due diligence on expressway

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Gov. Kathy Hochul has committed $1 billion to cover a portion of the Kensington Expressway without benefit of any studies to assess the project’s updated cost or impact on the environment and health of East Side residents. Meanwhile, the state governor’s office and Department of Transportation are slow-walking Freedom of Information requests from Investigative Post seeking documents related to the project.  The state FOI law generally requires agencies to provide records within 20 business days of receiving a request. Twenty-six business days have passed since Investigative Post filed its requests. The DOT has said it intends to take up to[...]

Posted 2 years ago

Jan 14

2022

Board of Elections fail transparency test

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When a good government group decided to test whether county election boards comply with the state’s open government laws, the first hurdle was getting someone – anyone – at those boards to answer an email or a phone call. It wasn’t easy. Last summer the New York Coalition for Open Government — a group that tracks government agencies’ compliance with freedom of information and open meetings laws — emailed 17 county election boards across the state to ask how often commissioners held meetings, whether those meetings were publicized, and whether meeting agendas and meetings were posted online. In many cases[...]

Posted 2 years ago
Investigative Post

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