Under Mayor Eric Adams, Freedom of Information Law requests are lingering in limbo for months and sometimes years, according to a new analysis from the good government group Reinvent Albany.
The group examined all of the records that were in the City's FOIL system in 2024 to come up with their findings. The biggest offenders? The Mayor's Office, which took an average of 283 days to close out a FOIL request, and the Department of Correction, which took a whopping 485 days to close out a request, according to Reinvent Albany's review of the data on the City's OpenRecords portal.
For journalists whose requests to City agencies often are dragged out for months and months, the findings were no surprise. But as Reinvent Albany's Rachael Fauss explained, the sheer scope of the failure of the City in fulfilling its state-obligated FOIL mandate was tough to even get a sense of while digging through the data.
"The system is not working very well at all," said Fauss. "We created the technology to make requests, but the actual follow-through for compliance has been completely lacking."
It wasn't supposed to be this way.