School News

Elmont School District sued by transparency group

Reclaim New York accuses officials of not complying with request for information

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Reclaim New York Executive Director Brandon Muir, left, and attorney Dennis J. Saffran discussed the New York Transparency Project on Tuesday in Mineola.
Reclaim New York Executive Director Brandon Muir, left, and attorney Dennis J. Saffran discussed the New York Transparency Project on Tuesday in Mineola.
Courtney McGee/Herald

The nonprofit group Reclaim New York filed a lawsuit on June 7 in Nassau County Supreme Court against the Elmont School District for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Law request.

Reclaim New York, an organization that works for government reform and accountability, submitted more than 250 FOIL requests for records of 2014 expenditures to local government entities on Long Island, as it plans to do around the state. Of the 57 entities that were listed as non-compliant, 18 were in Nassau County. Nine were school districts. Five districts ignored repeated FOIL requests, the group said, and four, including Elmont and District 13, denied them.

According to Reclaim New York spokesman Doug Kellog, by FOILing for an ordinary report, Reclaim was attempting to illustrate how difficult the process would be for an ordinary citizen trying to obtain public documents.

“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to beg to see how local government spends their money,” said the group’s executive director, Brandon Muir. “This lawsuit and others combine with our grass-roots effort to put every public official and taxpayer-funded entity on notice that the days of spending money in the shadows are over.”

Muir said that more than 200 entities on Long Island were compliant, a rate of 80 percent. That’s 10 percentage points lower than the compliance rate in the Hudson Valley, the only other region targeted by the project so far.

In a FOIL request sent to the Elmont School District on March 7, Reclaim asked for line items expenditures to be delivered in either Microsoft Excel or Comma Separated Values, or CSV. According to Reclaim officials, both formats are standard for such request.

Elmont District Clerk Diana Delahanty responded to the request on March 11. “We do not have records that would conform to your request,” she wrote in an email. On March 23, Reclaim informed the district that it was moving forward with an appeal. On April 11, after getting no response from the district, officials at Reclaim called Delahanty. She informed them that she was forwarding the appeal to the district’s attorney, Colum P. Nugent.

“The district disagrees with Reclaim New York’s statement that the Elmont School District does not have records that track payments to vendors,” Elmont Superintendent Al Harper said in a statement. “In response to the Reclaim New York’s Foil request, the district responded that it did not have the information available in the format requested.”

According to Reclaim New York attorney Dennis Saffran, education law requires school districts to keep expenditure records. “That is not only patently incredible,” he said of Harper’s statement, “but if it were true, it would also be illegal.”

In addition to not having the documents in the format requested, Harper also indicated that the district is not legally required to alter existing records by redaction or otherwise respond to a FOIL request.

“That is not true,” said Bob Freeman, executive director of the Committee on Open Government. “The law clearly envisions situations in which agencies will engage in the deletion or redaction of items within a single record.”

In District 13’s case, officials believed that the manner in which Reclaim made the FOIL request was not proper. James Pyun, an attorney for the district, said the request was denied because of the way in which it was presented.

“Based on guidance from legal counsel and the New York state Committee on Open Government, the district determined that Reclaim New York’s blanket request for vendor payments was ambiguous,” Pyun said. “We did not maintain records in the format requested, and the records may retain personal information concerning employees or parents that could not be redacted without unreasonable time and effort.”

Courtney McGee contributed to this story.