FOIL Requests Training (10-18-11)

“I think it's incredibly important for the average citizen to understand what their rights and responsibilities are when it comes to information in this country. This workshop gave an overview of the fundamentals involved in making a FOIL-attempt, and peppered the somewhat dry information with vivid, personal experiences that have really mattered.” –Melissa Kondrak

“I thought the information discussed was very insightful, I think it might be worthwhile to maybe include someone with a different perspective like a lawyer who handles FOIL’s. There were a couple of times where I felt like a different perspective could have been helpful; a sense of what you might run into if you are going to FOIL an organization.”
Tysha Martin

Last Tuesday, the Coalition for Economic Justice facilitated a workshop entitled “Fun with Foil.” On hand, were seasoned “foilers” Geoff Kelly and Buck Quigley of the ArtVoice and Peter Reese Esq, a strong and active leader on open and transparent government.

The Freedom of Information Law or FOIL is a law that guarantees access to New York State agencies public records. The intent of this law is to make government more transparent and provide citizens with vital information regarding key decisions that affect their lives on a daily basis.

As with any law, enforcement is absolutely critical and if it’s left with monitoring and enforcement, it may not fully live up to its creator’s intentions. So goes the Freedom of Information Law. State Agencies can ignore your request or deny your request on procedural issues, or to stall a process. Often times unless individuals and organizations are willing and able to litigate, the information requested can and will be with held, which only reinforces the disconnect between citizens and their elected officials and public institutions.

Geoff, Buck and Pete’s combined experience provided participants with an exceptional history of the Freedom of Information Law, experienced based knowledge, procedural information and proper timeline, and concrete steps for how to draft a FOIL request.

The Coalition for Economic Justice has been using FOIL Requests to obtain information pertaining to the development of the waterfront in order to more fully understand the story of how the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation came to be, and how they were spending public money and on who. The information on contracts they had entered, board minute notes, helped weave a story which is still far from over. And as expected, there were several items that we requested that we were denied, despite our assertion that these are absolutely public.

It occurred to us and some of our coalition partners that drafting Foil Requests and the necessary follow up required a certain skill set that possibly needed cultivating. And through our own experiences, it became clear that to get what you needed meant asking the right questions. Drafting FOIL Requests is a type of art form. There’s some absurdity in this, that it’s necessary to go to such significant lengths to get information that is legally public, but it’s proof yet again, that our laws and government in some ways are not set up to protect the people it serves. This is just one small, yet critical tool in effecting change and demanding a more transparent, accessible, and accountable government. In other words, a government that truly acts on for and by the people.

Please stay tuned for the next workshop dates!!

For more information on the Freedom of Information Law, check out these resources-

http://www.ppgbuffalo.org/citizen-power/citizen-tool-kit/

http://www.dos.state.ny.us/coog/foil2.html

Global Foundries: An expensive lesson that will make your blood boil

Last week, CEJ held a press conference with coalition partners to present solutions to fix our region’s failing economic development programs as detailed in a new report, Generating Waste, by the Partnership for the Public Good (PPG). At the event, several speakers explained how WNY’s Industrial Development Agencies (IDAs) have wasted public money subsidizing corporations that have created low-wage jobs and hired out of state construction firms, which they said ought to make your blood boil.

One subsidy deal granted by the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) will most certainly make your blood boil – GlobalFoundries. Five years ago, ESDC gave GlobalFoundries $1.4 billion in public subsidies. The Albany Times Union, addressed this deal by saying it “was one of the biggest taxpayer handouts ever offered to a private enterprise in the United States and the state is taking a huge risk its bet will pay off.”

Under Governor George Pataki, ESDC gave GlobalFoundries $665 million in cash as part of the $1.4 billion subsidy package. The company has promised to create 1,465 jobs – that’s about $1 million per job.

To add insult to injury, “New Yorkers are paying roughly $25 million a year – or a total of $1.5 billion through 2040 – on the debt service for the bonds the Empire State Development Corp. issued to pay for the project,” The Albany Times Union reported.

So, what did GlobalFoundries spend our public dollars on? Well, the company spent $2,691 on t-shirts, $2,198 for Price Chopper gift cards, and paid $5,120 on flat panel televisions from Sam’s Club. GlobalFoundries also spent public money on luxury corporate apartments, catered meals for special events, and on lunch meetings.

Ken Adams, president and CEO of ESDC, says the State has learned its lessons from deals such as the GlobalFoundries one. They’re no longer fronting corporations cash, for one, Adams told the Albany Times Union.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Regional Economic Development Councils could be an opportunity to change the way New York State has done economic development, but only if public officials truly have learned from the mistakes of the past. We can ensure the Regional Councils don’t make the same costly mistakes as the GlobalFoundries debacle by getting them right in the first place and instituting performance standards, and accountability and transparency measures from the start, as proposed the Alliance for a Greater New York’s (ALIGN) report, Seizing the Moment: How Regional Economic Development Councils Can Build a Good Jobs Economy.

Reigning In Our Region’s Out of Control Economic Development Programs

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, expanding across the country with more and more people calling on the wealthiest to pay their fair share and demanding that our elected officials create good jobs, CEJ joined with advocates and policy experts earlier this week to talk about solutions to our region’s job and economic crisis.

We gathered outside a small-scale Holiday Inn on Niagara Falls Boulevard, which received a package of tax incentives to the tune of nearly $2 million from the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) in 2007, to highlight the failures of our region’s economic development agencies.

In addition, we released a new report, Generating Waste, by The Partnership for the Public Good (PPG), produced in coordination with the CEJ, the Niagara Orleans Central Labor Council and the WNY Area Labor Federation. Generating Waste, which can be found here, focuses on the three most active IDAs in the region, Niagara, Erie, and Amherst as well as on the NY Power Authority.

The 9 IDAs in Erie and Niagara County are all separate public benefit corporations authorized by NYS to provide sales, property and mortgage recording tax exemptions to businesses. Each IDA has its own Board, staff, legal representation and consultants. The IDAs operating expenses are generated based on fees that businesses pay based on the size of their tax break.

At a time when unemployment and underemployment remain stubbornly high, and economic inequality continues to increase, New Yorkers need to take a close look at the State’s spending on economic development and the results it is yielding, especially when New York faces severe budgetary challenges and has slashed spending in most sectors of State government.

As Sam Magavern, Co-Director of PPG said, “In New York what economic development programs largely amount to is the awarding of tax breaks and other benefits to individual businesses. When all the State’s tax expenditures on business are combined, they now amount to some $8.2 billion per year-- and that is just the tax breaks, not including all the overhead and staffing costs for all of the agencies that provide those tax breaks, and not including the low-cost power allocated by the New York Power Authority. New Yorkers are receiving very little return for their billions of dollars in investment.”

The NY Power Authority is the largest publicly owned utility in the nation, providing New York with more than one quarter of its electricity and operating more than 1,400 miles of transmission lines. Run by a board appointed by governor, NYPA owns 17 power plants that supply about one fourth of the state’s electricity needs. NYPA is an unusual government entity in that it tends to run a “profit.” In 2010 NYPA reported net income of $181 million

Roger Cook, the former Executive Director of the WNY Committee on Occupational Safety and Health and a leader with the region’s Interfaith Peace Network talked about the particulars of the tax subsidy deal granted to Holiday Inn Express developer Mohan Saran. “What makes me so angry is that the developer received nearly $2 million in various tax breaks from the IDA but didn’t use this money as expected to create local jobs. He hired a construction firm from Georgia that didn’t properly train its workers and cut corners with respect to safety. Those cut corners cost a worker his life. This was a preventable tragedy. There are highly skilled construction workers eager for employment right here in Niagara County. Our IDAs need to reign in the waste and hold developers accountable.”

The Holiday Inn Express deal is just one questionable subsidy deal among many cited by PPG. According to PPG, our local IDAs are not helping to grow our economic pie by luring new business into the region. Of the 71 tax exemption deals that the IDAs of Niagara County, Erie County, and the Town of Amherst did in 2010, only one appears to involve a company coming from out of state (Triad Recycling). All the other deals appear to be expansions or relocations by companies that were already in the region.

Several speakers at the press conference identified Governor Cuomo’s new Regional Economic Development Councils as an opportunity to reign in our region’s out of control economic development programs. The Governor has created 10 Regional Councils each charged with developing a strategic plan for their region by November 14^th to help guide roughly $1 billion in state money.

Jim Briggs, president of the Niagara-Orleans Labor Council, said the Regional Councils “are an opportunity to harness local expertise and build the kind of economy day-to-day New Yorkers want and need, but this will only happen if the councils, our elected officials, and all of us, address the elephant in the room – over $8 billion a year in state spending on economic development through programs like the IDA that just aren’t providing a real return on investment.”

According to Magavern, “The goal of the report is not just to recommend changes to NYPA and the IDAs, but also to draw conclusions that are widely applicable to economic development efforts and that can help to guide the Regional Economic Development Councils as they craft their plans and criteria. The programs we investigated operate with loopholes so big you could drive a Lexus through them – literally in the case of the Amherst Industrial Development Agency. We’re hopeful that this report helps guide our economic development decisions in a new, more positive direction.”