Croton Officials Say Information Requests Numerous

CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. – Village officials at Monday evening’s budget workshop said Freedom of Information Law requests have grown so onerous over the past few years, that enough requests are processed to create a separate position.

“We have been hit with a large number of very substantial FOILs,” said Village Manager Abraham Zambrano, using the law’s acronym. FOIL is a New York State law, brethren to its federal equivalency the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which formalized the process of requesting information from municipal authorities, nearly 40 years ago.

State legislators hoped a side effect of a recent change to the Open Meetings Laws would relieve municipalities of some of the burden of the process by mandating that authorities make back up documents available to the public before meetings. Legislators assumed that many of these documents would be placed online, if not utilizing websites immediately, than in the near future.

The conversation regarding a “part-time FOIL clerk” was initiated by a rather innocuous portion of the village budget, “Law Appropriations,” which had scarcely changed. Trustee Ann Gallelli mentioned that attorneys working for the village regularly had to review or redact portions of FOIL requests for an additional cost to the village. The total proposed "Law Appropriations" budget is $221,873.

“Whatever time they have to spend going through it, which in light of some of these, is quite substantial,” said Gallelli about the requests.

Mayor Leo Wiegman said he believed requests have recently become more complicated. He said requests often regard multiple years of records, using language such as “all correspondence,” which captures large quantities of records.

“It’s a balancing act because everyone has the right to do this and we’re serious about fulfilling them,” said Gallelli. When Village Clerk Paula DiSanto was asked how much time she spent fulfilling the requests, she said she had never calculated it because it was such a deeply embedded part of her job.

Trustee Ian Murtaugh suggested that in the future, the village could consider posting fulfilled FOIL requests online, so the same information would not be requested repeatedly.

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