A Freedom of Information ‘Christmas Present’ Remains Unopened as City Delays Rollout

The city is dragging its feet on a requirement for all city agencies to upload records requests and data to an online public portal, further delaying transparency from city agencies, good-government advocates said. 

The bill, which was passed in the City Council last November, requires every municipal agency to opt into the city’s Open Records portal for data requests.

The updated bill formally requires every agency to participate in the portal and now will include Freedom of Information requests made to the City Council and the five borough presidents’ offices. 

The law would make it easier to file data requests and provide more transparency on delays. Agencies would be required to upload responses within a certain time frame, allowing the requestor — oftentimes journalists — 14 days to publish a story without it being shared widely, according to Rachael Fauss, the senior policy advisor at the nonprofit Reinvent Albany.

She and other good-government advocates helped craft the bill and are now concerned because a report on its implementation due in June has still not been released. 

“The law would absolutely put us on better footing to actually monitor the agencies and see what they’re actually doing on FOIL,” she said. 

The bill, introduced by Manhattan Councilmember Gale Brewer, lapsed into law on Dec. 25, 2025 — “a Christmas present for the advocates who fought for it,” Fauss joked.

“If you get every agency on the open records portal to start proactively releasing records, you can get some better data about what the actual problems are,” she said. 

“How do you know what the problems are if nobody’s looking systematically at them at the city level?”

‘Nothing’s Happening’

A spokesperson for the Department of Records and Information Services, Kenneth Cobb, said they planned to release the plan to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Speaker Julie Menin in mid-November, but did not answer a question about its delay.

Brewer told The City Reporter the Council planned to hold a hearing on the law’s delay in January. 

“Nothing’s happening,” she said of the initiatives the bill planned. She said she thought the Mamdani administration “should be better.”

New York City government is notoriously slow around Freedom of Information Law requests, often delaying for years before releasing information.

A 2025 analysis from Reinvent Albany found that the city government receives around 170,000 FOIL requests a year, and 16% were still open a year later. Data from the existing Open Records portal showed that response times were slowing, which they blamed on staffing issues. 

Journalists often rely on the Freedom of Information Law to obtain schedules, emails, renderings, and any other data to inform their reporting — but the delays can often render the data useless once it finally arrives.

And it also can keep vital information from the public. 

In September 2019, The City Reporter requested data and outside contracts related to a 911 system upgrade from the city’s technology agency.

Since then, the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation has extended the deadline 60 times. The latest projected response date is Dec. 1 of this year.

Noel Hidalgo, the executive director of BetaNYC, an open government advocacy group, said this law would ideally give everyone a better sense of how the city works. 

“We’re in a moment in time where government information is one of the few things that you can actually trust,” he said. “FOIL is our last recourse in regard to transparency and operation.”

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