NY Assembly Passes Two Major FOIL Reform Bills for Sunshine Week
Reinvent Albany thanks the New York State Assembly for leading on two bills strengthening the state’s Freedom of Information Law. We urge the Senate to pass both of these bills quickly and help persuade the Governor to sign them.
We and 18 watchdog, transparency, and journalism groups also strongly urge both the Senate and Assembly to pass the other two bills in our four-bill package.
The first bill passed by the Assembly, S5000 (Hoylman-Sigal) / A1410 (Rosenthal), will make it so that corporations have to re-apply for their records to be exempted from FOIL after submitting them to the state. Currently, corporations that make such a request can have those records exempted from FOIL permanently. Without this information, the public is often not able to see how much the state is paying for services and whether it could be getting a better bang for its buck.
The second bill, S452 (Hoylman-Sigal) / A2321 (McDonald), will require government agencies to report on many FOIL requests they are receiving and closing. This will enable the public to better understand the state of FOIL in NY and see which agencies are struggling to fill requests.
Two other FOIL bills have passed neither house and remain priorities for Reinvent Albany. We will continue to fight for them during the 2025 session:
- Reduce Agency FOIL Response Time (S2520 (Skoufis) / A3425 (Raga)) – Advanced to third reading in the Senate last session.
- Strengthen FOIL Attorneys’ Fees (A950-A (Steck) / S1418-A (Liu)) – Passed the Senate last session.