Agency Transparency Plans All Fizzle, No Sizzle: Watchdog Report

May 30, 2024
Watchdog Analysis Finds 66 Transparency Plans Cursory and Incomplete
 

A new report by watchdog group Reinvent Albany reviewed 66 transparency plans submitted by NYS agencies to Governor Hochul in the first quarter of 2024, finding them generally incomplete and underwhelming. Ironically, the Executive Chamber is one of the six agencies that has not yet published a 2024 transparency plan. 

We cheered Governor Hochul’s September 2021 directive requiring agencies to submit transparency plans to her office. We like the idea and on March 22, 2022 published a report reviewing the prior plans, Opening New York 2022. 

Unfortunately for the 2024 plans, most agencies provided less detail than in 2021, and more than half did not describe how they comply with all fundamental transparency mandates, including the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), Open Meetings Law (OML), or Open Data Executive Order 95 of 2013. 

A summary of the report’s findings is below.

  1. Total agencies completing 2024 transparency plans: 66
  1. Agencies providing plans in 2021, but not 2024 (as of 5/30/24): 6
  • Executive Chamber
  • City University of New York 
  • Division of the Budget
  • Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery 
  • Office of the Inspector General
  • Office of Renewable Energy Siting 
  1. Agencies reporting FOIL stats plummeted from 2021 (22 or 31%) to 2024 (6 or 9%)
  1. Overall completeness of transparency plans: % of agencies addressing issues, 2021 vs. 2024

Recommendations
In September 2022, watchdog groups asked the Governor to issue an Executive Order mandating annual transparency plans. The groups asked for checklists for compliance with current transparency mandates, including data on FOIL caseloads and response times, and compliance with Executive Order 95 of 2013 and the Open Meetings Law.

Regardless of the Governor making improvements to the transparency plan process, the report recommends passage of three bills to improve NYS agency transparency:

  1. FOIL Reporting – S8671-A/A9621-A (Hoylman-Sigal/McDonald) would require state and local bodies subject to report data about their FOIL process to the Committee on Open Government (COOG), which would publish data on its website and via data.ny.gov. State agencies would report full FOIL logs, and local agencies would report annual totals of requests received and closed. COOG must make recommendations for expanding local reporting by Jan 1, 2027. Passage of this bill would make New York a national leader on public records request reporting.
  2. Open Data for Debarment Lists – S9398 (Ramos) would require the Department of Labor (DOL), Workers Compensation Board (WCB), and Office of General Services to publish lists of debarred companies and individuals as open data. The current DOL “list” of people and companies debarred by the WCB is nearly useless due to a restricted, balky search form.
  3. Open Meetings Law Improvements – A10266 (Simone) would require agencies to hold hybrid meetings, ensuring in-person and remote access for the public and members of public bodies, and close loopholes that result in less public notice for meetings and delayed access to the materials up for discussion.

Click here to view the analysis of agencies’ 2024 transparency plans in Google Sheets. 

Click here or below to view the full report as a PDF.