Reinvent Albany advocates for transparent and accountable New York State government and increased transparency in New York City. We work to strengthen the Freedom of Information Law and put government information online, especially spending, contracting and budget information and we are vocal advocates for open data laws and practices. We also advocate for more accountable and better governed state authorities, including the MTA. We also work for transparent business subsidies and economic development spending rooted in facts and careful analysis. We seek to create a state government that is responsible, responsive and above board and thus we fight for public integrity measures and against laws and practices that increase the risk of corruption and favor the few and well connected over the public interest.
We strongly support the work of New Yorkers who work to increase public integrity and public trust. We share many of their goals, especially fighting corruption, and we support their work to make elections fair, easy and clean.
Our work is focused on winning:
Online transparency that allows the public to see what our state government is doing, how it spend public funds, and who gets those funds.
Open data laws and directives that put the state’s and city’s vast wealth of digital information online and make that data easy to find and reuse without restriction.
OpenFOIL, an open and online Freedom of Information Law process that takes full advantage of technology so that FOIL works better, is less expensive, and complements Open Data so that the public information revealed by FOIL is available to all.
Online performance measurement for state agencies and authorities accountability, including online publication of clear public goals, priorities and performance measures.
Fiscal honesty, which to us means the state government spends dedicated transit and clean water funds on for transit and clean water; and that economic development spending is transparent and can be clearly justified .
Spending transparency, in particular around economic development spending and off-budget and discretionary spending like business subsidy deals and MOU/lump sum spending which are opaque, and at risk for corruption, and whose efficacy is difficult to measure. We have an additional focus on the private finance of public infrastructure, which we believe is generally more expensive than funding via public finance, and is therefore a bad deal for the public.
What we have won
Online Transparency and Open Data
Creation of NY State’s “Open NY” / Open Data Initiative via executive order.
Creation of NYS Open Budget website.
Major upgrade to the Attorney General’s NY Open Government.
Major upgrade to the NYS Comptroller’s NY Open Books site.
NYC Open Data Law and fully funded open data initiative.
Fiscal Honesty
NYS Transit “Lockbox” bill.
In coalition, we helped stop the diversion of $500m in Clean Water Funds for Tappan Zee Bridge construction.