Reports and Fact Sheets
Issue: Open Govt Freedom of Information

Reinvent Albany regularly writes and publishes on issues and legislation relevant to our core mission. Below is a complete list of our reports, policy briefs, and memos.

April 2025 NYC Government Flouting Freedom of Information Law New Report Shows FOIL Requests and Delays Skyrocketing: NYC Gets Roughly 170,000 FOIL Requests a Year; 16% of FOIL Requests Still Open After a Year Read more March 2025 New Report Update Highlights Transparency Leaders in NY’s Criminal Courts A small group of judges and counties leads the way in publishing decisions, demonstrating that open justice is possible—even as many decisions are not published online Read more May 2024 Agency Transparency Plans All Fizzle, No Sizzle Our report reviewed 66 transparency plans by NYS agencies to Gov. Hochul in Q1 2024, finding them incomplete and underwhelming. Read more March 2024 Listening to FOIL 2024: Lessons from Six NYS Agencies Our new report looks at the open records requests made per the Freedom of Information Law to six agencies of NYS government. Read more July 2023 “Open ESD” Report Recommends Major Reforms for Secretive State Authority Report includes 35 specific actions to improve Empire State Development’s transparency, governance, oversight, and ethics. Read more March 2022 Opening New York 2022: Rating 70 State Agency Transparency Plans What NYS agencies told the Governor they are doing to improve FOIL, Open Data, Open Meetings, and other basic transparency measures Read more January 2021 Legislative FOIL: A Tale of Two Houses Covers legislative FOIL and the two houses' respective approaches, including recommendations on options for reform. Read more April 2019 Steps Forward for MTA FOIL and Open Data 18 specific actions the MTA can take to improve transparency now. (2019) Read more November 2018 FOIL that Works: MTA 2018 An in-depth look at FOIL at the MTA shows a fragmented process and offers best practices for online FOIL and police incident reports (2018) Read more December 2017 NYS Courts Deny FOILers Attorneys’ Fees in Nearly 1 in 4 Lawsuits Even When Records Provided and Agencies Had No Reason to Withhold Read more March 2017 Open New York “Tools” Recommendations for specific tools that enable state agencies to quickly create web-based information resources to be included in OpenNY.gov (2011) Read more March 2017 State Email Retention Policy New York State should match the Federal Government's email retention policy and save emails for 7 years and the emails of executive staff permanently (2014) Read more