POINT OF VIEW

It's been 99 days and counting ... still no records

Posted

Reporters have a creed of sorts: If all the government officials and elected leaders are happy with you in your coverage area, then you’re not doing your job.

That doesn’t mean that we set out to intentionally agonize those that hold the purse strings to our taxpayer dollars, but it does mean that there are times you’re going to have to publish something that doesn’t make you very popular. And all you can do is be understanding, and continue to strive to be nothing but fair, and remember they are human beings, too.

New York City is a very interesting market, especially when it comes to media, and far too often, publications are printing headlines more focused on selling copies than actually reporting news.

Community journalism is different. While I absolutely want as many people as possible to read the words we publish each week, I’m not going to pick fights or sensationalize some mostly non-story in order to make it happen. As a reader, you may not always agree with what we cover and what we don’t — or even how we cover it.

But that’s OK. it’s part of the give and take. Being critical doesn’t mean you’re manning battle stations. It simply means you care, and what you think and believe is important, which is why we offer so much space for you to have your voice.

With that said, we as reporters, still, have a job to do. And that job doesn’t always mean writing stories. As I’ve talked about in this space before, we have a duty to represent a check and balance on our government. To ensure that our best interests, as a people, are represented. That the hard-earned money we part with to contribute to this great society is used appropriately.

We might not think that our community board does a lot, but that would be very wrong. These are volunteers who work very hard to represent the best interests of Riverdale, Kingsbridge, Spuyten Duyvil, Fieldston and Marble Hill. And to help support that, the city provides the board with a rather hefty sum of money that once belonged to us, the people.

And we have a right to see how those dollars are being spent. A right provided to us by state law. We can learn about the use of that money through the board meetings, or we also have a right to request financial documents through New York’s Freedom of Information Law.

When I covered government in the past, public records requests were quite routine for me. It wasn’t always a formal process. I might walk into city hall and ask if I can take a look at a document, for example, or even ask for a quarterly financial report. While sometimes these requests might turn into stories, reporters actually collect a lot of information during the day, where only a fraction of it ever makes it into print.

Back in November, I decided to make a request for financials of the community board, covering expenditures shy of $900,000 over a three-year period. It was part of a broader records request, but to be honest, this part was supposed to be the easiest — open up a spreadsheet, hit save, and drop it in an email.

Community Board 8 has fulfilled many parts of the request, more or less, but simply will not let me see the books. In fact, as of Feb. 21, it will be just under 100 days since the request was made — well past any timetable state law allows for government agencies like the community board to comply with a public records request.

Here’s the thing: As much as this lack of cooperation screams there’s something to hide, I honestly don’t think there’s anything to hide. In fact, I more than expect these financials to do nothing more than confirm what I already believe: That the community board is doing its best to be good stewards of our money.

Yet, I can’t make that assumption. Reporters can never make that assumption. We work off facts, and facts are formed through analysis of evidence. That evidence here is simply the financial documents that are long, long past due.

If you’ve ever worked in a public agency, you know that receiving public records requests are annoying, and take up time you could be doing something else. Yet, our public records laws are the very basis of our democracy, where our government officials don’t work for themselves, they work for us. Seeing these records upon request is our right, no matter how much of an inconvenience it is.

Instead of simply receiving and fulfilling my records request, a few in the community board’s leadership took me doing my job as some act of war. That’s like telling your dentist to meet you out in the parking lot simply because he informed you he’d have to perform a root canal.

As I’ve stated before, if there’s a war, it’s one-sided, and I am not fighting it. I respect deeply the blood, sweat and tears our community board members donate — but that volunteerism doesn’t make them immune to the law.

It’s been long enough. This is a chapter that should have been closed some two months ago, yet it lingers, only because the community board is acting as if public records laws don’t apply to them.

It does. And this won’t be the last time I or anyone in the community wants records. So the community board needs to find a way to ensure true transparency with the community they serve.

Michael Hinman, Community Board 8, Freedom of Information Law,

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