The Manhasset School District gave an illegitimate reason for denying access to public records it is legally required to provide, according to a lawsuit an open-government group filed Tuesday.
The district is one of three government organizations that are “the three worst actors” of about 50 that did not complete or comply with Reclaim New York’s requests for spending and contract records under the state Freedom of Information Law, attorney Dennis Saffran said Tuesday at a press conference in Mineola.
“Whether these denials are the product of ignorance, incompetence or a blatant disregard for law does not matter,” Brandon Muir, executive director of Reclaim New York, said. “All taxpayer-funded entities and public officials need to know that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.”
The lawsuit filed in Nassau County Supreme Court asks a judge to order the Town of Oyster Bay and the Manhasset and Elmont school districts to produce records and asserts that they either ignored or wrongly denied the nonprofit group’s requests.
Reclaim New York filed requests with 253 Long Island towns, villages and school districts earlier this year for its New York Transparency Project, which aims to create a searchable online database of all public spending in the state, Muir said.
About 80 percent complied and provided the records, but 47 did not complete or comply with the requests as of Wednesday, Reclaim New York spokesman Doug Kellogg said.
In a statement, Oyster Bay spokeswoman Marta Kane denied the town ignored Reclaim New York’s request, as the lawsuit alleges.
The town is “working on compiling the roughly 1,400 pages of information and will notify the group of its availability as soon as possible,” Kane said.
Elmont school district Superintendent Al Harper did not return a phone call seeking comment.
The Manhasset School District’s denial of the records was based on a lack of specificity in the request and Superintendent Charles Cardillo’s claim that the district could not reasonably separate big-money contracts from smaller payments to teachers and parents that might contain pesonal information, Saffran said.
“It’s kind of the local equivalent of those rogue states that put civilians around military complexes so that the military complex won’t be bombed,” Saffran said. “The fact is, though, it’s totally illegal.”
In an email, Cardillo said the district determined the “blanket request” for all payments to vendors was too ambiguous after consulting legal counsel and the state’s Committee on Open Government.
Because the district does not keep separate lists of large payments to contractors and smaller payments to individuals, the district would have to produce a new set of records to fill the request, which the law does not require, Cardillo said.
“The district’s payment records may contain personal identifying information such as a payee’s social security number or home address,” Cardillo wrote. “If so, revealing such information would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy and would have to be redacted prior to disclosure.”
But court decisions going back to 2001 have rejected arguments like the school district’s, said Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee on Open Government.
Saffran said the Freedom of Information Law requires municipalities to provide the records and redact personal information. Several other governments used spreadsheet programs to delete personal data, Saffran said, and one blacked it out by hand.
“It wouldn’t be creating something new. It would be withholding or redacting a portion of an existing record,” Freeman said.
Cardillo said the district tried to redact personal information, but determined “the task could not be completed without unreasonable time and effort,” which the law does not require.
Reclaim New York intially listed the Town of North Hempstead as noncompliant, and its website says Mineola ignored the request as of May 31.
But Mineola Village Clerk Joseph Scalero said he corresponded with the group multiple times since its request in January and sent the requested documents on Tuesday. The town sent its documents May 19, spokeswoman Carole Trottere said.
“This is an ongoing thing,” Scalero said. “They can’t just come out of a vacuum and say we never spoke.”
Trottere and Scalero said Reclaim New York’s requested a large amount of information that took weeks or months to process. North Hempstead ultimately produced more than 850 spreadsheet pages and more than 1,200 electronic document pages, Trottere said.
Reclaim New York spokesman Doug Kellogg confirmed the group received the town’s and village’s documents, and called the town’s website “a big step in the right direction on transparency.”
