De Blasio speaks to reporters. | AP Photo/Mary Altaffer De Blasio falls short of promise on public records access Fails to fulfill routine requests.

On May 18, 2015, POLITICO New York asked City Hall to release the schedule of Dominic Williams, the first deputy mayor’s chief of staff and City Hall’s main point of contact with the taxi industry (aside, perhaps, from Mayor Bill de Blasio himself).

The City Hall office tasked with handling public records requests said it would have those schedules ready by July 17, 2015. When July 17 arrived, the office said that because of a significant "volume of requests," the records would not be available until Aug. 28. That date was then pushed back to Sept. 25, Nov. 20, Jan. 8, Feb. 19, March 18, April 22, May 13, and, after a phone call with POLITICO New York’s attorney, May 20.


On that momentous Friday, a year after the original request, City Hall shared Williams’ schedule with POLITICO New York.

Given how long it took City Hall to produce the documents, one might have expected them to contain explosive news. They did not.

But they did, for the umpteenth time, reveal how a mayor who came to office skewering the sorry state of public records access in the previous administration himself has little regard for the law requiring the records of public employees be made public.

It's not that de Blasio's City Hall is worse at public records access than former mayor Michael Bloomberg's, per se. It's that, as with so many things de Blasio-related, the mayor set an unusually high standard for himself, then failed, utterly, to live up to it.

When he was public advocate, de Blasio used to dole out grades to the Bloomberg administration for its public records responsiveness, or lack thereof.

“The city is inviting waste and corruption by blocking information that belongs to the public," he said in 2013, after releasing a Freedom of Information Law report card. "That’s the last thing New York City can afford right now. We have to start holding government accountable when it refuses to turn over public records to citizens and taxpayers."

He even had a whole section in his 2013 platform devoted to improving public records access.

Then he became mayor.

Last year, DNAinfo used the same grading system de Blasio employed to measure the Bloomberg administration's public records access, and determined Public Advocate de Blasio would have awarded Mayor de Blasio a D.

The mayor's flouting of the Freedom of Information Law achieved satire-level absurdity in May, when de Blasio designated several private-sector advisers with business before the city as “agents” of the city whose communications with him were exempt from the law, an interpretation that caused experts to guffaw.

It was the most laughable example of an administration-long trend.

To date, POLITICO New York has at least 14 outstanding Freedom of Information Law requests dating back to 2015 and 2014.

They range from simple requests, like the easily downloadable schedules of first deputy mayor Tony Shorris and budget director Dean Fuleihan, to more expansive ones, like all communications between anyone working in the de Blasio administration and several named individuals in Uber’s employ.

(Oddly, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office, which is known for having its own transparency issues, fulfilled a similar, and similarly timed, request by POLITICO New York regarding Uber in comparatively record-setting time.)

Freedom of Information Law requires a response to a request within five business days and then, if necessary, within 20. And then, if really necessary, at another "date certain within a reasonable period."

“You know that agencies cannot delay and delay and delay,” said Robert Freeman, executive director of the state's Committee on Open Government.

But they do.

“That’s because they haven’t been sued effectively yet," he said.

POLITICO New York’s two oldest requests date back to July 2014, before the de Blasio family had even moved into Gracie Mansion.

The oldest of the old, from July 18, 2014, asks for communications between the de Blasio administration and some of the people he would, two years later, dub “agents of the city.”

City Hall declined to address specific questions about the size of its Freedom of Information office, or whether de Blasio has changed his opinions on transparency since transitioning from public advocate to mayor.

In a statement, de Blasio spokeswoman Aja Worthy-Davis touted the administration's OpenRECORDS website, which allows the public to submit and track freedom of information requests online.

“This administration has committed to a more expeditious and transparent FOIL process, and has streamlined that process through creating and maintaining the OpenRECORDS website to move this city towards a more effective government" she said.

