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October 25, 2006
FOIL follies II: Brennan's request for business plan rejected
Atlantic Yards Report serves up the second installment of its four-part series on Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, a law whose use has proved to be very important and necessary to shedding light on many of the obscured details of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards proposal.
FOIL Wars, "The Empire State Development Corporation Strikes Again"
Yes, the Empire State Development Corporation finally released a memo attempting to back up its prediction that the Atlantic Yards Project would generate $1.4 billion in new city and state taxes.
But that wasn’t what Brooklyn Assemblyman Jim Brennan really asked for. Indeed, his FOIL request for the project’s “business plan”—the crucial estimate of overall costs and revenues—was rebuffed by the ESDC. Now he’s appealing that rejection.
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Not all agency documents are subject to disclosure. Brennan said that the agency stated that, according to the law, it may deny access to records or portions thereof that "are inter-agency or intra-agency materials which are not... statistical or factual tabulations or data."In other words, if they are statistical or factual dabulations or data, they should be disclosed. The ESDC's rationale, Brennan said, must be that the business plan is not a statistical or factual tabulation. He believes that it is.
Posted by lumi at October 25, 2006 8:50 AM