What's she hiding — still?
Gov. Hochul's office has refused to release her complete daily schedule for the months of April, May and June, despite repeated requests from Streetsblog, plus two Freedom of Information Law requests aimed at analyzing her travels and her meetings during the critical moments when she made the decision to pause congestion pricing.
The saga begins just after the gridlock governor's June 5 announcement that she had halted congestion pricing. Thinking conspiratorially, we went to her online schedule posted on her website to pore over the details.
But in mid-June, when we checked, the schedule was complete only through December 2023. So we asked the governor's press office to update it, but heard only crickets.
So on June 20, we filed our first FOIL request (officially logged as R001199-062024), seeking all the records through June (which would end by the time the state answered our request).
Just nine working days later, the FOIL office responded and said the page had been updated.
Yes, it had been updated, but only a bit; the months of January, February and March were added. But the Freedom of Information request for the months in question — April, May and June — was denied without any reason provided.
By September, we were at it again, emailing the governor's press office several times that fall seeking the update. Again: Crickets.
So on Oct. 29, we filed another FOIL request, this time just for the public schedules for May and June — the critical months when Hochul was traveling all over the state and, in her own description, talking to diner customers about roadway tolls. (That FOIL request is logged as R001389-102924.)
For some reason, the previous nine-day efficiency had crumbled. On Oct. 29, we were told by the New York State Executive Chamber Records Access Office that it would need until Nov. 27 simply to provide a "status update" on the request.
Late last month, we received another such email saying that now the office needed until Dec. 30 to provide us with the same "status update."
A legal expert on this kind of thing says the delays are unconscionable.
“There is no good reason for the Executive Chamber’s significant delay in releasing Gov. Hochul’s daily schedule," said Heather Murray, the associate director of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, which has represented Streetsblog in our many fights for public information.
"The public has a significant interest in knowing the identities of people who Gov. Hochul meets with and the subjects of those meetings. Delaying release of these records for six months is tantamount to denial of the request and violates the Freedom of Information Law.”
Why are we so keen to get the detailed schedules? For starters, the daily media advisory that Gov. Hochul's team issues every day lists only where she'll be and when — and, sometimes, the names of other people involved.
Here's a typical one:
"1:10 PM Governor Hochul Delivers Remarks at the AI Summit New York, Javits Center, 429 11th Ave New York, NY 10001."
Frankly, there's more information about how to mail a letter to the location than there is about what the state's highest elected official would do there.
But the detailed schedules have a vast treasure trove of information — public information — that could show who influenced the governor. It also shows how she traveled around the Empire State.
Here's one I picked at random, showing just how busy the governor actually is — and this was from a Saturday! Look closely; not only do we learn the identities and titles of all the people who are in the room with the governor at any given time (at least when she's in public), but we also learn when she's taking state aircraft and if she is reimbursing taxpayers because the trips on either the state jet or helicopters were for state business, personal business, political business or just a diner visit that is some combination of the three.
This trove of information is vital for the public. For instance, the Post once used the public schedule to do a devastating investigation into the governor's excessive use of the state's airborne fleet. In her first year in office, the governor took 210 flights across New York on our Sikorksy S-76 chopper and our King Air planes, racking up at least $271,000 in costs borne by taxpayers.
Knowing how the governor was ferried around (certainly not by ferry, mind you) in the days before she canceled congestion pricing would certainly help New Yorkers know if she was truly acting in the interest of hard-working residents or whether she has no clue about life in this city because she's always flying over it in a subsidized chopper or past it on our state jet.
Advocates urged the governor to come clean.
"With so many dull knives out for congestion pricing, there's no telling who in the class of selfish drivers and pandering pols might have had the governor's ear and influenced her notorious pause," said Danny Pearlstein of Riders Alliance. "With trust in elected officials surely at or near bottom, the governor should absolutely level with New Yorkers and tell us who she heard from and took note of as she unmade up her mind."
