NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

In City Limits, Jarrett Murphy reports on the continuing lack of transparency of Mayor de Blasio and this administration.  Freedom of Information requests take months, sometimes years to be responded to.  Meetings of public bodies are closed when they should be open.

In January 2015, we were forced to sue Chancellor Farina and the NYC Department of Education to keep School Leadership Team meetings open to the public.  When Farina decided to close these meetings, we intervened in a lawsuit to keep them open, along with Public Advocate Letitia James, and our pro bono attorneys Advocates for Justice and NY Lawyers for Public Interest.  When we won in the Supreme Court in April 2015, Chancellor Farina still insisted on keeping these meetings closed, and appealed the decision to the Appellate Court.

We eventually eventually succeeded in our lawsuit in October 2016, in a unanimous decision of the Appellate court, but only after Farina had effectively kept these meetings private for nearly two years.

Now there is a new example of the Mayor and his administration to keep private what should be public.  This fall, the City Council passed Local Law 168, to create a School Siting Task Force that would include representatives from several city agencies and government bodies, including the DOE, the City Council, City Planning and the School Construction Authority.  This Task Force is supposed to meet and come up with a report by July 31 about how the city can more quickly acquire sites for new schools to alleviate school overcrowding.

This is a crucial issue, because in many cases, twenty years or more have lapsed because of the apparent inability of the SCA and the DOE to find sites, even when the neighborhood schools are at 120% or more.  This happened in Sunset Park Brooklyn before parents, members of the community and CM Carlos Menchaca became involved in pushing for new schools and identifying appropriate sites.

The SCA itself has very few people on staff and only four real estate companies citywide on retainer tasked with this assignment, and we've been told that they never "cold call" or reach out to owners to see if they might consider selling their properties before they are put up for sale, even though this is the best way to acquire sites for development in CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?