Emily Shaw

New Yorkers, meanwhile, can enjoy the fact that the newly proposed NYC POIA will give them a chance to show the feds how it’s done. Democratic Councilmember Ben Kallos introduced New York City’s version in order to achieve the same unimpeachable aim as the federal POIA: bringing government into the 21st century by putting all public government information online.

In several ways, the NYC proposal is stronger and goes beyond its namesake bill. Rather than simply expressing the sense of the legislative body that public information should be available online, NYC’s POIA mandates that:

Whenever the terms "public information," "public inspection" or "inspection by the public" are used in the charter or administrative code...the information provided by a city agency pursuant to any such requirement shall include...publication of all such information on the agency’s website, in an open format, and publication to the open data portal...no later than such time as such information is provided by any other means.

While the federal POIA foresaw putting the decision about what to put online in the hands of anadvisory council, the NYC POIA proposes to let existing restrictions on public information provide the guidelines for online access. In other words, in terms of making the meaning of “public” truly equivalent to “online,” New York’s proposal accomplishes this quite neatly.