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JON CAMPBELL GANNETT: Board With SUNY Ties Blocks Public From Meeting



ALBANY - A high-powered non-profit overseeing the Buffalo Billion and other major state economic-development projects has declined to allow the public to sit in on its board meeting Tuesday.
The Fort Schuyler Management Corp., which is closely affiliated with the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, had a quarterly board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, according to David Doyle, a SUNY Poly vice president. The meeting was set to take place via conference call.
Reporters and members of the public were not permitted to listen in, he said.
The meeting came as several major projects associated with SUNY Poly and Fort Schuyler have come under federal investigation, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office acknowledging that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is examining potential bid-rigging.
Fort Schuyler has a real-estate portfolio worth billions, acting as SUNY Poly's landlord for facilities in Utica, Syracuse and Buffalo, including a still-under-construction SolarCity manufacturing plant that the state put $750 million toward. The plant is the centerpiece of the Buffalo Billion program, a pledge from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to spend $1 billion in public funds to boost the state's second-largest city.
The state's Open Meetings Law requires "every meeting of a public body" to be "open to the general public." It doesn't allow telephone conferencing for a meeting, but does allow videoconferencing if the public has an area to attend......
....Robert Freeman, executive director of the state Committee on Open Government, said he believes it's clear Fort Schuyler falls under the Open Meetings Law.
Last year, Freeman wrote an advisory opinion finding Fort Schuyler was subject to the state's Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, which allows members of the public to request and receive government records.
"My belief is if indeed Fort Schuyler is subject to FOIL, the meetings of its board are subject to the Open Meetings Law, as well," Freeman said Tuesday. "That would mean they could not conduct a meeting by telephone."
Freeman's advisory opinion last year was written at the request of The Investigative Post and WGRZ-TV, which was then owned by Gannett Co. Inc. Ultimately, Fort Schuyler posted documents that were requested under FOIL after a lawsuit was filed.
In his opinion, Freeman wrote that Fort Schuyler amounts to a state "agency" and should be required to comply with the open-records law.
He pointed to a 1980 case brought by Westchester-Rockland Newspapers, a collection of Gannett papers that were the predecessor to The Journal News, that found volunteer fire companies were subject to FOIL, despite their status as a not-for-profit corporation.....

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