Brooklyn Bridge, Aug 3 – On thenight of
July 13 two large trucks of Ahern Painting Contractors
were at work beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, water-cleaning
the underpinning. Public money at work on a public
landmark — by a contractor whose history with this exact
bridge is a matter of federal court record.
In 2016, Ahern paid $656,000 to settle U.S.
Attorney's claims of Disadvantaged Business Enterprise
fraud on two federally funded New York projects — passing
invoices through a defunct DBE that supplied nothing — and
was suspended government-wide by the Federal Highway
Administration pending debarment.
Then in 2019, the U.S. Attorney for the
SDNY sued Ahern again, this time over the Brooklyn Bridge
itself and Queens Plaza: per the complaint and Ahern's own
settlement admissions that November, false statements were
submitted to NYC DOT and the MTA claiming a disadvantaged
business did work actually performed by a non-DBE, with a
$10,000 kickback and an Atlantic City trip in the mix.
Seven years later, the trucks are back under the bridge,
spraying away.
So on July 13, Inner City Press filed
Freedom of Information Law requests with two offices: NYC
DOT, for the contract, its value, the bid documents, and
above all the vendor responsibility determination — how an
agency that Ahern admitted deceiving weighed those
admissions before hiring it again for the same structure;
and the NYC Comptroller, whose Charter Section 328 power
to object to registering a contract on integrity grounds
either was exercised here or wasn't.
The Comptroller's office published a report
just this April titled "Sunlight in the City," a blueprint
for FOIL best practices; Inner City Press has asked it to
live up to its own blueprint.
Meanwhile, as of August 3, it is the
Department of Transportation which is reveling in delay in
transparency, reflecting badly on the Administration. NYC
DOT has denied Inner City Press's appeal of its six-month
timeline for records on Ahern Painting Contractors' work
at the Brooklyn Bridge — but the denial is a study in
technical correctness doing no real work.
Assistant General Counsel Michael Twomey's
letter concedes that DOT "has made no determination" on
the request and that "agency efforts to timely respond
remain ongoing," then explains that Public Officers Law §
89(3) simply does not mandate any specific response
deadline once the initial five-day acknowledgment is sent
— meaning a January 13, 2027 response date, for a request
about a single named contractor's work on a single
structure, is "reasonable" for no better reason than that
the statute lets it be.
The appeal was denied not because DOT is
right that six months is warranted, but because the law
gives it nowhere it has to be wrong. The letter
closes by noting judicial review is available under
Article 78 of the CPLR, with a four-month filing window,
and copies the state's Committee on Open Government. Inner
City Press has now filed with COOG, and not for the first
time (but for the first time in a while, we are back,
locally, while banned from the UN, with no answer or
action by the Administration on that either, more on that
separately)
"Dear Executive Director Bewlay and
Committee Staff: Inner City Press and I write to
request an advisory opinion concerning the New York City
Department of Transportation's stated seven-month response
timeline for a discrete FOIL request, and notes that this
is not the first time this Committee has addressed DOT's
delay practices, nor the first time an Inner City Press
matter has informed the Committee's guidance on this
question. On June 22, 2026, Inner City Press
submitted a FOIL request to NYC DOT seeking discrete,
identifiable records: contracts, bid documents, and vendor
responsibility determinations concerning a single named
contractor, Ahern Painting Contractors, Inc., and its work
on or under the Brooklyn Bridge. DOT's acknowledgment
letter set a response date of January 13, 2027 — nearly
seven months from the request — citing only "the volume of
FOIL requests which DOT receives per year" and its general
practice of processing requests "in the order in which
they are received." On appeal, DOT's Assistant General
Counsel upheld that date, reasoning only that Public
Officers Law § 89(3) "does not mandate" any specific
response period once the initial acknowledgment issues,
and that the January 13 date was therefore "reasonable." A
copy of the appeal determination is enclosed. This
Committee has previously addressed materially identical
conduct by this same agency. In a September 9, 1999
advisory opinion to Transportation Alternatives concerning
DOT's handling of two FOIL requests, then-Executive
Director Robert J. Freeman found the requests
"constructively denied" where DOT's acknowledgment letters
were "open ended as to time," and cited, among other
authority, Inner City Press/Community on the Move, Inc. v.
New York City Department of Housing Preservation and
Development, N.Y. Sup. Ct., N.Y. Cnty., Nov. 9, 1993, for
the proposition that an agency's "actions demonstrate an
utter disregard for compliance set by FOIL" where "records
finally produced were not so voluminous as to justify any
extension of time, much less an extension beyond that
allowed by statute." The 1999 opinion also observed that
Mr. Lindsay's letter described "a long standing problem at
NYCDOT" — language that, twenty-seven years later, again
describes the agency's practice. The request at
issue here is narrower than a general FOIL request:
records concerning one contractor's work on one structure.
DOT's justification, both at the acknowledgment stage and
on appeal, rests entirely on general agency-wide volume,
never addressing why this particular, discrete request
requires seven months. Inner City Press respectfully
submits that this is precisely the kind of open-ended,
unparticularized timeline the Committee's 1999 opinion,
and the underlying 1993 Inner City Press decision it
cites, found inconsistent with § 89(3)(a)'s "reasonable
under the circumstances of the request" standard.
Inner City Press requests the Committee's guidance on
whether DOT's stated timeline and appeal determination are
consistent with § 89(3)(a) and with the Committee's own
prior guidance regarding this agency. "
What the responsibility files show —
diligence, or a rubber stamp for a repeat settler — is
what these FOILs will reveal. Watch this site.
