Brooklyn Bridge, Aug 11 – On the night 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 - and we find
deterioration there, mere string-cite answers, more on
this to come.
COOG 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."
On August 11, the Comptroller's Office
emailed and purported to unilaterally extend its time to
November. Inner City Press wrote back: "Please be aware
that as of last night, the basketball / pickleball area
under the Bridge ramp that Ahern was recently "working" on
had half of the lights out, creating danger. In this
context, could you clarify what search or review process
specific to this request accounts for the extension to
November 20, 2026?"
The Comptroller's Office's own April 2026
report, "Sunlight in the City," set out "best practices"
for FOIL responsiveness, including the principle that
extensions should be tied to the specific complexity of
the request at hand, not general office-wide volume. The
extension letter cites only generic factors — "the large
volume of FOIL requests that our agency is concurrently
processing" — without explaining what about this specific
request, concerning a single named contractor's (Ahern
Painting Contractors) work on a single structure (the
Brooklyn Bridge) and the Comptroller's Charter § 328
review of that contractor's registration, requires four
additional months beyond the original estimate.
What the responsibility files show —
diligence, or a rubber stamp for a repeat settler — is
what these FOILs will reveal. Watch this site.