Commission out of Commission

This blog remarked in April on Buffalo’s former Commission on Human Relations, which investigated a Buffalo police officer in 1966 for the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black youth. That body’s present-day successor, the Commission on Citizens' Rights and Community Relations (CCRCR), has the power to issue subpoenas and hold public and private hearings to mediate discrimination disputes, including police misconduct complaints, pursuant to the Charter of the City of Buffalo.

The CCRCR’s bylaws require it to meet quarterly to fulfill the City Charter’s requirement that it meet at least four times a year. The Charter also requires each of the city’s boards and commissions, including the CCRCR, to produce an annual report.

According to public records, the CCRCR has not met since 2020, and its last annual report was for the year of 2019.

In response to a Freedom of Information Law request that I filed in my free time this March, the CCRCR’s executive director, Jason Whitaker, stated that the CCRCR has no records of any subsequent meetings, hearings, or reports, since “at the beginning of the pandemic, an administrative hold was placed on all commission’s activities including the CCRCR.” In response to a second request, Mr. Whitaker and a city attorney replied that there are no records related to the “administrative hold” and that no officer or employee of the CCRCR has a work calendar.

My initial request also sought a reasonably detailed current list by subject matter of all records in the possession of the agency (which each state or local government agency in New York State is required by law to update each year) and a record of the name, public office address, title, and salary of every officer and employee (which state law also requires each agency maintain). Mr. Whitaker declined to provide either of these records but pointed to the CCRCR’s website and to the OpenData Buffalo website, whose payroll records indicate that in 2022, the city paid the CCRCR director $101,071 dollars and the CCRCR secretary $54,724 dollars. Their combined pay since 2020 tops $500,174 dollars, according to the payroll dataset.

Of the budgeted salaries for the 34 directorships in the city’s 2022-2023 adopted budget, the CCRCR director’s $102,683-dollar budgeted salary is higher than half. Of the 16 other secretaries budgeted, the CCCRC secretary has a higher budgeted salary than 13 of them and the same budgeted salary as the Secretary to the Commissioner of Police. Buffalo’s Police Commissioner oversees over one thousand employees, while the CCRCR director oversees just one (the CCRCR secretary).

In the Mayor of Buffalo’s 2023-2024 recommended budget, salaries for the CCRCR director and CCRCR secretary increase to $105,764 and $55,061 dollars. After the inclusion of $700 dollars budgeted for supplies, rentals, printing, and binding (up from $600, despite that the recommended budget shows that the CCRCR has not used any of these funds from the last two budgets), the budget’s recommended allocation for the CCRCR is $166,175 dollars.

This sizeable taxpayer expense appears wholly unjustified in light of the city’s indication that the CCRCR is paralyzed by an undocumented prohibition on the duties it is empowered by law to perform. Even worse, these duties include responding to and resolving complaints of discrimination by our government, which are allegations of serious federal crimes.

Buffalo’s elected officials must take action if they are to honor their oaths of office. The clear long-term solution is to replace unaccountable bureaucratic appointees with a transparent and directly elected citizens review board, for which this blog has previously advocated.

During its budget deliberations this month, the Buffalo Common Council has an opportunity to reallocate the CCRCR’s funding and earmark it for an independent and effectual oversight body. Buffalo residents have opportunities to demand that change when completing the council’s budget survey and when speaking in person or remotely at the council’s public hearing on the budget, which is scheduled for Tuesday, May 16 at 5:00 PM. The social welfare organization Our City Action Buffalo is scheduled to host an online budget information session the night before.

Police police Police police police police Police police.

That title is a fully grammatical sentence. Put another way, it says:

Police of the Town of Police, Poland, who police the police of the Town of Police, Poland, are themselves policed by police of the Town of Police, Poland.

I modeled this after Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Combining the two, we can create the sentence: Buffalo police Buffalo police police buffalo Buffalo police. This means police of the City of Buffalo, New York, who are policed by police of the City of Buffalo, New York, buffalo (deceive or intimidate) police of the City of Buffalo, New York.

Last month, The Buffalo News reported that Buffalo police captain Amber Beyer, previously suspended in response to racial discrimination and retaliation complaints from members of the Buffalo Police Department’s Behavioral Heath Team (which she led), will now be reassigned to the office of Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia and will be able to “put in for a position on the open transfer list.”

According to the reporting, this result follows a departmental disciplinary hearing in which Captain Beyer pleaded guilty to unspecified charges and is the second disciplinary action taken against Captain Beyer for her conduct last year. After Captain Beyer allegedly subjected her colleagues to a “racist rant” that is now the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit, Commissioner Gramaglia appears to have ordered Captain Beyer to take implicit bias training. The Buffalo News used the passive voice in avoidance of specifying who ordered she take the training, but according to the Buffalo Police Department Manual of Procedures, the Police Commissioner determines what disciplinary measures, if any, officers face.

A Buffalo News editorial responding to this story points out: “Whatever the BPD’s implicit bias training includes, it does not seem to have taken hold with Beyer, at least not enough to prevent September’s alleged high-volume racial slurs in front of three Black members of her team.”

Further, the appropriateness of bias training alone as a disciplinary measure is questionable since Buffalo police officers reportedly are already receiving implicit bias training as a matter of course. Commissioner Gramaglia claimed in November 2022 that “since June 40% of the department has been trained in implicit bias.”

The impact of the department’s bias training is also questionable since the Buffalo News Editorial Board previously revealed that a current Buffalo police officer, Lieutenant Lance Russo, like retired officers who testified in another federal civil rights case, “could not remember when he received in-service training on racial bias, though he is ‘sure we have.’”

Twenty-three years ago, the City of Buffalo established an executive agency to monitor and review police department training programs and investigations of misconduct and to “eliminate prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination.” I will discuss the status of that commission in my next post.

Overwatch Oversight: Who Watches the Overwatch?

Local news stations have recently reported that shortly before Downtown Buffalo’s 2023 St. Patrick’s day parade, a Buffalo Police Department sniper rifle mounted on a tripod with a hanging weighted bag fell from the roof of an office building owned by Carl Paladino’s Ellicott Development Company and onto the sidewalk below, landing inches away from a propane-powered hotdog cart.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told WGRZ that “the officer was acting in an overwatch position, a security measure that offers the department a vantage point during mass gatherings.” The Buffalo Police Department’s 924-page Manual of Procedures does not describe this security measure but simply states that “[i]t is the policy of the Buffalo Police Department to safeguard participants of parades.”

Letting a unattended sniper rifle and its heavy mount fall off the edge of a four-story building and into a group of civilians below puts the department’s adherence to this policy in question.

Despite the obvious risk posed by the rifle and tripod with a weighted bag falling on a busy sidewalk from 50 feet above, WGRZ claims that “[e]xperts say it didn’t pose any immediate risk to the public.” The former Buffalo Police spokesman cited for this claim—retired police captain Jeffrey Rinaldo—is quoted as saying “[t]hese weapons are not something like a handgun or something where you could just pick it up and the average person would know how to utilize it.”

Consistent with the specifications of an RFP from 2020 (a request for proposals which garnered just one bid, for $8,626 dollars per rifle), the weapon in question appears to be a suppressed and accurized bolt action rifle fed with an internal magazine, sighted with a high-power variable optic scope, and fitted in a length of pull and comb adjusting chassis. While that may sound complicated, its modern accessories are ancillary to and unnecessary for the operation of the weapon. The necessary component—the bolt action firing mechanism—is shared by nearly every hunting and target rifle on the market and has remained virtually unchanged for 130 years. The notion of such a rifle being less intuitive to use than a handgun is laughable.

Schematic of an accurized bolt action rifle, the GOL Sniper Magnum.

Despite stating that an internal affairs investigation is ongoing, Commissioner Gramaglia told WGRZ that he “does not believe the officer mishandled the firearm” and that “it wasn’t dropped.” Per the department’s Manual of Procedures, the Commissioner alone determines whether departmental charges are brought following an internal affairs investigation and, if charges are brought, later renders a decision as to what disciplinary measures, if any, officers face.

Given Commissioner Gramaglia’s duty to fulfill the impartial roles of grand jury and judge in disciplinary policy matters such as these, his comments risk imperiling the integrity of the disciplinary process by creating the appearance that he adopted a preconceived view of the facts of the incident, formed a prejudicial conclusion as to the adherence to procedures, and colored media coverage of the incident with prejudicial statements.

WIVB’s article on the sniper rifle incident quoted a criminal defense attorney, Barry Covert of Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP, who appeared to take a different view than the Commissioner’s. Mr. Covert said that the conduct constituted “negligence” even in the event that officers adhered to protocols. In tort law, negligence is defined as a “failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances.”

The sniper rifle incident hasn’t been commented on by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown or any member of the Buffalo Common Council, but one candidate for the Ellicott District’s open seat on the Common Council, Matthew Dearing, called Commissioner Gramaglia’s response to the incident “beyond absurd” and seized on the opportunity to advocate for an “independent Police Review Board” in City Hall.

An independent police oversight body or civilian review board could bring cases like these to transparent and equitable conclusions. In 2021 (the last year on record), only 22.5% of investigated cases resulted in sustained allegations, and likely fewer resulted in departmental charges. Even fewer likely resulted in disciplinary action. The formerly published statistics do not clarify those details but do indicate that no one was terminated that year.

Following the racial justice protests of 2020, the New York State Legislature lifted the veil of confidentiality over police discipline, at least on paper. Following the legislature’s repeal of New York State Civil Rights Law section 50-a, which prohibited public disclosure of police disciplinary records, police departments have seized on the repeal’s legal ambiguities in order to resist making full disclosures.

Shortly after the 50-a repeal, LOSA lead counsel Stephanie Adams intervened in a civil lawsuit against the City of Buffalo that was brought by the city’s police and fire unions, who opposed the Buffalo Common Council’s request for five years of disciplinary records. Following a vigorous legal battle, Judge Frank A. Sedita III decided in favor of LOSA’s client and denied the unions’ request for the court to stop the city from turning over disciplinary records to the Common Council.

Other court cases involving police resistance to releasing disciplinary records have not been as successful, and even in the successful case for LOSA, the court did not compel the production of records. Consequently, the disciplinary process remains largely opaque. The Buffalo Police Department makes few proactive disclosures to promote information access, and the process to request and obtain records from the department is arduous and typically stonewalled, seldom permitting review and awareness.

Civilian review boards are the most direct way to achieve transparent police accountability, but Buffalo’s political establishment has resisted this approach for over 50 years. In 1966, the city’s former Commission on Human Relations investigated a Buffalo police officer for the fatal shooting of a unarmed Black youth. Buffalo’s police union responded by accusing the commission of overstepping its authority, and two members of the Common Council along with the Crime and Corrections Committee of the Buffalo Niagara Business Federation promised to investigate the commission for investigating the officer. One councilman echoed the police union’s accusation that the commission was acting like a civilian review board. That was reportedly the last complaint against a police officer that the commission investigated.

In 2021, Stephanie Adams and other community members helped members of the Common Council’s Police Advisory Board circulate petitions for a ballot measure to create a civilian review board. The coalition submitted the signatures of several thousand Buffalo residents collected pursuant to New York State law, but the Common Council failed to create the ballot measure. In 2022, the Common Council dissolved the Police Advisory Board and replaced it with an advisory body whose members must be confirmed by the Common Council after being appointed.

Days after the sniper rifle incident, The Buffalo News published an editorial that called for the creation of a “long-awaited” civilian review board for police accountability. It accompanied a news story by Deidre Williams that described the powers of Rochester’s and Syracuse’s civilian review boards and quoted the Buffalo police union’s president, who said that the union “would exhaust every resource to fight” efforts to create a civilian review board with disciplinary power. According to Investigative Post, the city last year forfeited its best bet to win concessions from the union, when, due to inaction from Mayor Brown’s administration on union contract negotiations, the union went to an arbitrator who awarded raises and back pay for police department employees. The Brown administration declined to oppose the award, despite that it offered nothing in return.

Buffalo’s need for independent police oversight is stronger than ever. The sniper rifle story has been picked up by news organizations in the McClatchy Media Network, including The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Miami Herald, whose article has been featured by Yahoo! News. The story’s national reverberation affirms the necessity of an impartial, appropriate, and corrective resolution to this dangerous and alarming incident. Such a resolution is not guaranteed by the current system, which must be overhauled with a transparent and accountable civilian review board to prevent injury and loss of life in future incidents.

Records Management Matters

Local governments in New York State are required to follow a 410-page document, known as the Local Government Schedule or LGS-1, to determine how long their records must be kept. The cover of LGS-1’s 2022 edition uses a photo of Buffalo’s City Hall to complement its Art Deco styling, yet it’s apparent that Buffalo's municipal government struggles to comply with the records retention schedule contained therein.

Buffalo City Hall is flanked on one side by a statue of the thirteenth U.S. President, Millard Fillmore, who practiced law in Buffalo and represented the city in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1837 and 1843. A bust of President Fillmore next to City Hall’s directory (which currently names a City Clerk who left office in 2019) greets visitors and employees after they pass through security at the building’s main entrance.

Buffalo City Hall’s Millard Fillmore statue, photo by Nathan Feist (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Buffalo City Hall’s bust of Millard Fillmore, photo by Nathan Feist (CC BY-SA 4.0)

President Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was condemned across northern states (where slavery was by then illegal) because it required law enforcement officers to arrest anyone alleged to be an escaped slave, imposed fines of $1,000 dollars (over $38,000 in today’s dollars) on officers who did not effect arrest and on civilians who allegedly aided fugitives, and rewarded officers and judges who arrested and convicted those alleged to be escaped slaves.

With this sordid history in mind, Buffalo’s legislative body—the Buffalo Common Council—unanimously adopted a resolution “to establish a poll on what City-owned property that bears the name Fillmore should be changed and what new name should take its place.” The Common Council posted a questionnaire on Facebook a week later, and The Buffalo News encouraged the public to also provide responses by phone and e-mail.

The Common Council’s Facebook post announcing its Millard Fillmore survey

The results of this survey have never been published, and, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, the City Clerk stated that the results of the Common Council’s questionnaire are not available because they are located only on a personal account of a former employee.

The LGS-1, meanwhile, sets a 6-year retention period for opinion survey results and directs appraising said records for historical significance so that survey results “involving very significant issues” are retained permanently.

In response to my request for all results from the survey, the City Clerk was able to provide one e-mail from a member of the public, who wrote that renaming Fillmore Avenue “is an outstanding opportunity to affect public trust of local government,” noted that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed free Blacks to be kidnapped and sold in the South, and recommended that the avenue be renamed Juneteenth Avenue. Buffalo’s annual Juneteenth parade proceeds up Fillmore Avenue to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park.

MLK Park was once a park called “The Parade.” Fillmore Avenue now bisects it.

Fillmore Avenue was last renamed in the mid-1870s (President Fillmore died in 1874). An 1872 map of Buffalo labels the portion north of what is now MLK Park “Walden” and labels the portion south of the park “Adams St.” Another 1872 map labels the south portion “East Street.” An 1866 map (before the park was constructed) labels the entire street as Walden Street.

The first judge of the Erie County Court and eighth mayor of Buffalo, Ebenezer Walden, owned a large plot of land there, and until 1969, the Common Council’s Fillmore District was named Walden District.

Augustyn “Gus” Franczyk represented Buffalo’s Walden District in 1968

In October 2020, the Common Council unanimously approved a resolution to designate Fillmore Avenue “Black Lives Matter Way” and cited a teenager named Mekhi Edwards who recommended in June 2020 that a Buffalo street be painted with the phrase Black Lives Matter (Washington, D.C. did this the day it designated two of its city blocks as Black Lives Matter Plaza). Council members pledged to install trailblazing signs on Fillmore Avenue with the new designation, and Mayor Byron Brown directed that the signs be installed in an “expedited manner so that residents can appreciate this historic moment as quickly as possible.”

As of March 2023, no such signs are present, and the Common Council appears to have deleted its Facebook post announcing the change (a record of that post is preserved in a WIVB News article). The LGS-1 specifies that public relations communications containing “significant information” be retained permanently.

Fillmore Avenue at Broadway in September 2022, adapted from work of Andre Carrotflower (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Public figures who embraced slavery remain the namesakes of streets in many Buffalo neighborhoods. Washington Street is named for a U.S. president who ratified the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and owned 123 slaves at the time of his death. Jefferson Avenue’s presidential namesake pursued abolition of slavery but owned 600 slaves over the course of his life and freed very few. Porter Avenue and Breckenridge Street are named after perhaps the first slaveholders to live in Buffalo. In 1820, General Peter Buell Porter and his wife Letitia Breckenridge brought five young slaves to Buffalo, where the slaves were considered indentured servants under a New York State law that required they be freed at 28 years of age for men and 25 years of age for women.

Spurred by the racial justice protests of 2020, the University at Buffalo and Buffalo State have renamed their buildings and facilities previously named after General Porter and President Fillmore. There may be majority support among residents of the City of Buffalo to remove those names from municipal property, but nearly no records of the Buffalo Common Council’s public opinion survey on this subject are available to the taxpayers who funded the survey, because City Hall is apparently not in compliance with the New York State retention schedule that bears its image, LGS-1.

The Committee on Open Government implores New York State for reform

The New York State Legislature created the Committee on Open Government (CoOG) in 1974 to provide advisory opinions and develop regulations for compliance with the newly ratified Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL. Every year, CoOG issues an annual report with proposals for improving access to public meetings and records in the State of New York.

The 2022 Annual Report is a plea for fundamental change of the system overseen by CoOG. The report notes that “the current structure of administrative oversight of FOIL compliance does not promote the prompt and efficient disposition of such disputes.” This is because state laws for records requests made with local governments are not enforced by any state agency. Instead, those who make records requests must spend hundreds or thousands of dollars suing local governments to compel compliance. CoOG’s report puts it thus: “The current statutory construct for appeal and enforcement places an expensive and time-consuming burden on private citizens seeking redress for perceived violations of the open government statutes.”

The report points to other states which fund offices to enforce freedom of information laws and to two bills in the New York State Legislature which seek to improve outcomes and timeliness for records requests. 

The report asks the New York State Legislature to clarify the intent of its repeal of Civil Rights Law section 50-a (which had prohibited disclosure of police disciplinary records), since the current body of case law is inconsistent on whether the repeal applies retroactively and whether disclosure of pending or unsubstantiated complaints is now required.

CoOG also advises on the compliance of public bodies with New York State’s Open Meetings Law, or OML. The 2022 Annual Report comments on the ambiguity of whether OML applies to advisory bodies. Historically it has applied, but the text of a 2021 amendment suggests it does not, despite that the Legislature’s memo that accompanies the amendment stresses that it does.

The report notes “no court has yet interpreted whether this change in the law now excludes from coverage by the OML all advisory bodies,” but I am sad to report that the Erie County Supreme Court decided in December 2022 that the City of Buffalo’s Citizens Advisory Committee on Reapportionment is not a “public body” as described in the amendment and therefore is not subject to the OML. The full docket for this case is available here.

Finally, the report calls attention to a bill that seeks to require public meetings be livestreamed, and it raises the alarm that the OML amendment allowing videoconferencing for public meetings will expire January 1, 2024, unless renewed. The recommendations of the report are worthy of serious consideration. I urge our state legislators to take action, and I encourage members of the public to contact their state legislators and demand that action.

Board Oversight and Intervention training now available from LOSA

The Law Office of Stephanie Adams provides legal services to New York State nonprofits and their boards of trustees. After reading in The Buffalo News that the boards of two prominent Buffalo nonprofits failed to respond in a timely and considerate manner to complaints concerning their former presidents, we have created a board member training regime on board oversight and tough decision-making. 

The 90-minute training, titled Board Oversight and Intervention: Using the Tools of Governance to Prevent and Address Concerns in an NFP Environment, will coach current and prospective board members on how to prepare for, prevent, and appropriately respond to conflicts between, controversy about, and misconduct by board members.

The customizable and confidential training, designed to consider the unique mission and culture of your organization, will provide participants with simple yet critical tools that boards can use to create and maintain a healthy work environment while promoting a not-for-profit mission.

Our trainers are Stephanie “Cole” Adams, former General Counsel at Niagara University, and Samantha White, President of the Minority Bar Association of Western New York, who between them have thousands of hours of board training, investigations, and advocacy experience with charitable operations. While the topic is serious, Cole and Sam work to keep the content interactive and engaging.

To inquire about a customized training for your organization, reach out to info@losapllc.com or call (716) 464-3386 to reach out to Ms. Adams personally.

LOSA Emerging Artists Initiative, Phase 2: Drawn to India

Exciting times in Buffalo!

Anyone who watches our firm will not be surprised to learn we’re happy to see a mayoral candidate focused on the health and well-being of every Buffalo resident. In fact we’re so pumped about this, we want to turn some of that enthusiasm into art…so our latest “Emerging Artists” theme is “Drawn to India.”

Here’s how to participate: Submit your picture of the woman who is reinvigorating local politics by July 16, 2021 (to kalinprice@losapllc.com).

The winning image (selected by the team here at the LOSA) will be displayed in the LOSA windows at the corner of Potomac and Grant, and the artist will be awarded $300, along with a matching donation in their honor to the India Walton campaign.

No no write-in's need apply!

LOSA Emerging Artists Initiative Launches: January, 2021

It’s been a rough year. One thing that sustains us, no matter how challenging things get, is art.

To celebrate and support the emerging artists in our home territory of Buffalo, NY, the LOSA has created an “Emerging Artists Initiative.”

It’s a simple program: 4 works of original art by an emerging Buffalo artist, and the artist’s bio, are displayed in our beautiful storefront windows on Grant Street. We switch the display every three months (every quarter). And because the LOSA firmly believes that artists should be paid, we pay $300.00 (three hundred) for the right to showcase this work.

To mix things up, we pick a theme each quarter. This January’s theme is something we all need: renewal.

Interested in applying? Please send 4 photos of your work, a bio (required to be considered), complete contact information (phone, address, email) and expression of interest to paralegal Kalin Price at kalin@losapllc.com.

We’ll select the first “LOSA Emerging Artist” by January 22, 2021 (since we can only pick one, all other entrants will be notified by January 23 via email, and invited to try again in April). You get your check when you drop off the display copies of your work.

Who is a Buffalo “emerging artist?” Anyone whose bio shows us a serious commitment to the pursuit of graphic arts, with limited commercial support to date. And you have to live in Buffalo (we love you too, Niagara Falls, but this one’s for the home team).

Not sure how to write your bio? Send us your name, what inspires you, why you have chosen a creative path, and what the work you submitted means to you.

Comments on Public Library Board Autonomy

Law and current legal authority firmly establish that public library boards are the sole authority regarding employee terms of employment, including hiring, compensation, benefits, evaluation, promotion, discipline, and termination. 

This autonomy is constrained only by a public library board's need to observe the New York Civil Service Law, the New York Education Law, numerous state and federal labor laws, various applicable regulations, and a library's own charter and bylaws. 

The law does allow a public library to use, in whole or in part, the payroll system, policies, and benefits systems of their sponsoring government entity, if such resources are offered to the library by that entity.  Further, the government entity, in making such an offer, may condition such use on the library's cooperation with certain reporting procedures or methods of documentation.  The choice to use such offered resources, however, is ultimately at the discretion of the library's board, who may instead decide to have the library implement its own system. 

And finally, the choice as to how to expend library funds with respect to employees (salary, benefits, paid time off) always rests solely with a public library's board.

The legal authority establishing these considerations is extensive, but a thorough summary is set forth in the links and content below.

https://www.osc.state.ny.us/legal-opinions/opinion-93-15, which states:

"The ultimate control of the use, disposition and expenditure of the library fund moneys is vested in the library board even when the municipal treasurer has custody (1991 Opns St Comp No. 91-57, p 158). Further, even if the treasurer of the sponsoring municipality is custodian of the library fund, the library board would have custody of private source moneys of the library (1988 Opns St Comp No. 88-76, p 145; 1980 Opns St Comp No. 80-340, p 101).

Public libraries are, for most purposes, fiscally autonomous from the sponsoring municipality (see Opn No. 91-57, supra; 1983 Opns St Comp No. 83-32, p 37; Buffalo Library v Erie County, 171 AD2d 369, 577 NYS2d 993 affd 80 NY2d 938, 591 NYS2d 131). In addition, public library officers and employees are often not considered to be officers and employees of the sponsoring municipality or school district (see, e.g., General Municipal Law, §800[5], conflicts of interest; Public Officers Law, §10, official oaths; Binghamton Public Library v City of Binghamton, 69 Misc 2d 1005, 331 NYS2d 515 and County of Erie v Board of Trustees, 62 Misc 2d 396, 308 NYS2d 515, collective bargaining negotiations). In view of the library's fiscal autonomy, it is our opinion that library trustees and the separate library treasurer are not town officers or employees for purposes of Town Law, §123 and, therefore, are not subject to the accounting and auditing provisions of that section.

We note, however, that General Municipal Law, §30(3) requires that an annual report of financial transactions, including those involving private source moneys (Opn No. 88-76, supra), be made by the treasurer of each public library. The report must be certified by the officer making the same and, unless an extension of time is granted, must be filed with the Office of the State Comptroller within 60 days after the close of the library's fiscal year (General Municipal Law, §30[5]). In addition, the Education Law contains certain requirements for public libraries to report to the State Education Department (see Education Law, §§215, 263). Finally, as noted in Opn No. 88-76, supra, the town board, in determining the amount to be raised by taxes for library purposes, may take into account a library's private source funds and, therefore, may request from the library information concerning such funds."

https://www.osc.state.ny.us/legal-opinions/opinion-91-57, which states:

"With respect to library moneys, however, we note that public libraries are, for most purposes, fiscally autonomous from the sponsoring municipality (see, e.g., 1983 Opns St Comp No. 83-32, p 38). Thus, the ultimate control of the use, disposition, and expenditure of those moneys is vested in the library board of trustees even if the municipal treasurer is the custodian of library moneys. (Education Law, §§226[6], 259[1]; 1987 Opns St Comp No. 87-84, p 125; see also Opn No. 87-49, supra; Opn No. 86-54, supra). In addition, it is the library board of trustees which may authorize the investment of library moneys even when the moneys are held in the custody of the municipal treasurer (Opn No. 86-54, supra). Therefore, since the library board controls the use and disposition of library fund moneys, it is our opinion that the library board must consent to any arrangement under which library fund moneys are to be comingled with moneys of the municipality."

https://www.osc.state.ny.us/legal-opinions/opinion-2001-12, regarding indemnification of library trustees, which states:

"PUBLIC OFFICERS LAW §18: There are two alternatives for conferring the benefits of section 18 of the Public Officers Law on employees of a public library: either (1) the board of trustees of the library may elect to confer the benefits of section 18 on library employees as a public library expense; or (2) the governing board of the sponsoring municipality or school district may confer section 18 benefits on library employees as a direct expense of the sponsor."

Comptroller Opinion #445, which states:

"As a general rule, the town library board of trustees, and not the town board, has the authority to appoint and dismiss library personnel (Education Law, §§ 226(7), 260; 30 Opns St Comp, 1974, p 98). The library board exercises direct control and supervision over library personnel and, for most purposes, including labor negotiations [**486] under the Taylor Law (Civil Service [*2] Law, §§ 200, et seq.), the library board is considered to be the employer of library personnel (County of Erie v. Board of Trustees, 62 Misc 2d 396, 308 NYS2d 515; Binghamton Public Library Unit v. City of Binghamton, 69 Misc 2d 1005, 331 NYS2d 515; Opns St Comp, 1972, No. 72-402, unreported; cf. Retirement and Social Security Law, § 30(c); Opns St Comp, 1980, No. 80-199, as yet unreported; Finkelstein v. Central School District, 34 AD2d 781, 311 NYS2d 243 affd 28 NY2d 705, 320 NYS2d 751). Compensation for library personnel is fixed by the library board and paid from the library fund (Education Law, §§ 226(7), 259(1)). It would then follow that, as between the town board and the library board, it is the library board which determines the vacation and sick leave benefits for library employees. It is our opinion that a library board of trustees has implied authority to provide for sick leaves and vacations for library employees (see Opn No. 80- 199, supra; 1961 Atty Gen [Inf Opns] 105; Education Law, §§ 226(7), 260). We note that expenditures for employer contributions to the New York State Employees' Retirement System for library employees are expenses [*3] incurred for the operation of the library and should be paid from library funds (Opns St Comp, 1975, No. 75-903, unreported; 16 Ed Dep't Rep, 1977, p 416). The same would hold true for employer contributions for social security and unemployment insurance for library employees."

I hope this information is of assistance.

Stephanie Adams discusses 50-a police records ruling with local media

Stephanie “Cole” Adams discussed her client James Kistner’s successful fight for the release of Buffalo Police Department disciplinary records with WKBW’s Madison Carter on October 6:

https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/judge-rules-police-and-fire-disciplinary-records-should-be-public-strikes-down-unions

In the interview, Adams noted the importance of her client’s intervention in the lawsuit, which was originally filed against the City of Buffalo and city officials only to prevent the release of records.

“Buffalo is very often the defendant in cases involving allegations of misconduct by the Buffalo Police Department, and so there might not be the strongest motivation for them to fight the case vigorously,” Adams said.