OPEN LETTER TO NEW ROCHELLE CITY MANAGER ON IMPROPER WITHHOLDING OF EXTERNAL AUDIT REPORT
CityManager@newrochelleny.gov
City Manager Wilfredo Melendez
Dear City Manager Melendez,
I want the court to weigh in on a matter that has become recurring — almost monthly — during your tenure: the City of New Rochelle’s routine violations of the Open Meetings Law. Many of these violations involve simple matters, such as failing to make slide decks presented during public meetings available on the City’s website, either separately or as part of the agenda or minutes package, before or after the meetings in question. Since you took office, the Open Meetings Law has effectively ceased to exist as a functioning check in New Rochelle. In my two decades covering this city as a journalist, it has never been less transparent or less accountable to the public than it is now.
I intend to file an Article 78 proceeding regarding the draft audit document at issue in FOIL Request No. 26-1060. It is not moot unless you produce the exact version of the audit marked “Draft” referenced by Thomas Smith of EFPR during the June 9 meeting of the New Rochelle City Council, which you have refused to do.
For the record, the history of that request is as follows: received June 11, 2026; denied July 13, 2026; appealed July 15, 2026; your denial of that appeal signed July 29, 2026, and received by me on July 31, 2026.
Without waiving my rights in that proceeding, I would still like to obtain some version of the audit now, so that — unlike your administration — I can share it with the public, given the substantial public interest in the City’s finances.
In your denial of my appeal, you wrote: “the audit will be finalized and a copy of the final audit will be promptly provided upon completion.”
In my article published yesterday, I addressed that statement directly:
On June 30, 2026, the city’s outside auditor, EFPR Group, issued the 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR), which received an unmodified audit opinion. The ACFR also references a second report from the same audit engagement, EFPR’s “Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting and on Compliance and Other Matters,” also dated June 30, 2026, which has not been made public. Both documents are products of the same audit engagement that was still underway, in draft form, on June 9.
Your July 29 denial letter states that “the audit will be finalized and a copy of the final audit will be promptly provided upon completion.” I would note that the audit was in fact already finalized while my appeal was pending: I filed my request on June 11, the City denied it on July 13, and I appealed on July 15 — but the audit itself had already been completed and filed on June 30, before the City’s own denial, before my appeal, and weeks before your July 29 determination. Your description of finalization as a future event was inaccurate at every stage of this process, not only on the date you signed your letter.
I do not know, and cannot know from video alone, the exact title of the document Mr. Smith consulted while answering questions at the June 9 meeting. What I can attest to is what the video shows: a document marked “Draft,” which Mr. Smith read from and referred to while answering questions — including questions about findings that do not appear anywhere in the 163-page Annual Comprehensive Financial Report filed June 30. Those same findings — identified by number, with statutory citations — were displayed to the public on a slide during that presentation. I would note that this slide deck was not made available to the public prior to the meeting, in violation of the Open Meetings Law, as has so typically been the case under your administration. Whatever the June 9 draft document was called, the record that explains those findings — what I would call, in plain terms, “the audit” — now indisputably exists in final form. The City’s own ACFR states that EFPR “issued our report dated June 30, 2026” on internal control and compliance.
Given that the audit was in fact complete as of the date of your denial, I ask that you now provide the audited financial statements and/or internal control and compliance report referenced above, consistent with your offer to produce that record when it became available, made in the course of denying my appeal of FOIL Request No. 26-1060.
Respectfully,
Robert Cox
Publisher & Managing Editor
Talk of the Sound
