The Public's Right to Know: New Rochelle's FOIL Stonewall — Part I

Robert Cox

16 Aug 2026 — 16 min read

This first installment is free to read without a paid subscription (but please consider one to support good journalism)

DUBLIN, IRELAND (August 16, 2026) — This is Part I in a multi-part series.

Shining the Light

"If you get a full copy, your recourse, in my opinion, involves shining the light and pointing out where there might not have been full compliance."
— Robert J. Freeman, New York State Committee on Open Government, to Robert Cox, Publisher of Talk of the Sound, March 3, 2015

For most of the past 18 years, that was essentially how I handled fights over public records. File a Freedom of Information Law request. If an agency resisted, appeal. Argue. Narrow the request when that made sense. Pick up the phone. Keep pushing. And when necessary, write about what the government was doing.

What I did not do was routinely sue.

Robert Freeman, the longtime executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government and for decades New York's leading authority on FOIL, repeatedly encouraged me to use the platform available to me as a journalist. Shine a light on the problem. Let the public see what its government was withholding and why. Use publicity and moral suasion to make disclosure preferable to continued resistance.

That approach generally worked. Until New Rochelle in 2024.

I now have multiple Article 78 proceedings involving public records, including a newly filed case challenging the City's handling of 24 separate FOIL requests. This series is about how we got here.

Why I Didn't Just Sue

There is a reason that, despite countless battles over public records during 18 years covering New Rochelle, I never sued the City, the New Rochelle Police Department, the City School District of New Rochelle or the New Rochelle Municipal Housing Authority to obtain records.

Litigation is a lousy way for a working journalist to get information.

An Article 78 proceeding costs real money. Representing myself does not make it free. Between court filing fees, printing and service on respondents, each proceeding costs me roughly $1,000 before placing any value on my time. If I had filed an Article 78 every time one of those agencies denied a FOIL appeal over the past 18 years, I could easily have spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money litigating over public records.

The economics look very different on the other side. Government employees defending their agencies’ decisions never personally pay the legal bills. The taxpayers are paying. A requester has to decide whether a particular record is worth spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to pursue in court. The government can defend its decision with public resources.

Money is only part of the deterrent. I am a journalist, not a lawyer. An Article 78 does not write itself. I have to research the law, reconstruct the administrative history, organize exhibits, draft and revise a verified petition and memorandum of law, learn the applicable court procedures, file everything correctly through NYSCEF and arrange proper service on every respondent. Organizing the exhibits alone is a genuine slog — assembling years of requests, responses, extensions and appeals into a clean, properly labeled record a judge can actually follow is some of the most tedious work in the entire process.

The current proceeding involving 24 New Rochelle FOIL requests illustrates the amount of work involved before a case ever reaches a judge. Over a period of weeks, I went back through years of FOIL requests, responses, extensions, appeals and correspondence. I identified unresolved matters and selected 24 that I believed presented the issues particularly clearly. Then I deliberately created a clean administrative record for judicial review: 24 requests, 24 City determinations, 24 administrative appeals and 24 final determinations by the City Manager. Only after completing that process could I begin preparing the Article 78 itself.

Filing the proceeding does not mean the records suddenly arrive. It begins another wait. An Article 78 can take months to resolve, a year or even longer. Most of the FOIL matters now being litigated in this case are already two or three years old. For a journalist investigating something happening today, obtaining a document years later can mean receiving it long after the information would have had its greatest public value.

Delayed disclosure can become its own form of obstruction. A document that arrives after an election, after a government contract has been awarded, after money has been spent, after an official has left office or after a controversy has passed cannot necessarily perform the same public function it could have performed when first requested.

And if I go through all of that and win, there is no pot of gold at the end of a FOIL Article 78. I do not receive damages for the time the records were withheld. I get the public records the court agrees I was legally entitled to receive in the first place.

FOIL provides for attorney's fees and litigation costs under certain circumstances, but I am representing myself, so there are no attorney's fees for me to recover. At best, I may recover some out-of-pocket expenses such as filing, printing and process-server fees. Nobody reimburses the weeks spent preparing the case, gives back the reporting time diverted into litigation or restores the value lost when records needed for a current investigation arrive months or years too late.

That creates a striking imbalance. The requester spends his own money, contributes his own time and assumes the burden of taking the government to court. The government defends its decision using taxpayer resources. If the requester ultimately prevails, his principal reward is the public records the government should have provided all along.

In New Rochelle, that imbalance has taken on an additional dimension. The City Council agreed to use taxpayer money to fund private defamation litigation by Corporation Counsel Dawn Warren and Development Commissioner Adam Salgado arising from my reporting in The New Rochelle Thimblerig.

City Manager Wilfredo Melendez told the Council that the City Code allowed either him or the Council to authorize the legal action. He said he chose to bring the matter before the Council "for transparency and for openness." Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert specifically noted that Melendez could have authorized it himself and praised his decision to bring it to the Council.

After 18 years covering New Rochelle City Hall, I drew a different conclusion from that public exercise. I understood the message as directed at least partly at me: City government was publicly demonstrating that it was prepared to put its resources behind Warren and Salgado and hoped the legal threat would cause me to change course. That is my interpretation. What is not interpretation is what City officials said that night.

Melendez told the Council:

"My hope is that it ends there. We don't continue with this anymore."

Council Member David Peters went further:

"I think the city manager has indicated that he hopes that this action will stop at the cease and desist in this matter, and that individual involved will take that into consideration around the impact of what's going on."

Ramos-Herbert then summarized the objective this way:

"The intent is, and the hope is that the cease and desist will do the work. But if not, then they will need legal counsel to decide what next steps are."

The Mayor also acknowledged that bringing the matter before the Council was "unprecedented within itself."

I am now paying out of my own pocket to bring Article 78 proceedings seeking public records while New Rochelle taxpayers are funding litigation arising from reporting those records help make possible. I have also filed another FOIL request seeking the records behind the City's decision to fund that litigation.

For nearly two decades, there was a better way to resolve these disputes. Freeman taught it to me: shine the light. Appeal. Argue. Persist. And when an agency still refuses to comply, use journalism to show the public what its government is doing.

That approach generally worked well enough that I never had to sue a government agency for records. But it depends, at least in part, on public exposure functioning as a deterrent — on officials caring that their conduct has been brought into the light. Under the current New Rochelle administration, public exposure has too often ceased to provide that restraint.

Flowers Park changed the equation.

But the fight is not simply over public records. It is about what can happen after the public sees them.

The Public's Right to Know

There are basically four ways an investigative reporter finds out what government is doing:

People talk.
Government officials answer questions — or don't.
Public meetings and legally required disclosures expose some of what government is doing.
Public records provide the documentary evidence.

The four often work together. A source points toward something worth investigating. A FOIL request seeks records that can confirm or disprove what the source says. Those records generate questions for government officials. An answer, or refusal to answer, generates another lead. A public meeting produces another document. Another source comes forward.

That is investigative reporting. FOIL requests are not the investigation. They are tools of the investigation.

That distinction is important to understanding what has happened in New Rochelle in recent years.

How We Got Here

The present records fight did not begin with Dawn Warren, Adam Salgado or even Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert. Its roots go back several years.

In 2022, then-Mayor Noam Bramson sought appointment as New Rochelle's Development Commissioner. Although Bramson did not become Development Commissioner, I filed an ethics complaint challenging his pursuit of the position. The complaint was sustained and referred to the Westchester County District Attorney's Office. The DA ultimately declined to prosecute, and Bramson later announced that he would not seek another term as mayor in 2023.

Bramson remained mayor through December 31, 2023. During his final year in office, he played an important role in advancing Yadira Ramos-Herbert as his preferred successor, including involvement in her campaign fundraising.

At the same time, another drama was unfolding inside City Hall. In March 2023, City Manager Kathleen Gill fired Human Resources Commissioner Robert Yamuder. Months later, an anonymous letter arrived containing numerous allegations, largely directed at Gill.

Bramson and Ramos-Herbert pushed for action on the letter and against Gill. Ultimately, the City Council declined to proceed on an anonymous complaint whose allegations could not be substantiated.

But that was not the only ethics matter moving through City Hall.

A Second Sustained Complaint Against Bramson

In 2023, I filed another ethics complaint involving Bramson and Council Member Sara Kaye over Sustainable Westchester. As part of my reporting, I FOILed emails involving Bramson and Kaye that I believed were relevant.

The records were eventually produced, but late and in a PST file format I could not open. As a practical matter, they were useless to me at the time.

The Ethics Board sustained my complaint on December 5, 2023. I did not finally gain access to the contents of those emails until May 2024, months after the ethics proceeding was over.

What I found was remarkable: while Bramson was being investigated over a potential conflict involving Sustainable Westchester, he was also on Sustainable Westchester's payroll. That had not been disclosed to the City or the Ethics Board even during the ethics proceeding.

By then it was too late to put those records before the Ethics Board considering the complaint. There is an important lesson in that episode that goes well beyond Noam Bramson: sometimes delayed disclosure does not merely postpone a story. It prevents information from being available when it matters most.

A New Administration

Ramos-Herbert became mayor on January 1, 2024, with Democrats holding a commanding 6–1 majority on the City Council.

One of the earliest records controversies involved something seemingly straightforward: a flag.

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, an Israeli flag had been raised outside New Rochelle City Hall. After the new Council took office, members discussed taking it down.

I learned about those discussions and filed a FOIL request. The resulting emails exposed internal conversations that otherwise would never have been public. Publication of those records caused an uproar, particularly within New Rochelle's Jewish community, and put Council members in the uncomfortable position of explaining discussions they had not expected voters to see.

It was a textbook example of why FOIL matters. Government officials knew what they had said. What changed was that the public knew, too.

Another Ethics Complaint — And Gill Is Gone

In February 2024, I filed an ethics complaint against Ramos-Herbert concerning her relationship with Sustainable Westchester.

Before the Ethics Board issued its determination publicly, sources familiar with the matter told me the Board had sustained my complaint. I did not at that point have the determination itself.

On March 25, Gill was called into the Mayor's office and told she was being fired. The mechanics proved more complicated than that. The Mayor could not simply fire the City Manager unilaterally. Gill ultimately departed under a negotiated separation agreement.

The determination my sources had described to me as sustaining the complaint was never released to me. Instead, the determination ultimately provided to me on April 10 reached the opposite result.

Those are the facts I can establish from my own reporting: what sources told me before Gill's departure and what the City subsequently provided to me. I believe the determination was rewritten in the intervening period, but that conclusion is based on the sequence of events and source information rather than my possession of both versions of the document.

By then I was in repeated contact with the Westchester County District Attorney's Office, raising alarms about what I believed was corruption inside New Rochelle government. City Hall, meanwhile, was leaking like a sieve.

Sources, Then Records

People inside and around City government were providing increasingly detailed information about contracts, expenditures, personnel, outside organizations and decisions being made behind closed doors. Those sources did not eliminate the need for records. They made the records more important.

A good source can tell a reporter where to look. A document can establish what happened. So the information coming from sources generated increasingly targeted FOIL requests.

I was not asking City Hall to turn over mountains of paper so I could rummage through them hoping to stumble across a story. Increasingly, I knew what I was looking for.

One early example involved the anonymous letter and Robert Yamuder. I was investigating whether Yamuder had authored the anonymous 2023 letter attacking Gill. Among other things, that investigation required writing samples that could be compared with the anonymous letter.

I sought Yamuder's emails from his final weeks in office. The City responded that there were about 8,000 potentially responsive records. I did not need thousands. I offered to narrow the request dramatically, to perhaps 10 or 20 emails sufficient for the journalistic purpose. Corporation Counsel Dawn Warren refused my offer to reduce the request by more than 99 percent.

The fight continued. It would not be the last time.

The New Rochelle Thimblerig

By the summer and fall of 2024, the information coming in was pointing toward a much larger story. I began mapping out what became The New Rochelle Thimblerig, an extensive investigative series about what was happening inside City government.

The word thimblerig is an old term for a shell game — a confidence trick in which the mark is invited to watch closely while the operator makes what matters disappear.

The reporting involved specific people, specific organizations, specific expenditures and specific events. Among them were WE Rock, Lincoln Park, Jazz Under the Stars, Vivian Spady, Rocky Middleton, LaChonne Williams, Kingdom Community Consultants, Mark McLean and Josiah Mott, along with numerous other City programs, contractors, employees and organizations.

The FOIL requests followed the reporting. I sought contracts, invoices, emails, payment records, procurement records and documents showing who authorized expenditures, where money went and what taxpayers received in return.

Over the relevant period, I filed roughly 50 FOIL requests connected to this broader reporting. Some produced records. Some produced partial records. Others became prolonged battles.

In my view, something changed as City officials began to understand that apparently separate requests were pieces of a much larger investigation. Delay became resistance, and resistance became stonewalling.

The Reporting Begins

The first installment of The New Rochelle Thimblerig appeared on October 24, 2024. The series was deliberately constructed to unfold over time. I knew where the first several installments were going, while expecting publication itself to generate additional information and leads.

That is precisely what happened. But publication produced something else.

A cease-and-desist demand arrived from attorneys representing New Rochelle Corporation Counsel Dawn Warren and Development Commissioner Adam Salgado. Then something extraordinary happened: the City of New Rochelle agreed to use taxpayer money to fund their private defamation litigation against me and my publications.

The December 2024 Council discussion quoted earlier matters because it puts the City's own words into the record. Melendez said he hoped the matter would end with the cease-and-desist. Peters said he hoped I would "take that into consideration." Ramos-Herbert said the hope was that the cease-and-desist would "do the work."

Warren and Salgado ultimately filed their federal defamation lawsuit in August 2025. Their lawsuit itself makes my FOIL disputes with Warren part of their theory of the case. Their version, broadly stated, is that Warren stood up to me over FOIL, I became angry, and my reporting about Warren and Salgado followed.

I see the chronology very differently. The FOIL requests were part of the investigation that generated the reporting. That distinction is at the heart of everything that followed.

Now There Is a FOIL About the Lawsuit

The circle has become almost absurdly complete.

The more I investigated, the more targeted FOIL requests I filed. The more those requests were resisted, the more the resistance itself became something to investigate and report. That reporting generated legal threats and, eventually, taxpayer-funded litigation. Now the decision to fund that litigation has itself generated another FOIL request.

On August 12, I filed Request No. 26-1496 seeking records concerning the City's decision to fund the Warren-Salgado litigation, including internal communications, memoranda, drafts and communications with outside counsel concerning that decision.

So now there is a FOIL request about the taxpayer-funded lawsuit arising from reporting based partly on earlier FOIL requests.

Welcome to New Rochelle.

Flowers Park: What Happens When the Public Knows

There is another episode that helps explain why access to information matters so much: Flowers Park.

I learned from sources inside City Hall about an RFP involving the park. It appeared in what amounted to a classic Friday night document dump. By Saturday morning, I had analyzed the proposal and published what I believed it meant: effectively turning substantial control over a public park over to a private developer.

People noticed. Council Member Al Tarantino began pressing questions from inside the Council. Residents organized. Youth sports organizations, neighborhood groups and other community interests mobilized. Across two meetings, more than 100 people turned out, with overwhelming opposition to the proposal, and people got up and spoke against it for an extended period of time at both meetings.

At the second meeting, former New Rochelle Mayor and then-Westchester County Clerk Tim Idoni delivered a particularly effective argument against the proposal. Within days, the plan was withdrawn.

That should have ended the story. Instead, it began another records fight.

I sought the developer's response to the RFP so the public could see what had actually been proposed. The City resisted producing it. That dispute eventually became my first-ever FOIL Article 78 proceeding, and it remains pending. The Flowers Park proceeding is separate from the new case involving the 24 FOIL determinations.

Flowers Park demonstrates the point better than any abstract discussion of transparency ever could. The fight is not simply over public records. It is over what can happen after the public sees them. In my view, that is precisely why access can become contentious: records allow residents to compare what public officials say they are doing with what the government's own documents show they are doing.

The sequence at Flowers Park was straightforward:

Information produced reporting.
Reporting informed residents.
Residents showed up.
Elected officials faced public pressure.
Government changed course.

That is what the public's right to know looks like when it works.

Scrutiny Beyond City Hall

Meanwhile, something larger was happening. The Westchester County District Attorney's Office was investigating matters involving New Rochelle. The New York State Inspector General became involved in matters arising from New Rochelle. Other state regulatory inquiries followed aspects of the reporting. And the City's increasingly troubled finances became another major focus of investigation.

On June 9, 2026, New Rochelle's outside auditor presented findings that raised serious questions about the City's financial practices. The following day, I submitted a formal complaint to the New York State Office of the State Comptroller.

The Comptroller subsequently confirmed that it would audit New Rochelle. The Comptroller has not said that my complaint triggered the audit, and I do not claim that it did. What is known is that the audit is now getting underway as these questions about the City's finances continue to develop.

At the same time, another FOIL fight is unfolding over financial records, including a draft financial statement referenced by the City's outside auditor at a public meeting but subsequently withheld by the City. The City Manager denied my administrative appeal on July 29. Additional targeted FOIL requests are being filed as new financial information emerges.

This story is moving while I am writing it.

The 24

Which brings us to the Article 78 proceeding that prompted this series.

Over the course of the Thimblerig investigation, many FOIL requests developed messy administrative histories: extensions, partial responses, enormous claimed record counts, unanswered appeals, constructive denials and disputes that never reached what I considered a proper conclusion.

By 2026, New Rochelle was using the NextRequest portal, which created a much cleaner administrative record. In May, I resubmitted 24 unresolved matters through that system. I did not hide their histories. Quite the opposite: the prior requests and disputes were identified.

The City denied all 24. I appealed all 24. City Manager Wilfredo Melendez denied all 24 appeals. Those determinations are now before the New York State Supreme Court in Westchester County.

The City's position is essentially that these are old disputes that cannot be revived through new FOIL requests after the time for an Article 78 challenge has expired.

My position is substantially different. Some of the requests changed. Some covered later periods. Some necessarily sought records created after the earlier requests. Some prior administrative processes were never properly completed. Most fundamentally, I contend that the four-month limitations period governing Article 78 litigation is not an exemption under FOIL permitting an agency to refuse to process a new records request on its merits.

A judge will ultimately decide the legal questions. This series has a different purpose.

Open the Files

There is no reason readers should have to take my word for what happened. The records exist, and subsequent installments will put those records in front of readers.

Over the installments currently planned for this series, I am going to open several of these files, reproduce the relevant records where possible and walk through them: what was being investigated, what records were requested, why they were needed, what the City did, what happened on appeal, and what the City's own emails, determinations and records show.

We will begin with Generations Church, which may be the clearest example among the 24.

Each case study will return to four basic questions:

What I Asked For

What records were actually requested?

Why I Wanted It

What was the underlying reporting question?

What the City Did

How did New Rochelle process the request?

What Happened Next

What was produced, withheld, delayed, appealed — or left unresolved?

There are six installments presently mapped out. I do not expect the story to stop there. The Comptroller's audit is beginning. New FOIL requests are pending. Litigation is underway. Records continue to emerge. There may be a Part VII, a Part XII or more.

We will follow the documents wherever they lead.

Freeman's advice to me more than a decade ago remains as useful as ever: shine the light.

For nearly 18 years, that was generally enough to resolve my public-records disputes without going to court. It is not anymore. Now there are two forms of scrutiny: one comes from journalism and the other from a courtroom. Both serve the same principle.

The public has a right to know what its government is doing.