The Public’s Right to Know: New Rochelle’s FOIL Stonewall Part V

Robert Cox

03 Oct 2026 — 7 min read

DUBLIN, IRELAND (October 3, 2026) — This is Part V in a multi-part series.

In the previous installments of this series, I have examined different ways a public-records request can go off the rails. There was Generations Church, where the City said an electronic search had identified more than 10,000 records, later nearly 11,000 “and counting,” while my questions about how that search had been conducted went unanswered. There was the broader numbers game: 20,000 records here, 16,000 there, more than 2,000 somewhere else — large numbers that may or may not tell you much until you understand how the searches were conducted and what happened afterward. And there was Kingdom Community Consultants, a request whose complicated history ultimately required me to correct my own reconstruction of what had happened.

This installment is different. With the resignation of New Rochelle City Court Judge Matthew J. Costa and the appointment of Michelle Bernstein to fill his seat, I sent essentially the same records request to two government agencies at essentially the same time. One was the City of New Rochelle. The other was the New York State Office of Court Administration.

That created something unusual in a FOIL dispute: a comparison. The City acknowledged my request and then went silent. OCA took nearly six months and produced very little. I was not satisfied with its response either, and I appealed. But OCA did something New Rochelle did not do: it produced records. One of them was a letter written by the mayor of New Rochelle.

What I Asked For

On January 1, 2025, I submitted a FOIL request to New Rochelle City Clerk Kim Jones seeking records concerning Costa’s resignation and the process that resulted in Bernstein’s appointment. I asked for records related to Costa’s resignation, materials submitted by applicants seeking to fill the vacancy, communications with applicants including Bernstein, communications with the New Rochelle City Court and New York State Unified Court System, and records related to Bernstein’s swearing-in, including invitations, press releases, statements and photographs.

Jones acknowledged the request. I submitted essentially the same request to OCA. That matters because the two requests then traveled very different paths.

Why I Wanted It

Costa’s departure created a vacancy on the New Rochelle City Court. Mayor Yadira Ramos-Herbert selected Bernstein to fill it. I wanted to know how that process had unfolded: what records existed concerning Costa’s departure, who sought the vacancy, what materials applicants submitted, what communications occurred with the successful applicant, what communications passed between City Hall and the court system, and what records existed concerning Bernstein’s appointment and swearing-in.

These were not theoretical categories of documents. As I would eventually learn from another government agency, at least some records concerning the appointment plainly existed.

What the City Did

After acknowledging my January 1 request, the City produced no records. It did not request additional time, deny the request, claim an exemption or tell me that it had searched and found nothing. It simply stopped.

That distinction is important. A denial gives a requester something to challenge. An exemption can be evaluated. A claim that records do not exist can be questioned. An extension establishes another date. Silence leaves the requester waiting.

Meanwhile, the same process was unfolding at OCA.

What OCA Did

OCA acknowledged my request on January 14, 2025, then issued successive delay notices in February, March, April and May, each pushing its response further into the future. I did not consider that satisfactory. But there was at least an administrative process underway, and eventually it produced something.

On June 4, after nearly six months, OCA provided two records. One was Bernstein’s Oath of Office Card. The other was more interesting for purposes of my New Rochelle request: a December 3, 2024 letter from Ramos-Herbert to Administrative Judge Anne Minihan announcing that the mayor had appointed Bernstein to fill the City Court vacancy effective December 30.

This was not an OCA document created by some Albany bureaucrat. It was a City of New Rochelle document. It was on the mayor’s City Hall letterhead. Ramos-Herbert signed it. City Manager Wilfredo Melendez was copied on it. The letter said a “Bernstein Resume” was attached. OCA had obtained and produced the mayor’s letter. New Rochelle had not.

OCA did not produce the referenced résumé. It also withheld records concerning Costa’s resignation on privacy grounds and applicant materials under a separate provision of the Public Officers Law. Other categories I had requested were not addressed to my satisfaction, so I appealed.

OCA Points Back Toward New Rochelle

On June 30, 2025, OCA FOIL Appeals Officer Michael Siudzinski denied my appeal. I disagreed with much of his determination, including OCA’s handling of the delays and its withholding of records. But one passage was particularly important to my request pending in New Rochelle.

Siudzinski wrote:

“The records you seek are not records of the OCA, but rather records of the judiciary or records of the City of Rochelle.”

That did not establish that every document I had requested was maintained by New Rochelle. Some, according to OCA, were judiciary records. OCA also maintained that responsive records in its possession were subject to exemptions. But by this point I knew something I had not needed to speculate about: records responsive to my request existed. OCA had actually given me one created by the mayor of New Rochelle, and OCA’s own appeals officer was telling me that the universe of records I was seeking belonged not to OCA, but to the judiciary or the City.

Back in New Rochelle, my January request remained unanswered.

The Records Were There

This is what makes this FOIL different from some of the others in this series. Sometimes a requester has no independent way to know what exists inside a government agency. That information asymmetry is inherent in public-records laws. I can describe what I want, identify people, dates and subjects, and ask the agency to search, but I cannot see into its email system, document-management system or filing cabinets.

Here, I did not have to guess. I had the mayor’s letter in my hands. The letter itself showed that it had been sent to the state court system and copied to Melendez. It referenced an attachment — Bernstein’s résumé — that OCA did not provide. Whatever disputes might exist about other portions of my request, there was no question that at least one responsive New Rochelle record existed because another government agency had already given it to me.

Yet New Rochelle had given me nothing.

May 2026

By May 2026, New Rochelle had implemented its NextRequest records portal. As I explained at the beginning of this series, I used that system to resubmit a group of earlier FOIL matters with incomplete, disputed or otherwise unresolved administrative histories.

On May 4, I resubmitted the Costa/Bernstein request. It became NextRequest No. 26-730. This time the City responded immediately. On May 5, it denied the request, saying the records sought substantially duplicated records previously requested and that a requester could not revive or extend the limitations period for challenging an earlier FOIL determination simply by submitting the request again.

There was an obvious problem from my perspective: What earlier determination? The City had acknowledged my January 2025 request. It had not produced records, requested an extension, issued a denial or made a substantive determination at all.

So I appealed.

The Appeal

My May 5 appeal to Melendez laid out the two parallel histories. New Rochelle received the request and went silent. OCA received essentially the same request, delayed for months, eventually produced two records and then issued a written determination on appeal.

I specifically pointed out that one of OCA’s records was Ramos-Herbert’s December 3 letter and that OCA’s appeals officer had said the records sought were records of the judiciary or the City of New Rochelle rather than OCA. I argued that the City could not rely on a limitations period arising from a determination it had never made.

On May 20, Melendez denied my appeal. His reasoning brings the entire dispute into focus. Melendez agreed that the original request had been constructively denied. He wrote that because there had been no further correspondence, the request was constructively denied 20 business days after the City’s acknowledgment and that I had failed to appeal within the designated period.

He also addressed the parallel OCA request:

“While the City notes that you admit that you filed an identical request with the OCA and received the requested documents, the remainder of your appeal addressing discussions with the OCA is beyond the scope of this appeal.”

The City therefore denied the 2026 request because the original request had been constructively denied in February 2025 and I had not appealed that constructive denial at the time. That is the City’s position. Mine is different.

The Paradox

FOIL’s constructive-denial mechanism exists so that government silence does not leave a requester waiting forever. At some point, the law can treat an agency’s failure to act as a denial, allowing the requester to appeal.

New Rochelle’s position turns that mechanism into the central issue in this case. The City acknowledged my request and then did nothing. I did not appeal its silence. Another government agency processing essentially the same request eventually produced records, including a document created by New Rochelle’s mayor, and later told me that the records I sought were records of the judiciary or the City rather than OCA.

When I returned to New Rochelle through NextRequest in May 2026, the City did not search for those records and decide whether they should be released. Instead, it said I should have treated its silence the first time around as a denial, appealed that silence, and then sought judicial review within the applicable limitations period. Because I had not done that, the City maintained, I could not start over.

There are legal questions wrapped around all of this, and those questions are now before the Westchester County Supreme Court in my Article 78 proceeding. But readers do not need to decide those legal questions to understand the underlying chronology.

On January 1, 2025, I asked New Rochelle for records. The City acknowledged the request and then went silent. I asked another government agency for essentially the same records. That agency eventually gave me a letter written by New Rochelle’s mayor and told me that other records I sought were records of the judiciary or the City. I went back to New Rochelle, and the City said I was too late.

The records were there.

The question now is whether New Rochelle can rely on the passage of time that followed its own silence to avoid deciding whether I am entitled to them. That question is now before a judge.

Part I: The Public’s Right to Know: New Rochelle’s FOIL Stonewall (8/16/2026)

Part II: The Public’s Right to Know: New Rochelle’s FOIL Stonewall (8/17/2026)

Part III: The Public’s Right to Know: New Rochelle’s FOIL Stonewall (8/18/2026)

Part IV: The Public’s Right to Know: New Rochelle’s FOIL Stonewall (8/21/2026)