At last Thursday's meeting of the Board of Trustees, residents requested that the Board reveal the terms of the Requests For Proposals (RFPs) for the St. Paul's buildings. Several residents said they believed that the RFP's should be available to the public immediately, but the Board, under advice from its attorney said that they should be withheld at this time.

Since the New York State Freedom of Information Law and Open Meetings Law is obviously of great interest to newspapers, we have on several occasions attended seminars on the topic and often refer to the state's website: www.dos.state.ny.us/coog/coogwww.html

According to what we have found (and we welcome other residents to do their own cyber sleuthing at the above site, which is an excellent resource) the Board can indeed keep the RFP's confidential until such time as an agreement has been reached on a proposal. In fact, the Board could choose to keep the terms secret until all negotiations with the winning bidder are complete. The rationale is that if the proposals were to be publicized, it could harm the Village financially. However, once a proposal has been accepted and negotiations complete, the RFP's are then records that are subject to the Freedom of Information Law, and would be available to the public.

On the other hand is the question of whether in this particular situation it is wise for the Board to not release the details soon. In the case of St. Paul's, the Board will need to gather broad public support for whatever plan it chooses in order to present it to our State Legislators. Public "buy-in" to the project is essential, and to do that, the Board must present in as much detail as possible the pros and cons of each submission.

As we commented before, the Village is chock-full of people who work in the financial sector and in real estate. In Garden City the public is a resource - there are a lot of really smart people here.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher