Accountability Is What You Make Of It

Because god forbid public officials not be able to use public opinion surveys, or their Viking range-equipped kitchen cabinets:

In 43 separate email chains during the first half of that year, the mayor’s office and a few outside consultants discussed internal opinion surveys and formulated strategy on some of Mr. de Blasio’s most pressing concerns: the New York Police Department, the budget, election reform, media coordination and the governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat.

One chain concerned charter schools; another dealt with affordable housing in East New York, Brooklyn. Three discussed “the most effective message to employ in raising funds to advance the mayor’s policy agendas.”

These internal discussions about public matters are now part of a court battle here, as lawyers for a nonprofit aligned with the mayor are fighting to keep those emails confidential, resisting subpoenas for that information by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

The legal strategy appeared to clarify what had been one of the more puzzling moments of the de Blasio era: the description in May of five outside consultants as “agents of the city.” The designation of “agents” appeared months earlier, in a December letter from the nonprofit’s lawyers to the state ethics panel, and applied to a dozen advisers with close ties to the city.

The de Blasio administration has argued that the nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, and a small group of outside consultants are so close to City Hall that they essentially work for the city. For that reason, the argument goes, their emails with the mayor and his staff are immune from public disclosure under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

[. . .]

“If such documents were made public, elected officials might be reluctant — and might not even choose — to obtain the information derived from public opinion surveys,” Ms. Wolfe said.

Arguing before Justice Denise A. Hartman in a courtroom here on Wednesday, a lawyer for the nonprofit, Lawrence A. Mandelker, said that communications between Mr. de Blasio and the nonprofit did not have to be disclosed to the panel because, among other reasons, of a “deliberative process” privilege that applies to executive branch communications.

In essence, the nonprofit, which has taken unlimited donations from developers and others that do business before the city, acts as a kind of kitchen cabinet for Mr. de Blasio, and its advice does not have to be turned over, Mr. Mandelker argued.