Did Syracuse lawmakers abuse the state’s open meetings law while making budget cuts?

Syracuse Common Councilors worked for a week to draft more than 70 amendments aimed at paring down Mayor Ben Walsh’s budget proposal.

But the public was not made privy to the discussions that guided the councilors’ decisions as they hewed about $16 million of funding from the proposed budget.

That’s because the Council crafted the changes in caucus, three councilors said. Caucus meetings are closed doors meetings meant for elected officials to plan political strategy. They are designed to allow councilors of shared party affiliation to meet separately from councilors of a rival party. Councilor Marty Nave told a Central Current reporter that all councilors attended the meetings. 

The city’s nine Common Councilors, however, are all Democrats. Advocates say such a use of caucus meetings with no public notice is an abuse of New York State open meetings laws — and could be a violation of Syracuse’s City Charter, which requires meetings of the Council to be open to the public. 

“There is no basis for discussing budget amendments in private,” said Paul Wolf, a lawyer and the President Emeritus of the Coalition for Open Government. “Budgets are public documents and the public has a right to see and hear budget discussions by their elected representatives.”

Wolf and Rachael Fauss, a senior policy advisor at Reinvent Albany, both said the Council’s use of caucus meetings is an abuse of New York state’s open meetings laws. 

The Council’s use of caucus meetings to shut the public out of budget discussions that lead to unprecedented cuts from the mayor’s proposed budget is one of several moves during this budget season that has drawn criticism from good government advocates. 

The Council also: 

• Chose not to release a taxpayer-funded, $20,750 analysis of Walsh’s proposed budget, a public document, before voting on their own amendments
• Did not make public the agenda of their proposed amendments until 11 p.m. the day before unanimously voting to approve them
• Did not make public the text of the amendments until they were to vote on them
• Never publicly discussed the $16 million in cuts, choosing instead to discuss them in closed-to-the-public caucus meetings

City officials, including Auditor Alex Marion, and experts have described the budget process as secretive. Marion believes it to be the most secretive in his seven years in government. 

Fauss and Wolf, the open government advocates, agree.

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Fauss’ work at Reinvent Albany, a nonprofit advocacy group aimed at increasing transparency and accountability in government centers, focuses on public policy with an eye toward governance, ethics and budget issues.

She derided the council’s process for drafting budget amendments.

“If there are major decisions being made behind closed doors and the public doesn’t have the opportunity to read these budget bills or amendments before they’re voted on, then it’s a secretive process,” Fauss said.

Councilors Patrona Jones-Rowser and Amir Gethers said they attended the meeting and that the Council had a quorum present — or enough members to conduct official business. 

While an exemption for caucusing has been carved out of New York state’s open meetings laws, judicial precedent has in the past determined that a unanimous Common Council carries a different standard. 

Wolf told Central Current that if all councilors are members of the same party, they are not allowed to discuss public business in private caucus meetings.

He pointed toward a 1992 lawsuit in Buffalo that bears similarities to the Syracuse Common Council’s 2025 budget discussions. In 1992, the Buffalo Common Council was considering measures to address the city’s budget deficit. The councilors met in private — calling the gathering a caucus meeting — with the stated purpose of adopting a plan to tackle the deficit before making the plan public. 

But the councilors were all members of the same party.

The Buffalo News sued the Buffalo Common Council. Then-Erie County Supreme Court Judge Joseph Glowina ruled that exemptions to open meetings law must be judged narrowly, so as not to restrict the public’s access to information. He also ruled that in such cases where a legislature — or in this case Council — is homogenous, a closed-door meeting where a quorum is present cannot be ruled a caucus. 

Fauss said the Council’s budget deliberations mimicked that of the New York State Legislature. In Albany, she said, major amendments are made at the last minute in closed-door meetings.

“If the entire body is composed of one party, that’s an abuse of a loophole, to have zero public meetings in person,” Fauss said.

Because the city budget, and any amendments made to it, are a public matter, Fauss believes the council abused the caucus loophole to discuss public policy in private.

It’s unclear who on the Council called the caucus meeting. Councilors Pat Hogan, who is also the Council’s president pro tempore, and Chol Majok — both are 2025 mayoral candidates — did not return a call from a Central Current reporter seeking comment. 

In the immediate aftermath of the budget amendments being approved, Hogan rejected advocates’ and officials’ characterizations of the Council’s approach as secretive. Hogan called that characterization “baloney.”

“We had a budget hearing for every single department,” Hogan said. “We parsed all those figures. They were public, too. So I was a little puzzled by that statement.”

Fauss disagreed. 

“If your council is making last minute changes based on a consultant report no one has read, in a closed meeting, that sounds like a terrible budget process where the public is not a part of it whatsoever,” Fauss said.