A state appellate court ruled in July that the Empire State Development Corporation must turn over documents regarding a firm’s potential conflict of interest in carrying out a study of the Manhattanville expansion footprint.

The case began in 2006, when Tuck-It-Away Storage owner Nick Sprayregen brought two lawsuits against the ESDC when it would not grant him access to documents through the Freedom of Information Law. Sprayregen is one of two remaining owners of property in the expansion footprint that has refused to strike a deal with Columbia.

Although FOIL is designed to allow citizens to access public documents, it permits government agencies to deny access to certain ones exchanged with other agencies. The ESDC withheld 117 documents it received from Allee, King, Rosen, and Fleming, a firm it had hired to conduct the blight study.

But the firm was also hired by the University to assist in preparing the expansion plan and an environmental impact statement. Sprayregen’s attorney, Norman Siegel, claimed that FOIL’s “intra-agency” and “inter-agency” exemptions apply only if the firm in question is “disinterested in the agency decision on which it offers advice.”

The court supported this argument in its decision, ruling that the firm held an “inseparable conflict” between its representation of Columbia and ESDC and should therefore not be permitted to deny Sprayregen access to the documents.

The July 15 decision states that “the gargantuan size of the project, the layers of conflict between Columbia and ESDC and the difficulty of offering perfectly objective advice while serving two masters” preclude a FOIL exemption.

“We argue that Columbia can’t have it both ways, and that’s really the heart of the injustice,” Sprayregen said.

ESDC maintained that the confidentiality agreements made by the sections of firm that worked on different side of the case prevented a conflict of interest. Lawyers for ESDC argued that the firm “was hired for different purposes” and that the documents in question were eventually going to be made public anyway with the release of the blight study.

“There is no evidence that it [AKRF] was beholden to two masters. Was it best to do both? Obviously not. But there is no rule that bars the consultant from working on both sides,” the ESDC attorney said in the December 2007 oral arguments.

Siegel said in December that the decision could have a far-reaching impact in future eminent domain cases. “The fight is over the importance of freedom of information, especially overdevelopment projects,” he said.

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