Thank you for the opportunity to provide written testimony on the preliminary budget as relates to the budget of the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS). Our organizations were strong supporters of Intro 1235 of 2025, which codifies the NYC OpenRecords portal for Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, and requires all city agencies to use it. We applaud the City Council for passing this transformative transparency legislation, which became Local Law 199 on December 26, 2025.

Local Law 199 requires DORIS to release an implementation plan within six months of the law taking effect, which will be June 2026. However, it is our understanding that DORIS has already begun taking steps to implement the law, and is prepared to hire additional staffing and contractors to build new functionality into the OpenRecords portal soon after funding is provided.

We fully support DORIS’s request that funding start to be allocated for the remainder of FY 2026, ramping up in FY 2027, so that the agency can have the resources necessary to fully implement the law. This includes the following:

• $105,000 annually for a permanent new developer for DORIS, which should be pro-rated for FY 2026 to begin the hiring process as soon as possible;
• $110,000 in OTPS funding for a systems architect and UX designer, likely under the citywide Microsoft contract, which could also be pro-rated for FY 2026; and
• $12,000 for the remainder of FY 2026, and $40,000 annually for Azure cloud storage to support the OpenRecords portal.

The total cost for implementation is $255,000 in FY 2027, but this number will decline once there is less need for contractors to support new functionality under the portal. This is an extremely modest amount in the context of a proposed $127 billion NYC budget, but will mean a great deal for DORIS as it implements this new law while fulfilling its current responsibilities.

The request from DORIS is also well in line with the City Council and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) fiscal impact statements for Intro 1235, which projected costs between $215,000 and $267,000 in FY 2027.

Thank you for your consideration.

Submitted jointly by Citizens Union, Reinvent Albany, BetaNYC, Common Cause/NY, Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Legal Aid Society, League of Women Voters of the City of New York, New York Coalition for Open Government, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P)