Bob Turner, former chair of the previous Saratoga Springs Charter Review Commission, has made a number of statements to the media wrongly accusing Saratoga County Board of Elections Commissioners Bill Fruci (D) and Roger Schiera (R) of denying his most recent FOIL request for images of ballots cast in last November’s charter vote. He should apologize to them.
Commissioners Fruci and Schiera had nothing to do with the denial of Turner’s FOIL request. If Mr. Turner had bothered to get a better understanding of the FOIL process he would have known that Saratoga County, like other government agencies, has a FOIL officer who reviews requests for documents and renders decisions and is clearly identified on the County website. Employees of other departments are not involved in that process. Actually, Turner didn’t even need to know any of this. All he had to do was look at the reply he received which did not come from the Board of Elections.
Mr. Turner does not actually seem to understand the FOIL process in general as the decision he received pointed out that one of the reasons his most recent request was denied was because it was a duplicate of a previous request and had “not been appealed to the furthest extent permissible under the law.”
One would hope that in the future Mr. Turner, a Skidmore Government professor who teaches a course on local politics, would do his homework before he acts and before he speaks to the press. In the meantime, he owes Commissioners Fruci and Schiera an apology.
- Jane Weihe
