New York court ruling gives Freedom Foundation access to employee information

Shella Alcabes
February 9, 2023

The ability to obtain public records is a vital and invaluable tool in the Freedom Foundation’s quest to ensure government transparency and educate public employees about their First Amendment rights.

With that in mind, the organization scored a major victory on this very issue last week in upstate New York. On Jan. 20, the Jefferson County Supreme Court (a trial court) ruled that the Freedom Foundation is entitled to all of the records it seeks.

Last October, the Freedom Foundation legal team filed a lawsuit against the county for refusing to provide it with the names, genders, work addresses, job titles, hire dates, work emails and phone numbers and bargaining units for all its employees represented by CSEA/AFSCME Local 1000.

The Freedom Foundation needs this information to know which employees are part of the collective bargaining process with the county. Moreover, having it gives the Freedom Foundation the ability to inform union members of their constitutional right to opt out.

In defending its baseless position, Jefferson County insisted that revealing this information would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy on the public employees. This argument holds no water because the data sought was clearly public information — every American taxpayer is entitled to know who works for them and how to contact them at work.

The Freedom Foundation has never — and would never — ask for a public employees’ private information. But addresses and phone numbers for buildings and employees funded by the taxpayer are the very definition of public information.

Jefferson County also argued that the Freedom Foundation uses the contact information it requests to subject public employees to a fund-raising pitch — a no-no under public records law. The charge, however, was and will always be uncorroborated because we know better.

Fortunately, the court agreed. Judge James McClusky plainly stated in his opinion that the county failed to rebut the Freedom Foundation’s position and must provide the requested information within 30 days.

This was a victory not only for government transparency but for the Freedom Foundation’s outreach strategy, as well. Hopefully it sends a message to other bureaucrats who’ve been permitted for too long to act as though their loyalty was to the unions and other leftist special interests rather than the residents of their state and its duly enacted laws.

Shella Alcabes

Litigation Counsel

Shella Alcabes is a knowledgeable and creative litigator with over ten years of experience in commercial litigation. Ms. Alcabes joined Freedom Foundation because of her love of liberty and to fight for the protection of First Amendment rights. After graduating law school, Ms. Alcabes practiced for several years at one of the country’s preeminent firms, Morrison & Foerster LLP, in Los Angeles, and then made the cross-country move to a boutique litigation and bankruptcy firm in New York. At Morrison & Foerster LLP, Ms. Sadovnik handled multi-million and billion dollar cases including labor disputes with a large grocery store chain and the infamous Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case. She was also responsible for handling all aspects of complex commercial litigation, including conducting trial in Federal Court and drafting and arguing appellate briefs in the California Supreme Court, the Appellate Division of New York and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Ms. Alcabes received her B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, where she was on the Loyola Law School Law Review. Ms. Alcabes was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old. She is fluent in Russian, and proficient in both Hebrew and French. In her time off, she enjoys playing peek-a-boo with her toddler and Bar-B-Queuing with her husband.