If there’s one thing I appreciate about New York State agencies… it’s their predictability. They have been, totally and completely, predictable since I began my quest to understand what the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES) was doing to our state’s nature under the guise of green energy.
That predictability is a lack of transparency. It’s unanswered phone calls, emails, and voicemails at every level within ORES, including an inability to schedule in-person meetings with agency staff in Albany.
I tried... twice.
After I attempted to visit the ORES office in 2025, ORES announced that it had “moved locations” for the first time since its inception in 2020, relocating to the Agency 3 Building at Empire State Plaza. I then attempted to visit the new location and schedule a meeting there as well. Instead, I was met by a DPS “liaison” who escorted me out of the building and followed my mother and me through the Empire State Plaza concourse.
That same lack of transparency ultimately found its way onto the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Facebook page in March 2026. And that is exactly what we are suing over.
American Land Rescue Fund v. the Department of Environmental Conservation
I, in my capacity as the president of the American Land Rescue Fund, have filed a petition (in thanks to our brilliant attorney) against the DEC and Commissioner Amanda Lefton as of Monday, August 17, 2026.
The full petition can be read here.
This is a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) Article 78 lawsuit against the DEC for failing to adequately answer a FOIL we submitted this past spring over the censorship of comments I left on the DEC’s Facebook.
After comments were “hidden” from public view, later restored, I submitted a FOIL request seeking records including Facebook moderation logs, administrator actions, internal communications, public complaints, and DEC’s policies governing social media moderation.
The DEC did not even remotely attempt to satisfy the FOIL request.
Our petition is asking the court to:
Declare that DEC violated FOIL;
Vacate DEC’s administrative appeal determination;
Order DEC to conduct and document a diligent search for all responsive records;
Require production of all non-exempt records or a legally sufficient certification if records truly do not exist;
Hold an evidentiary hearing regarding the adequacy of DEC’s search; and
Preserve all Facebook moderation records while the litigation is pending
Our lawsuit argues that DEC's claim that no additional records existed is contradicted by DEC's own publicly available "Terms of Participation for Social Media," a moderation policy that the agency failed to produce despite it being directly responsive to the request. The petition further states that because DEC administers its own Facebook page through Meta Business Suite, records documenting moderation actions should exist and should have been searched.
After filing dozens of FOILs with multiple NYS agencies since October 2025, I have noticed a pattern: these agencies are comfortable with not directly answering FOIL requests. It’s a “norm” to them. It’s a norm because they count on everyday New Yorkers not 1) posting about the lack of transparency on social media and Substack and 2) having the funds and time to hire an attorney to sue.
I am an unfortunate intersection of those two points in a human being, alongside American Land Rescue Fund.
Though this lawsuit is not a “direct attack” at ORES, like the agency would anticipate and expect from me, it’s another lawsuit that chips away at the foundation of the greater New York oligarchic machine from which ORES was created.
If New York State agencies know they can get away with circumventing FOIL requests, they can essentially cover up and conceal fraud, mismanagement, illegal activity, and regulatory capture.
If these same agencies were forced to, fully and honestly, answer the FOIL requests submitted to them, they would not be able to get away with signing off New York State designated habitat and endangered species to foreign solar and wind companies.
And lastly, if a New York State agency has to try and “hide” or remove social media comments that start important discussions for public interest and transparency, that should tell you, based on the universal principle of common sense, that they are up to “no good” behind the scenes.
Thank you immensely to everyone who has donated and supported American Land Rescue Fund since its founding in 2025. We could not do this without you. I maintain a page on the website called Lawsuits where you can review our three submitted lawsuits to date.
If a state agency and the bureaucrats within it will only do the right thing after they are sued, then it's long past time to shine a little sunlight on how those agencies operate.
Lots to come.
FURTHER READING
Managing partner at Young/Sommer becomes Zoning Board of Appeals chair in New Scotland, New York
When I first learned about Fort Edward Solar, sited for one of the last grasslands of its kind throughout the entire Northeast, I began the process of filing my nonprofit, American Land Rescue Fund, as a party to the proceedings.
Your wish is our command: New York's PSC grants Boralex's request to transfer 13,100 acres of solar leases without further review
“Regulatory capture is a government failure where a public regulatory agency prioritizes the commercial or special interests of an industry over public welfare. It is driven by heavy lobbying, the "revolving door" of personnel between agencies and private firms, and information asymmetry.”
For complete beginners: how to buy land if you never have before
“I can’t buy land. It’s way too expensive.”
Thank you for showing up and doing the work, Alexandra. They make it tedious and time consuming, which is expensive, in the hopes that people will give up and go home.
I appreciate your tenacity and dedication to saving what’s left of our country. 💚
Thank you. Also predictable: NYS agencies are less and less forthcoming in answering FOIL requests over time. In particular, NYSERDA used to produce useful information in response to FOIL requests re: vendor contracts, including contract details and monetary amounts. Now it’s all but impossible to extract anything useful. More and more often they assert that they must protect their contractors’ “competitive advantage” instead providing basic information to the public. Clearly their goal is to discourage people from submitting FOIL requests. At this point, you have to be prepared to submit appeals when you submit your initial FOIL requests. You now have to plan on waiting for them to delay providing any information for the maximum allowable period. I don’t expect immediate responses to my FOIL requests, but I now have to plan on the longest possible delays. Most of us who reply on the state to provide information for research can’t afford to sue, so I appreciate any such efforts.
In my experience, the state conceals a LOT of information from the public. It disgusts me to see Democrats behaving like this when they criticize such behavior on the national stage. Either they’re committed to transparency in government or they’re not—and from their actions in NYS, I can only conclude that they’re not.