The question I ask is should city agencies be allowed to hide or remove public information at random and not let the public know?

I've been thinking about this a lot over the last couple months because of something that happened here in NYC recently with the Long Island Railroad. A few years ago, a bunch of city politicians ganged up on the city transit agency (MTA) to build a new train station.

Not only did the MTA agree, in their 5 year plan for 2015-2019, they raised and allocated around $40 million for the station for designing, surveys, and construction. In 2017 that was revised and around $30 million was removed. The rest was to be spent on design only and the removed money would be put back in during the 2020 5 year budget.

When the 2020 5 year budget was released, not only was the money not put back, the station wasn't even mentioned and the money that was allocated to design was never awarded either.

A city agency promised city politicians and their residents that they would build a train station with the money that was raised, and then casually deleted the station from all plans and public documents, without anyone knowing. They never announced that they were no longer pursuing the project. They never told the politicians that raised the money. They never told the residents. They just wiped it from existence

Should cities be able to do this?

It's hard for me to put a well qualified opinion together on this since I don't have much of a frame of reference for how things work internally, but that definitely sounds shady. I feel like just about anything government does should be open for the public to review. I believe government should be as transparent as possible with very little exception.

My city hid the fact that the old coal mine and steel factories were, for a century, have dumped their waste into the river downtown. They acknowledged it later, but didn't understand the risks. Heavily carcinogenic and out in the open. A few years ago they encased the whole river in cement and made it a public park, where people walk and kids play?

The same is said in most Canadian indigenous communities and in Flint, Michigan when it comes to viable drinking water or unwanted land development. What often happens in these situations is the city or government are often given instructions from the leaders of companies that would benefit from the diversion, to the dismay of the average person. This is reflected through Nestle purchasing up much of the world's water reserves, Ford being allowed to use Flint's clean water system after complaining about the citizen's water being unacceptable, the oil companies in Canada ordering police to remove people from unceded territory to allow for a pipeline.

This isn't discussed heavily by local media in the places it happens, and for good reason. It's quite difficult to manufacture the consent of the discontented, and while they may try by releasing the important info about what they're doing with a slanted twist, it likely isn't even half of the truth if you don't know who the people involved in these situations are, what their interests are, how they think, or who their friends are.

It's also quite important to bring up that across America, there has long been hatred from auto companies such as Fyrestone and GM that lobby for the defunding of public transport or scheme for its demise. New York's leadership is not morally just in scrapping these plans, but it does follow heavily with the trends of the past century that have caused the transportation system to become antiquated and decaying, thank the Koch brothers for that one.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z1KLpf_7tU