Court Rejects County Assertions Of Trade Secrets & Other Exemptions As ‘Conclusory Assertions Without Factual Support’
For the second time in less than a year, a Rockland County judge has enforced the spirit of New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), and used its teeth to force the government to produce documents.
This week, the court handed a victory to a Brooklyn law firm that has been seeking documents from Rockland County pertaining to the county’s contract with BusPatrol, the Virginia-based company that contracts with governments and school districts to install stop-arm cameras on school buses.
And earlier this year, a different judge ordered Rockland Green, the Rockland County Solid Waste Management Authority, to hand over documents that reveal how the animal shelter contractor was chosen.
Public agencies have become increasingly emboldened in denying access to public documents, a fundamental contract in American democracy. For more than two years, Aron Law PLLC, a Brooklyn-based law firm sought documents concerning the contracts, financial reconciliations, cost sharing, and communications between the county and BusPatrol. It found itself up against a harder stop than the stop arms BusPatrol deploys on school buses.
When members of the public or media seek documents, more frequently agencies thwart the effort to be transparent. Aron Law was told contracts and other information withheld or redacted contained “trade secrets,” according to court documents. And if disclosed, the county said, it would harm BusPatrol’s competitive advantages. The county also claimed it could not locate some requested documents, or that the documents contained intra-office communications that are exempt from disclosure under FOIL.
But Aron Law, which had already won previous FOIL cases on Long Island, was not deterred. The firm appealed these denials, claiming the county refused to have other departments within the county search their records, and the county’s reliance on exemptions was overbroad, conclusory and non-specific.
Stymied by administrative appeals to the county, on March 26, Aron Law filed an Article 78 proceeding in Rockland County Supreme Court challenging the county’s refusal to comply with FOIL.
Last week, Rockland County Supreme Court Associate Justice Djinsad Desir ruled in favor of Aron Law, finding the county’s reasons for denying Aron Law documents based on trade secrets were “conclusory” and that the county failed to carry its burden of showing the trade secret exemption applied. The court said the county failed to “articulate a particularized and specific justification for denying access.”
On the county’s claims of intra-agency exemption, the court found the county “failed to meet its burden of demonstrating this exemption applied to the requested material. Once again, respondent only provides conclusory assertions without factual support.”
The court did allow the county to submit some withheld documents to the court in camera (for the court to review outside of opposing counsel’s view) regarding the county’s claims that some documents contained attorney-client communications or work product.
The court will follow up with an order regarding disclosure after reviewing that subset of withheld documents.
For now, the court deferred ruling on an award of attorney’s fee to Aron Law. The court has ordered all documents withheld on the basis of trade secrets or intra-agency exemption to be produced to Aron law immediately. The court gave the county 14 days to produce the documents the county claims exempt under attorney-client privilege and gave the county 10 days to provide evidence via a certification describing the diligent search the county undertook to locate other documents responsive to Aron Law’s FOIL request.
The court will also likely rule on whether the county conducted an adequate search for documents after reviewing the county’s diligent search certification.
Aron’s lawsuit says programs like the one BusPatrol operates have been plagued by systemic issues, including reliability of camera footage, the adequacy of notice, and questions about motorist fault. RCBJ, since December 2025, has published a series of stories that shed light on BusPatrol’s technology glitches, on the county’s inability to manage ticketing and court hearings, and on the county’s unwillingness to be transparent over the terms of its agreement with the company.
Many have questioned whether there is a true need for the program, whether accident statistics support the cost of the program, and especially why the technology is unreliable.
While exact yearly figures vary, recent data shows there are two to three student fatalities annually nationwide caused by vehicles illegally passing stopped school buses, according to the USDOT and state surveys. From 2000-2023, there were 61 fatalities nationwide from drivers illegally passing stopped school buses, averaging 2.5 deaths per year, with nearly half being children 18 and younger, according to Traffic Safety Marketing, based on data from the NHTSA’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis, an arm of the United States Department of Transportation.
BusPatrol provides stop arm cameras to over 400 school districts in 24 states.
BusPatrol equips school buses for all of the school districts in Rockland County (via a voluntary agreement between the county and school districts) with stop-arm cameras that record still images and video of cars allegedly passing school buses when their red stop lights are activated. Motorists constantly contest the tickets because videos show that drivers cannot stop safely or that a school bus did not at first put on its yellow flashing lights warning of its intent to stop.
Fines are issued for $250 for a first offense, $275 for a second offense, and $300 for a third offense. There are 1,232 school buses equipped with BusPatrol cameras in Rockland County, according to data provided by BusPatrol to New York State.
During calendar year 2025, BusPatrol reported it collected $3,131,500 from 12,526 paid citations, at $250 per paid citation. Data provided to the New York State Assembly in June shows nearly 25 percent of the 22,744 notices of violation issued in 2025 (the most recent data available) were ignored by recipients, and of the 1,920 citations that were contested, only six drivers were found liable. Another 34 of the contested citations were dismissed. Thousands of Rockland County residents await hearings, some waiting more than two years.
Of that $3,131,500, after deducting its share of the revenue, and deducting technical and administrative fees, BusPatrol remitted $450,528.52 to Rockland County – 14.4 percent of the revenue collected, far less than the 45 percent of the revenue the county previously represented it is entitled to.
At 45 percent, the county would have collected $1,410,750, but technical and administrative fees ate up about $1 million, or $800 for each bus armed with BusPatrol Stop-Arm cameras in 2025.
BusPatrol did not provide any reconciliation or information regarding the county’s reduced share, but a simple calculation reveals the county netted about $36 per citation (before its own costs for reviewing thousands of videos by the Sheriff’s staff, county attorney time to prepare cases and appear in court, and payments to local courts to hear BusPatrol cases).
When RCBJ made similar FOIL requests to the county for BusPatrol’s contracts and other records, it was provided with heavily redacted documents. At the time, RCBJ sought information about the county’s financial arrangements with BusPatrol, specifically how revenues were split, and how much BusPatrol was charging the county in administrative and technical fees, which came out of the county’s share of citation revenue.
As the documents sought were similar to the records Aron Law was seeking, RCBJ declined to file its own Article 78 FOIL lawsuit and relied instead on the litigation team at Aron Law to secure the documents.
The mechanism RCBJ used to report on the contract between Rockland County and BusPatrol has been through BusPatrol’s reporting to the State Assembly.
From that data, RCBJ has written a series of articles on how revenue is split, how many citations are issued versus how many are paid, and where the “hot spots” are (those locations which generate the largest share of the alleged violations) in the county.
In July, a Rockland County Supreme Court Justice ordered the Rockland County Solid Waste Authority (Rockland Green), to release a trove of documents related to the bidding process for construction of the new animal shelter, while at the same time highlighting the importance of the First Amendment, the work journalists do, and New York’s FOIL law.
In soaring and poetic language, Justice John P. Collins, Jr, wrote “Before turning to the particulars of this dispute, the Court pauses to observe what is truly at stake. A free press is not an ornament of democratic government; it is one of its load-bearing walls. The First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press was written into our Constitution precisely so that an independent Fourth Estate could stand between the citizenry and the government that citizenry funds, watching, questioning, and when necessary, exposing.”
In an unequivocal and scolding 15-page ruling, Collins repeatedly says Rockland Green failed to meet the burden of FOIL exemptions, and that its arguments for withholding documents were conclusory and without merit.
