Opinion
January 28, 1985
Appeal from the Court of Claims (Lengyel, J.).
Appeal from the order entered September 26, 1983, dismissed as academic, without costs or disbursements, in light of the determination of the appeal from the order entered January 20, 1984.
Order entered January 20, 1984, reversed, without costs or disbursements, claimants' motion for leave to renew and/or reargue granted, and upon renewal and reargument, so much of the order entered September 26, 1983 as restricted the scope of available disclosure regarding items Nos. 3, 9, 10, 12, 18, 26 and 28 of claimants' notice for discovery and inspection dated June 10, 1982, inter alia, to a period of "three" years preceding the date of the underlying accident is vacated, and a period of "four" years is substituted therefor.
We treat claimants' motion for leave to renew and/or reargue as a motion for leave to renew, notwithstanding the fact that the new material submitted was apparently available to claimants' counsel at the time of the original motion (see Feinstein v Goebel, 97 A.D.2d 456; Vitale v. La Cour, 96 A.D.2d 941; cf. Rose v. La Joux, 93 A.D.2d 817).
Based upon the new material submitted, which tends to establish that the intersection at which the claimant David DeOlden was injured had become a source of concern to local residents prior to August 14, 1978, we have reached the conclusion that the liberal policy of disclosure incorporated into the CPLR (CPLR 3101, subd [a]; Allen v. Crowell-Collier Pub. Co., 21 N.Y.2d 403, 406; Echevarrieta v. Migoya, 97 A.D.2d 832) requires that the period of permissible disclosure regarding the items in issue be expanded, as requested, to four years preceding the date of the underlying occurrence. Titone, J.P., Mangano, Gibbons and O'Connor, JJ., concur.