OPINION OF THE COURT
Pigott, J.Petitioners are recipients of collect calls from New York State Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) inmates. They commenced suit seeking to enjoin DOCS from collecting a 57.5% commission on its 2001 contract with MCI Worldcom Communications, Inc. (MCI), damages and other relief. DOCS and MCI moved to dismiss the petition as time-barred and as failing to state a cause of action. Supreme Court dismissed all claims, and the Appellate Division affirmed. The lower courts held that the first cause of action should be dismissed on the merits and that the four constitutional claims as well as the sixth cause of action should be dismissed as time-barred. Supreme Court also held that the last claim was time-barred, while the Appellate Division rejected it on the merits. Because we find petitioners’ constitutional claims to be timely, we modify the order of the Appellate Division, reinstate those four claims, and remit the matter to Supreme Court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
I.
Inmates in DOCS prisons who wish to make telephone calls to their family members, friends or lawyers are required to do so by placing collect calls from coinless telephones in their respective correctional facilities. Because these calls are collect, the financial obligation falls to the recipient of the telephone *192call. This telephone system is installed and maintained, and telephone service provided, by MCI1 under an exclusive contract.
DOCS and MCI signed an initial contract on April 1, 1996, and a second contract on April 1, 2001. The contracts were awarded to MCI following a competitive bidding process; DOCS specified that it should receive a commission of at least 47% of the gross revenue generated by the collect calls. Under the 1996 contract, MCI remitted 60% of its revenues from these calls to DOCS; the percentage was reduced to 57.5% in 2001. The commissions received by DOCS are placed in a “Family Benefit Fund” account used primarily for medical care and also for other programs that benefit inmates, such as a family reunion program, nursery and family development programs, basic cable television service and medical parole. Only a small percentage of the funds is used for maintenance of the telephone system.
On October 30, 1998, MCI filed a tariff with the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC), setting forth the per-minute rates and per-call surcharges applying to the inmates’ calls under the first contract, and requested that its DOCS service be treated as a unique service not subject to standard rate caps. In approving the MCI rates and surcharges, on December 17, 1998, the PSC reasoned that MCI’s service provides DOCS with security features2 not traditionally associated with collect calling, thus justifying, in the PSC’s view, the high call rates (1998 NY PSC Case 98-C-1765, 1998 NY PUC LEXIS 693, at *2-3).
Recipients of telephone calls from inmates at DOCS correctional facilities commenced an action in the Court of Claims on September 27, 2000, challenging the 1996 contract.3 They argued that DOCS, through the agreement with MCI, infringed upon their rights to due process, freedom of speech and equal protection, imposed an unlawful tax and/or regulatory fee, violated General Business Law §§ 340 and 349, and tortiously interfered with their rights to use other telephone service carri*193ers offering lower rates. The court dismissed the claims as time-barred under Court of Claims Act § 10, and the Appellate Division affirmed in July 2003 (Bullard v State of New York, 307 AD2d 676 [2003]).
In May 2003, DOCS and MCI executed an amendment to the 2001 contract, implementing a flat rate of 16 cents per minute and a single surcharge of $3 per call. The State Comptroller approved the amendment on July 25, 2003. MCI then filed a revised tariff with the PSC on August 14, 2003. Recipients of the DOCS inmate collect calls took the opportunity to challenge the 2001 contract before the PSC. Several individuals and organizations, including two of the appellants in the present case and their counsel, filed timely comments with the PSC, arguing, among other things, that the DOCS-MCI inmate telephone system violated the constitutional rights of DOCS inmates and their families, and requested a hearing. Although no formal hearing was granted, summaries of the comments occupy some 17 pages of the PSC’s decision.
In its order, issued and effective on October 30, 2003, the PSC determined that its jurisdiction extends to MCI but not to DOCS because the latter is not a telephone corporation. The PSC declined to review the portion of the MCI rate that corresponds to the 57.5% commission retained by DOCS, but approved as just and reasonable what it called the “jurisdictional portion of the proposed rate,” corresponding to the remaining 42.5% of the surcharge and per-minute rate. The PSC directed MCI to file new tariffs separately identifying the unreviewed and the “jurisdictional” parts of its surcharge and rate, and MCI duly complied.
On February 26, 2004, petitioners4 commenced this combined declaratory judgment action and CPLR article 78 proceeding against DOCS and MCI in Supreme Court. Petitioners allege seven causes of action. Their first claim seeks enforcement of the PSC’s October 2003 order, interpreting it as implicitly prohibiting DOCS from collecting any commission from MCI beyond the rate the PSC expressly approved. Four causes of action allege violations of “the power to tax,” “due process rights,” “the right to equal protection,” and “free speech and association rights” under the New York State Constitution. The sixth sets forth a General Business Law § 349 claim. The seventh cause of action seeks an accounting.
*194We agree that petitioners’ first, sixth and seventh claims were properly dismissed. We conclude that the constitutional claims were timely, however, and should not have been dismissed. Accordingly, we modify the order of the Appellate Division, and remit the matter to Supreme Court for further proceedings.
II.
Whether petitioners’ constitutional claims are subject to the four-month statute of limitations period under CPLR article 78 or the residuary six-year limitations period of CPLR 213 (1) turns on whether the parties’ rights could have been resolved in an article 78 proceeding (Solnick v Whalen, 49 NY2d 224, 229-230 [1980]; New York City Health & Hosps. Corp. v McBarnette, 84 NY2d 194, 200-201 [1994]). While it is well established that a challenge to the validity of legislation may not be brought under article 78, this principle does not apply to the quasi-legislative acts and decisions of administrative agencies such as DOCS (see McBarnette, 84 NY2d at 204). Here, petitioners are challenging an administrative determination — DOCS’s decision to provide a collect-call-only telephone system to inmates and to require the telephone corporation it exclusively contracts with to pay it substantial commissions — by challenging the contracts making that determination binding on others. Petitioners are not disputing the validity of any legislation. They have furnished no compelling reason why article 78 review, in the nature of “mandamus to review,” should not be available to them under CPLR 7803 (3), and thus are subject to the four-month statute of limitations.
The more difficult question is when the statute of limitations began to run. A petitioner who seeks article 78 review of a determination must commence the proceeding “within four months after the determination to be reviewed becomes final and binding upon the petitioner” (CPLR 217 [1]). An administrative determination becomes “final and binding” when two requirements are met: completeness (finality) of the determination and exhaustion of administrative remedies. “First, the agency must have reached a definitive position on the issue that inflicts actual, concrete injury and second, the injury inflicted may not be . . . significantly ameliorated by further administrative action or by steps available to the complaining party” (Matter of Best Payphones, Inc. v Department of Info. Tech. & Telecom. of City of N.Y., 5 NY3d 30, 34 [2005]; see also Matter of City of New York [Grand Lafayette Props. LLC], 6 NY3d 540, *195548 [2006]; Matter of Comptroller of City of N.Y. v Mayor of City of N.Y., 7 NY3d 256, 262 [2006]; Matter of Eadie v Town Bd. of Town of N. Greenbush, 7 NY3d 306, 316 [2006]).
The finality and exhaustion of remedies requirements are drawn from case law on ripeness for judicial review (see Matter of Essex County v Zagata, 91 NY2d 447, 453-454, 454 n [1998]; Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew v Barwick, 67 NY2d 510 [1986], cert denied 479 US 985 [1986]; see also Williamson County Regional Planning Comm’n v Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, 473 US 172 [1985]). The two requirements are conceptually distinct. “The focus of the ‘exhaustion’ requirement ... is not on the challenged action itself, but on whether administrative procedures are available to review that action and whether those procedures have been exhausted” (Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew, 67 NY2d at 521; see also Williamson County Regional Planning Comm’n, 473 US at 192-193). Those who wish to challenge agency determinations under article 78 may not do so until they have exhausted their administrative remedies, but once this point has been reached, they must act quickly — within four months — or their claims will be time-barred.
When a contract between a government agency and a telephone company specifies the rate the company will charge, those who wish to challenge the contract, on grounds related to the rate, have not exhausted their administrative remedies until approval by the PSC, which has exclusive authority to review and determine intrastate telephone rates. Only then does the agency determination underlying the contract become “final and binding” (CPLR 217 [1]).
The question of when the 2001 contract became ripe for review is complicated by the May 2003 amendment. The 2001 contract lowered the DOCS commission percentage to 57.5% but did not change MCI’s call rates and surcharges. The 2003 amendment, on the other hand, kept the commission percentage but changed the call rate. The Appellate Division held that DOCS’s determination became final and binding “at the latest on July 25, 2003, when the amendment to the new contract was approved by the Comptroller” (25 AD3d 999, 1001 [2006]). This would be true, were it not for the fact that the May 2003 amendment altered the call rate. Since the rate change needed to be approved by the PSC, the 2001 contract became ripe for judicial review only upon issuance of the PSC order on October 30, 2003.
*196While the PSC concluded that it did not have jurisdiction over DOCS, it could have determined that MCI’s call rate and surcharge as a whole were “unjust, unreasonable or unjustly discriminatory or unduly preferential or in anywise in violation of law” (Public Service Law § 97 [1]) and ordered them to be lowered. It was reasonable for petitioners to believe that the PSC could have rejected MCI’s rate and surcharges in their entirety, just as, in 1998, it had approved them in their entirety. Such a result would quite obviously have significantly ameliorated the injuries petitioners contend they have suffered as a result of the high collect call rates, and would have forced DOCS to abandon the commission structure of its inmate collect calling program.
In this manner, DOCS’s determination remained subject to corrective action by DOCS until the date of the PSC order. The present case therefore differs from Stop-The-Barge v Cahill (1 NY3d 218 [2003]). There petitioners challenged actions by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), giving approval to a power generator project. We held that the statute of limitations applicable to the cause of action against DEP began to run when DEP issued a conditioned negative declaration (CND), rather than when DEC issued an air permit. We reached this conclusion in part because the CND marked the point at which the review process by DEF] the agency petitioners challenged in this claim, was complete (see 1 NY3d at 223; see also Eadie, 7 NY3d at 317). A refusal by DEC to issue an air permit would not have forced DEP to reconsider its CND. Here, on the other hand, corrective action by DOCS would necessarily have followed disapproval of the MCI rates by the PSC, and therefore petitioners had not exhausted available administrative remedies until the PSC review was complete.
In deciding the point at which petitioner’s administrative remedies are exhausted, courts must take a pragmatic approach and, when it is plain that “resort to an administrative remedy would be futile” (Watergate II Apts. v Buffalo Sewer Auth., 46 NY2d 52, 57 [1978]), an article 78 proceeding should be held ripe, and the statute of limitations will begin to run. But hindsight cannot be used to determine whether administrative steps were futile. Although the PSC ultimately decided to approve the MCI call rate only in part, declining to review a percentage of the rate corresponding to the DOCS commission, petitioners could reasonably have believed that the PSC would either approve or reject the rate as a whole.
*197We conclude that petitioners reached the point at which the injuries they allege could no longer be ameliorated by administrative action on October 30, 2003, when PSC issued its determination, and therefore that the constitutional claims in their combined action and proceeding, commenced on February 26, 2004, are timely. The parties’ remaining arguments concerning timeliness are academic.
The lower courts, having found petitioners’ constitutional claims untimely, did not have occasion to decide whether they state a cause of action. “While this Court may consider alternative legal grounds raised at but not addressed by the Appellate Division, the preferable, more prudent corrective action is remittal” (Schiavone v City of New York, 92 NY2d 308, 317 [1998]). Therefore Supreme Court should now determine the question whether petitioners’ constitutional claims state a cause of action. We agree with the Appellate Division that petitioners’ first claim, seeking “enforcement” of the PSC order, and their last claim, seeking an accounting, were properly dismissed on the merits, and that their General Business Law § 349 claim is untimely.
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should be modified, without costs, by reinstating the second through fifth causes of action and remitting to Supreme Court for further proceedings in accordance with this opinion and, as so modified, affirmed.
. MCI Worldcom Communications, Inc. is now known as MCI Communications Services, Inc., doing business as Verizon Business Services.
. MCI provides DOCS with various security mechanisms, including call monitoring equipment, call blocking capability, personal identification numbers for inmates and calling protocols alerting a recipient that the collect call is from an inmate.
. A companion action was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (see Byrd v Goord, 2005 WL 2086321, 2005 US Dist LEXIS 18544 [SD NY, Aug. 29, 2005]).
. Three of the petitioners are family members of DOCS inmates and the other two are nonprofit corporations providing legal defense services.