FOIA Coordinator by Edward Vielmetti

The No-Nonsense Guide to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act

The No-Nonsense Guide to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act illustrates in plain language how and why you might use FOIA laws to obtain government documents. The guide should be useful for people involved in the political process, as well as for businesses that work or want to work on government contracts. From fixing a broken sidewalk to obtaining a crime report, the Michigan Freedom of Information Act is a versatile tool to ensure that you are not ignored when it is your turn to deal with City Hall.

This work is about 15% done, and you can buy a draft in progress (think Kickstarter for books) from Leanpub in PDF, MOBI and EPUB formats.

Ask for a FOIA log first

When I look at the most useful single request that I've done to agencies, it's requesting a FOIA log or a list of recent FOIA requests and replies. There's a few reasons why you might do this, and I'll illustrate with some recent results.

First, you get the very basic intelligence to know who is asking questions of the public body and how frequently those questions come up. Sometimes, ask in the case of the Ann Arbor Downtown District Authority, there are only a handful of FOIA requests over three months; on the other hand, a similar scoped request to the City of Ann Arbor returned hundreds of pages of documents. Sifting through these unearths names of reporters, what questions they are asking, and whether they follow up when they get rejected.

Second, the unanswered questions and the rejections can prompt new lines of inquiry. A out-of-town reporter asked the Ann Arbor Public Schools what the total cost of substitute teachers was for the district, and their query was rejected because the school system did not have an existing document with that figure on it. The follow up that's being pursued by a local schools blogger is to unpack the request into answerable parts and reassemble the answer, perhaps by looking for invoices or reports at a school by school level.

Finally, it's always good to keep tabs on what kinds of side conversations go on between reporters and FOIA officials. You'll see appeals and conflicts over fees, protests for delays, and questions of legality of various actions. Viewing FOIA requests gives you an insight into tradecraft of the reporting trade and can give citizen advocates insight into how to best phrase their questions and how to deal with obstacles as they come up.

Progress Michigan: New Documents Reveal “Skunk Works” Cover-Up (and destruction of public records)

Progress Michigan reported a partially successful FOIA request for documents regarding the "skunk works" Michigan education efforts hosted on a private Basecamp server by a group that included both Michigan officials and private interests.

The FOIA request was partially denied because the Basecamp server that housed “Skunk Works” discussions and files was shut down following the revelation of the group’s existence, making several files unavailable.

If the Basecamp server hosted public records, then by shutting the server down the person who did that could reasonably be said to have destroyed records. That's doubly true if the server was shut down after the FOIA request was made. Destroying public records is a crime under MCL 750.491. Alternatively, I'm pretty sure that Basecamp doesn't fully destroy records when it shuts down an account - you should be able to get them restored from backups. It might take an appeal at least or a lawsuit at worst to get to the unavailable files.

Froide, an open source FOIA tracking platform

Froide has announced version 3 of its FOIA tracking platform. This internationalized system, written in Python, runs the German "Frag den Staat" FOIA portal. If you have the right combination of a small amount of programming skill and a good sense for how you want to customize your automated request-sender, you too can run your own FOIA portal.

A comparable system built on a different platform is MuckRock. My experience in using that makes me think that it's no small matter to set this kind of system up because there are all kinds of small details for every jurisdiction and every FOIA law that you want to get right.

Froide is a Freedom of Information portal written in Python using the Django Web framework. It manages public bodies, FoI requests and much more. Users can send emails to public bodies and receive answers via the platform.

It was developed to power Frag den Staat – the German Freedom of Information Portal.

Ask for meeting minutes: the Ann Arbor Downtown Area Citizens Advisory Council

The City of Ann Arbor has 101 listed boards and commissions, according to the city's Legistar service. (There are a number of them that are inactive.) This is an indication that there's some kind of public process by which decisions are made and where citizens can give their input.

One of the listed groups is the Downtown Area Citizens Advisory Council, which should be a citizen's group providing public input into the Downtown Development Authority's planning and development efforts. Of late that group has been dominated by its chair, who has been on the board since its inception in the 1980s.

A citizens advisory group has no power, in that it only reports in an advisory role and doesn't actually make any decisions. Unlike other parts of civic government, it does have a set voice at the table at every DDA meeting, and the chair has been outspoken about many civic issues.

You'd expect that this gorup would keep meeting minutes like every single other city board and commission. Alas, the quality of the latest set of meeting minutes I looked at was substandard ; it didn't list who was at the meeting, when it met, what was discussed by members of the group, or any record of public participation. The question has to come up: if there aren't good meeting minutes, is this board being run properly? In particular, is the chair claiming a broad consensus of public opinion for issues that have not been discussed publicly?

I've asked the city clerk for meeting minutes for the past year and a half so that I can see for myself what is going on.

More reading:    

a2politico on expired terms of board members of the CAC.

Ann Arbor Chronicle on a meeting where the expired terms came to an issue in public commentary; follow the comments.