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.

The high FOIA cost of broad email searches - Goodrich Area Schools

One of the key tenets of keeping a FOIA cost reasonably priced is to sharply limit the scope of your search. Very broad searches require an extensive look at records, and if you're not careful you'll require an individual to look at every message by hand because your search criteria are very difficult to express in code.

As an example, this search at the Goodrich Area Schools near Flint, Michigan, as reported by the Flint Journal, "Proposed $77,718 bill for Freedom of Information request has Goodrich parents fuming":

Sherry Smith filed a Freedom of Information Act request in late May, looking for emails sent between April 2014 to the present regarding her son, or his initials, "but not limited to emails between Goodrich Area Schools employees, Genesee Intermediate School District employees, Michigan Department of Education employees, etc."

The price tag: $77,718.75. District Superintendent Michelle Imbrunone said it is based on the need to contract an employee to search through records due to cutbacks in recent years among staff.

Some tips to reduce the burden for this particular search:

1. Limit the scope in time. More than a year is a lot of messages to search through; you might get better results looking at mail for a single month when you know there was activity.
2. Limit the scope for people's messages to search for. You might reasonably expect the student's teacher to have responsive messages, but it's not reasonable to search for messages from another teacher in another grade who doesn't have any relevant contact with the student.
3. Ask for records under FERPA. A student's educational records must be provided to the parent upon request, and while there can be fees for copying there are no fees for searches.

A request to "search every electronic mail record in your system for my son's initials" is simply not reasonable, and the very high price tag reflects that. Narrow the scope of your search to make it more likely that you will be able to afford the results.

The Open Meetings Act and the University of Michigan

The Detroit Free Press story of June 18, 2015, Michigan House panel calls for open university meetings, describes an effort to cause the University of Michigan and other state universities to hold all of its meetings in public. The current text of the law reads, in part,

... Formal sessions of governing boards of such [higher education] institutions shall be open to the public.

which the University of Michigan has interpreted as allowing "informal sessions" to be held in private.

The proposed change to the law, which you can see as 2015 House Joint Resolution O, would put before voters an amendment to the state constitution to change this to make it clear that all meetings of the Regents, informal as well as formal, would be open to the public.

The Free Press quotes U-M spokesman Rick Fitzgerald:

U-M's Fitzgerald said his school seeks to achieve transparency "through a variety of means, including the formal meetings of the governing boards. That transparency is balanced with the practical necessities of providing oversight to a multibillion-dollar enterprise."

Even though very little decision making goes on at the public regents meetings, the record of the agenda is very thorough and worth a periodic review to see what is going on. See the University of Michigan Board of Regents web site for agendas and meeting minutes. Meetings are held the Third Thursday of most months, mostly in Ann Arbor at the Anderson Room of the Michigan Union though sometimes in Flint or Dearborn at the U-M campuses there.

City of Ann Arbor, Michigan releases new FOIA log for January to May 2015

One of the most irritating typical FOIA problems that you will run into is getting a PDF document that started out its life as an Excel or other database document. Data which would be easy to process turns into a puzzle that must be decoded. In the worst case, the database dump gets scanned in and turned into bitmaps that have to be painstakingly decoded with an optical character recognition program. Madness!

The City of Ann Arbor has released a PDF file that's a report from its FOIA log database. You can find it from a link on the Clerk's FOIA page or you can see a copy at the a2civictech archives.

New Michigan FOIA rules come into effect July 1, 2015, which would require databases to be made available as databases and not just as PDFs. Look for an opportunity to re-request this collection then.

New Ann Arbor Public Schools FOIA coordinator

Barbara Tebbutt is the new FOIA Coordinator at Ann Arbor Public Schools, replacing long time employee Liz Margolis. The new coordinates are on the new AAPS web site. Note that search on that web site was difficult for a while but they have reorganized things somewhat to make it better.

Ann Arbor Public Schools

Barbara Tebbutt, FOIA Coordinator

2555 S. State Street

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

tebbutt@aaps.k12.mi.us

734-994-2283