When you send in a request under the Freedom of Information Act, there are several likely responses that are not the answer you want to get. This week's FOIA Friday covers the question of composing a really good request - one that gets you exactly what you want or a little bit more at minimal expense to everyone involved and as rapidly as possible.

If you missed the first FOIA Friday column, go back there for an introduction - otherwise keep reading after the jump.

I've been reading FOIA requests and responses to a variety of organizations, looking at patterns where some questions are answered quickly and efficiently with very little administrative fuss and others where everyone in the organization goes into panic mode because the records requested are so expensive and so hard to gather. There is a fine art to writing a good request, especially because every government body organizes its records and archives just a little bit differently, and unless you know precisely who to ask and how they have their files stored it can be quite cumbersome and frustrating for everyone involved.

The first common mistake that you want to avoid when filing a FOIA is to request too many records. If your question is "absurdly overbroad", an agency is within its rights to deny it in many cases, simply because the cost of fulfilling the request would be too high. In the case of Capitol Information Association v Ann Arbor Police Department, 138 Mich App 655; 360 NW2d 262 (1984), the court found that the plaintiff's request seeking "all correspondence" between the local police department and "all federal law enforcement/investigative" agencies was "absurdly overbroad" and failed to sufficiently identify the specific records as required by FOIA. I have seen requests come back with dollar estimates of over two thousand dollars for the cost of processing them - and those requests are generally expensive enough that the organization making that request thinks twice before paying the bill.

To reduce the chance that you will get back an estimate of a stiff fee for the records you want, be prepared to ask for much less than you will ultimately want to look at, in order to find a representative sample that is simple and relatively cheap to produce. Instead of asking for all communications regarding some topic, narrow the request to a single day's worth of material on a day where you know there will be at least one item that is relevant. You might also ask for a log, summary, or abstract of the contents of files rather than the files themselves; a clerk at the Ann Arbor Police Department's records office recommended this approach, which hopefully will yield a single $0.05 or $0.10 request that serves as an index into a collection which can then be pulled from selectively.

A second good technique for reducing the overhead of making requests is to go directly to the department or individual responsible for maintaining those records and ask them directly for the materials you want, in person. The internal process that they use to release materials to the public may require a formal records release, but this is often much more rapid once you know exactly what you want to see and where it lives on someone's hard drive or in a thick stack of paper in their office. The East Stadium bridges inspection photo gallery — which I'm in the middle of sorting through to pull the story out of it — came back in two days after sitting down with the engineer, after I had waited three weeks for my first formal FOIA query.

Finally, you should always make one more phone call or ask one more question before sending in a request. Many agencies and authorities subject to FOIA have a person designated to handle those requests, and a short conversation to help determine which agency has the records you want and how they are stored can make the difference so that you don't waste weeks getting back a "we don't hold these records" message.

Now on to some FOIA requests that haven't quite been turned into stories yet.

Sidewalks. I'm still waiting to hear back from the City of Ann Arbor sidewalk department for the request I made for inspection records for a sidewalk in front of a property on Summit Street. A crew was out there last week replacing some squares that had not been repaired since they were torn out to replace a sewer line in 2007, and an observer on the scene who talked to the crew said they were hired by the city to do the work.

Rental inspections. Homeowners at several meetings I've been at recently have expressed frustration at homes being rented in their neighborhoods which are occupied by more people than zoning for that area would allow. I'm starting to get back the first of what should be a series of rental inspection reports showing what the city is aware of regarding these parcels.

Bridges. A big batch of East Stadium bridge photos arrived this week - I'm sorting through them to line up the cracks and better illustrate the decays that have happened over time to the bridge that are prompting action to make urgent repairs.

There are more FOIA efforts that have turned into AnnArbor.com stories - it's part of the way we gather public information to make it possible to better understand what is happening in our community.