A common complaint about the Freedom of Information Act process is that it is slow to produce results. Here are a number of sources for those delays; consider it a handbook for the bureaucrat who wants to adhere scrupulously to the letter of the law while dragging their feet in ...
Under Michigan law, Freedom of Information Act requests have specific mandatory time frames for replies. You must receive a response within five business days of the receipt of your request for records, and the agency can extend their response by 10 business days without justification by notifying you of their intent ...
Redaction is the process of removing portions of a document that contain sensitive, privileged, or private information. It is regularly used in satisfying Freedom of Information Act requests, where the responding agency keeps some information from the public eye while returning the rest of a document. I spoke at Ignite ...
An ongoing index to the topics in the FOIA Friday column, including some index entries for stories that I wish I had written.
A FOIA audit seeks to get a comprehensive understanding of how a public body manages records requests. Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) has started an audit of federal FOIA handling, motivated in part by the gap he sees between the inaugural statement by the President on the importance of FOIA and ...
On Saturday, Jan. 22, a portion of the control system on the Argo Dam failed. River levels downstream of the dam began to oscillate wildly. The City of Ann Arbor, which manages the dam, discovered this condition on Monday morning, and by Tuesday repairs were under way. Efforts focused on ...
In January of 2010, I wrote an essay on the Michigan Open Meetings Act and the public posting of notices. In it, I described how one crucial component of the City of Ann Arbor's exercise of its official duties to notify the public of public meetings relies on a humble ...
The key to getting records from any organization via FOIA is to ask enough times until your request returns something other than a complete rejection. You may have asked for something which is appropriately exempt from disclosure under the FOIA law, but the records that you actually want are something different ...
One of the ways that journalists tell stories is to go to public records to dig into things that most people can't find easily. Public records are often stored in government filing systems — either hosted on a computer or kept on paper — that are expensive, cumbersome, or simply ...
A city with many boards and commissions, like the City of Ann Arbor, hosts a lot of meetings. With lots of meetings comes lots of meeting minutes, and the obligation under the Michigan Open Meetings Act to prepare those minutes promptly. For this week's column, I looked for meeting minutes ...
Michigan FOIA law allows a public body to use discretion in waiving fees for requests for public records. While fees for records requests are allowed under law, they are not mandated, and government departments can and do share information all the time without requiring payment of fees for each transaction. ...
Michigan's Freedom of Information Act law dates to 1976, a time when local governments mostly used paper maps to plan and coordinate information about local geography. Paper maps are ordinary records, which can easily be described and easily copied, and the law at the time treated them just like any ...
Whenever a public organization does a broad search for a new leader, it balances the requirement to conduct its operations in public with the desire to make personnel decisions with a reasonable degree of privacy considerations for those who will not be offered the job. Both Freedom of Information Act ...
When there was a hard rain in June, water went over a berm that holds back part of Thurston Pond. I just found out about it the other day. It's been months now since June, so I can't go out and get a photograph of what the damage was. The ...
The Ann Arbor Chronicle has sued the City of Ann Arbor over allegations that a closed meeting led to secret deliberations on the city's medical marijuana licensing in advance of the August primary elections. The city of Ann Arbor is not the only organization accused of using closed door dealings ...
Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com AnnArbor.com's partner news site MLive.com is on a quest to find the best barbecue in ......
Get the Ann Arbor RSS Feed
AnnArbor.com