Fifty employees in Washtenaw County government have six-figure salaries, while another 100-plus are somewhere between $80,000 and $99,000, county records show. In all, the county has 1,327 employees whose combined earning power totals $71.5 million, according to records obtained by AnnArbor.com through the Freedom of Information Act. That puts the ...
Radon levels far above amounts posing cancer risks plagued the basement of Ann Arbor's city hall where police officers worked for many years, city records show.
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 ...
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 ...
Ann Arbor City Council members can't use their private e-mail accounts to conduct city business anymore — at least not without violating their own council rules. Council members voted unanimously Monday night on new changes to the rules that govern their conduct inside and outside of public meetings.
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 ...
The new weblog FOIA Geek, run by investigative journalist Erin Rosa, launched with a project to submit 30 different FOIA requests to 30 different federal agencies over the span of a month. Along the way, they are sharing a set of secrets and techniques they have used to unearth information ...
FOIA laws in Michigan do not obligate the agency you are asking to create a new report to satisfy your request or curiosity. As a result, some set of interesting analysis is only available to you if it's been asked for and produced by someone else already. Your task is ...
Freedom of Information Act requests can be a lot of trouble. They are often returned slowly and at great expense, and people who file a lot of requests like Mick Dumke of the Chicago Reader are seen as trouble by the powerful elected officials he reports on. Mick knows that ...
The Freedom of Information Act requests that you send to a public body are themselves public records, which you can request by virtue of the FOIA. I've done that before, in order to audit what other news organizations are up to and to see just what the range of requests ...
Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com AnnArbor.com's partner news site MLive.com is on a quest to find the best barbecue in ......
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