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 to examine the elements of the public record that have been published to identify relevant documents that have not been published, and then ask for those.

Look very closely at the published agendas, board packets, and meeting minutes for each session of each meeting. By doing this systematically, you can identify reports and other documents prepared by staff to prepare boards for decision making. This gives you access to details that would be very tedious or impossible to retrieve through standard FOIA searches.

Agendas

Public bodies are not required by the Michigan Open Meetings Act to publish an agenda for their regular meetings. It is extremely common, however, for the secretary to the board to put together an agenda so that board members know what they are expected to come prepared to discuss.

Meeting notices should have a phone number on them with contact information for a person responsible for organizing the meeting. Call that person, and ask to get a copy of the meeting agenda as prepared for the board. In many cases those agendas are distributed electronically, and you can ask to be put on the distribution list so you can get future copies of meeting notices and agendas.

Depending on the rules and bylaws that the board operates under, meeting agenda items can be added up until the last possible moment. Do not assume that the lack of an item on an agenda published the week before means that you can rest easy that the topic will not be on the meeting's agenda. It's worthwhile to have someone in a citizen's group with long-standing interests to have one eye on a community television channel and one hand on their mobile phone so if citizens need to mobilize promptly there is a way to notify a broad network to address an issue that got on the agenda at the last minute.

Board packets

It is common for the secretary to the board to prepare a board packet, in order to provide board members with access to background materials to assist them in reviewing complex issues or to convey reports or other correspondence from citizens, committees or staff. These packets can be very large, with hundreds of pages of reading a typical workload for a monthly meeting.

Some organizations prepare only paper board packets, and so in order to get a copy you have to be prepared to pay duplication costs for a stack of paper. Other organizations prepare a PDF and send the board packet via e-mail to their board members. The City of Ann Arbor's LegiStar system allows the city to put all board packet information online with each agenda item containing its own collection of relevant documents, and some of the city's larger boards and commissions use this system routinely.

The most complicated situation involving board packets happens when the organization has a secure Web server where board members have access to documents that the general public does not have access to. In this case, there may be no specific "packet" per se to review. Decisions for review on the agenda may reference internal documents that have never been provided to the public, and as a result getting routine access to these public records may require the slow, tedious FOIA process.

Meeting minutes

Under the Michigan Open Meetings Act, organizations that hold public meetings are required by law to prepare minutes of those meetings. Proposed minutes must be available for inspection by the public within 8 business days after a meeting, and approved minutes must be available within 5 business days after the meeting at which they were approved.

The requirement for meeting minutes to be prepared in a timely fashion is routinely disregarded by government bodies until citizens or the press ask for those meeting minutes. Preparing minutes is a time-consuming chore, and many board members routinely accept the report that minutes of previous meetings are not available for approval. Sometimes no meeting minutes are published for months, especially in the case of boards that do not manage to make a quorum to pass a resolution approving past minutes.

Meeting minutes provide a record of the official decisions of a governing body. Like agendas and board packets, they may also reference in passing other reports, documents or correspondence of interest that have not been published and are relevant to the ongoing tracking of a complex issue.

Avoiding the FOIA process

The FOIA process is the world's worst search engine. You fill out a form and send it to someone who passes it up the management chain, causing trouble all the way, and demanding an answer within a fixed amount of time. If you make too many requests, the delays in getting a response to each individual request can be frustrating.

One way to bypass the FOIA process is to inform yourself of the inner workings and internal plans and processes of an agency's system. By doing so, you can reference very specific documents that are mentioned but not included in the agendas, board packets and meeting minutes that have been published.

Instead of asking the FOIA officer for information, address this kind of request to the board secretary. The request runs something like this:

I'm looking at the board packet for (date) and I notice on (page number) a reference to (named report) that is not included in the packet itself. Can you send me a sample copy of (named report) so that I see what this refers to?

The key with getting access to internal reporting information is that the FOIA laws do not provide you with the right to specify that a particular internal report be run. You may not even know what the name of the report is in order that you might request it. Getting a sample copy helps identify details that can be used for further, deeper inquiries. Because you are only asking for information that has already been provided to a board member there is much less chance that the document you want doesn't exist.

Every report of sufficient complexity includes some numbers that are hard to interpret and easy to misinterpret if you are seeing them for the first time. By the time you get to that level, you should be able to identify a specific individual inside the organization who knows that you can start asking informed questions.

At some point you might need FOIA to dig out reports and other documents that contain enough personal or private information that they require the full round of redaction and review that FOIA offices routinely handle. For most requests, however, it should be better to identify a very specific instance where a board member was provided a specific document for a meeting, and use that information as your point of entry into learning more about the system.

Edward Vielmetti reads meeting notices, agendas and minutes for AnnArbor.com, when and where he can find them.