This week's FOIA Friday looks at the costs of filing and fulfilling FOIA requests, and the actions that government organizations can and have taken to reduce the burden of managing incoming requests.

The cost of FOIA

I've written before about FOIA fees, and how to construct your request to keep them low.

Last year, the Mackinac Center, a conservative think tank based in Midland, prepared a very broad FOIA request asking for seven years of records from the Michigan State Police on Homeland Security expenses. They received a $6.8 million estimate for the work needed to produce the work. As I noted earlier, courts have rejected requests for information that are "absurdly overbroad," e.g. in Capitol Info. Associationn v. Ann Arbor Police Department (138 Mich. App. 655 (1984), 360 N.W.2d 262), where the court ruled that the "Legislature clearly intended MCL 15.233(1); MSA 4.1801(3)(1) to relieve public bodies from the intolerable administrative burdens which would result if such wholesale requests had to be fulfilled. Plaintiff had to request specific identifiable records; it failed to do so here."

A new report from the group notes that a second request to the Michigan State Police returned a $22 bill for two documents. It also noted that in comparison, the Federal office of Housing and Urban Development waived all fees for a request for monitoring reports of the Detroit field office of HUD for the past five years. That FOI request generated over 1,100 pages of documents.

Michigan FOIA law allows governments to require that people asking for records pay fees to get the documents that they request, but it does not require it. (MCL 15.234) The actual practice as to whether fees are charged varies even within an agency or government body. I regularly get no-fee FOIA responses from the City of Ann Arbor when all records are electronic and don't need to be printed out to paper for redaction, but Ann Arbor Police records have always cost $0.05 per page no matter how large or small the request.

Most of the cost of fulfilling easy FOIA requests — requests for well-described internally published documents which are circulated widely — is the cost of reproduction. As the FOIA request gets more complex, the costs go up. Searches that require broader searches through lots of documents to retrieve the ones requested, more careful scrutiny of documents for redaction to protect individual privacy, or careful attention to detail to not release trade secrets, make the costs of the response go up.

Thus it may not in fact be unusual that two pages of police records cost more to produce under FOIA than 1,100 pages of internally published reports. The 1,100 pages are ready to go; the 2 pages need to be looked at to protect the privacy interests of the public.

How to reduce the cost of fulfilling FOIA requests

One of the Obama administration's first executive orders was on the Freedom of Information Act:

"The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

One agency that's claimed to have taken this to heart has been the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has worked to systematically reduce the number of frequent requests for information that have to go through the FOIA process. Rather than forcing requests through a labor intensive and bureaucratic set of procedures to get common tasks taken care of, the EPA adapted its online publishing systems to return requested records directly.

Some examples of process improvements were claimed in testimony by Larry Gottesman, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Freedom of Information Officer:

1. Improved tools for e-mail searches, allowing more efficient ways to conduct key words searches on the Agency's e-mail servers. "This service will expedite FOIA searches and assure that all responsive e-mails maintained on the Agency’s e-mail system are identified."

2. Improved tools for redaction of sensitive documents, using "pixel replacement to permanently remove information being withheld from disclosure, eliminating the risk associated with technologies that electronically “white out” information which can later be restored.

3. Onlinestatus of EPA FOIA requests available, which allows requesters to look up how their request is moving through the system without making a phone call.

4. Broadly expanded publication of pesticide information which provides access to approximately 13,000 scientific reviews on 300 pesticide active
ingredients. Requests for this information previously had made up 20% of the EPA's FOIA workload; by publishing it online, the request burden went down to 3% of the total.

Getting routine requests out of the FOIA stream and onto the web helps everyone, with quicker turnaround time, less administrative overhead and more access by folks who don't know the system inside and out.

FOIA and public records reporting at AnnArbor.com

Several recent AnnArbor.com stories were based on public records requests, including David Jesse's reporting on recently demoted Willow Run Superintendent Doris Hope-Jackson.

Lee Higgins's stories on the Hutaree have been drawn in part from examination of Lenawee County court records to look at the background of the group's leader, Robert David Stone Sr.

Last week's story on FOIA as the worst possible search engine was picked up by the Art of Access weblog,

Edward Vielmetti writes the FOIA Friday column for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.