The Michigan Freedom of Information Act spells out requirements for government agencies responding to FOIA requests and sets out the terms for what fees can be charged. It also spells out penalties for government bodies who fail to comply with requests.

Depending on what you ask for, the process of finding it inside a government bureaucracy can be hard, time consuming, and thus expensive work. This edition of FOIA Friday shows some cases where the bill for FOIA requests was extremely large, and gives tips for how to whittle your request down in size and shape to have it consume less time and create better results.

If you haven't been following the whole series, the introduction provides a good perspective.

What's in the law

The Michigan FOIA law (MCL 15.234) states that "the fee shall be limited to actual mailing costs, and to the actual incremental cost of duplication or publication including labor, the cost of search, examination, review, and the deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information." The cost of labor calculated here must not be "more than the hourly wage of the lowest paid public body employee capable of retrieving the information necessary to comply with a request under this act", and the public body must use the most efficient way to duplicate records.

In practice, most agencies have some set per-hour fee for different classes of service, and many of them provide some amount of staff time gratis for record processing for incidental requests, charging only copying fees.  Call ahead for details if you find that you are asking for something that might generate a lot of paper to get the schedule of fees.

Call ahead and negotiate to save time and money

If you are hunting for specific information within an organization but are not sure how the organization stores these records, talk to the agency's FOIA coordinator on the telephone or in person to figure out how to phrase what you are looking for in such a way that it's most efficient.  A few words ahead of time can help you tailor what you asking for to avoid getting a bunch of things you don't need and to save everyone's time. 

Limit the scope of your request with a dollar amount

Add a line in your FOIA request that specifies the maximum that you are willing to pay for the request.  Something like  "Please notify me before any costs are incurred should the fee for retrieving this information exceed $25" will help you with a stop loss to make certain that someone at the agency takes a look at what you want and estimates its cost before going ahead with it.

Avoid paying for copies by inspecting the records on site

You have the option under FOIA to avoid many of the copying fee by asking to review or inspect the records at the governmental body's offices, rather than have them copied for you. If you know ahead of time your request is going to probably overturn hundreds of pages of records, but that only a few of them will really be interesting, you can look at them and then only pull the ones you want for copying. 

As an example, I've been over to Ann Arbor's City Hall to look at block party permits, to give me ideas on how to host a block party.  Rather than make a whole lot of copies, I was able to take the folder where the paper records lived into the hall and leaf through them and take notes by hand.

Asking for too much and being stunned by the bill

The biggest way to get a big bill for proposed FOIA work is to ask for too much, and then to be surprised when the agency agrees to your request. Some cases come to mind right away.

The Mackinac Center made an absurdly overbroad request for all information from the Michigan State Police for all information Homeland Security grant spending from 2002 to 2009.  They got back a letter with an estimate for over $6.8 million to fulfill the request.  Of course they were stunned by this, but when you ask for seven years worth of everything you should expect it to not be simple - or cheap.

Limiting your request to identify important records

One good approach to asking for information that gives you the best result at the least cost is to ask for a list of the records that satisfy a request rather than the records themselves. This can let the agency release their log files rather than the documents listed in the log file, and by doing so you can get a directory of all things that might be possibly relevant so that your eventual request for detail is compact and efficient.

For example, if you are looking for police records for a set of incidents over an extended length of time, you can ask for the log of those records rather than the records themselves.  You'll typically get back something like a spreadsheet with dates, times, incident numbers, and a brief or coded description; when there is something interesting enough to want to look at, you can selectively ask for the specific record you want by the incident number.

Changes to Ann Arbor city FOIA fees

The City of Ann Arbor is implementing new FOIA fees, in response in part to the increased costs they are seeing from more frequent requests.  The biggest changes are that less time will be given for free for any individual search, and that costs from the IT department will be separated out from costs from the rest of the system to determine labor charges.

FOIA in the works

Here's a list of FOIA requests in process or recently received by AnnArbor.com; we'll be writing more about each of these over time.

Ann Arbor Fire Department. We asked for and received a copy of the log of all fire department runs over a two week period; once we clean up that data I'm looking forward to showing a map.

Ann Arbor Transportation Authority. As mentioned last week, we sent in a request for information on their HyperOffice system; rather than asking for the whole thing, though, we decided to simply ask for a list of all of the files on the system.  We also noted in a recent story that board member Ted Annis has 10 things he wishes the AATA published in its web site, to increase the transparency of the management of the organization; in response, board chairman Paul Ajegba noted that "the public, the press, anybody can FOIA any documents in here."

Edward Vielmetti asks for just a little bit more than he really wants for AnnArbor.com.  Reach him at 734-330-2465 or by electronic mail at edwardvielmetti@gmail.com .