You've been following the FOIA Friday series, and maybe you've sent in your own Freedom of Information Act requests. They have come back, but you still don't know what you want to know, because either the agency has told you that they won't give you what you asked for or because details are redacted and you don't know why.

The Michigan FOIA law contains provisions for appealing a rejection without requiring that you hire a lawyer or go to court. Here's some simple guidelines for filing your appeal, with some language that you can use to start from to help you get what you want even if you have to ask twice.

The appeal process

Filing an administrative appeal of a FOIA rejection is straightforward, and described in MCL 15.240.

Address the appeal to the head of the public body that rejected the request, use the magic word "appeal" in the text of your request, and identify the reasons that you wish to have the denial overturned. When sending this in, enclose a copy of your original request to help the process along.

Reasons to overturn a denial

Here are three scenarios where you might have gotten back less than what you wanted, and how to approach each of them.

Heavy redaction in email

Sometimes you will get back records if you have asked for portions of a government agency's official correspondence that have been redacted. I've seen these where large parts of an e-mail string have been blacked out with no explanation why.

Michigan FOIA law states that you are entitled to an explanation of the reason why records are exempted from disclosure. If a sentence, paragraph, or entire message has been blotted out and you don't know why, ask for a specific reason (per MCL 15.243) why each portion of the text was removed.

There is a similar requirement for explanation in federal FOIA laws, and organizations that regularly release heavily redacted texts as a matter of course annotate the redacted materials with the chapter and verse of the reason why, to avoid a round trip on this step.

Privacy exemptions for financial records

One of the sets of redactions that is typical from government organizations is removing of personal information from financial records.

A fully worked out example of a successful appeal of redacted financial records can be found in Master statements for City purchasing cards, June 2008 - Jan 2009, a dataset requested and successfully appealed. The specific text in that appeal reads:

"This is an appeal of the partial denial of the FOIA request 09-024, submitted 15 Jan. 2009 and filled 20 Jan 2009.

I requested copies of the master statements for city purchasing cards that covering charges from June 1, 2008 through Jan. 15, 2009. The response, included as a PDF below, states that "card holder names have been redacted for privacy and security reasons".

MCL 15.243(1)(a) states an exception for: "Information of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy."

Purchasing cards are used to make official purchases for the City of Ann Arbor. There should be no invasion of individual privacy involved in releasing names associated with purchasing card statements. If there were, the accounting of over $100,000 should warrant identified purchasing card statements.

This is not an appeal of the redaction of account numbers."

The appeal was granted in full.

Redaction of copies of materials published in the media

This sounds absurd, but some organizations will redact copies of newspaper clippings and other published materials in response to a FOIA request. This is worth appealing just on principle.

Where to go if your administrative appeal fails

Michigan FOIA law includes the right to go to court to have a judge review a FOIA rejection. That's a subject for a future column, but the newsworthy note is that the National Freedom of Information Coalition has been funded by the Knight Foundation to support FOI litigation.

"We are delighted to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has approved a new $2 million, three-year grant to the National Freedom of Information Coalition to launch the Knight FOI Fund and support state open government groups.

The Knight FOI Fund will fund up-front costs such as court costs, filing fees, depositions and initial consultation fees, if attorneys are willing to take cases that otherwise would go unfiled. In addition to the Knight Defense Fund, NFOIC will continue to offer sustainability and project grants for state FOI coalitions."

Remember, if you get turned down in your search for public records, that's a first step in the process, not the last; you have the right to appeal to the head of the public body and ultimately to the court to have the decisions reviewed.

Edward Vielmetti is not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. He is happy to take a look at FOIA requests that you have made that haven't gotten the results you have wanted; contact him at 734-330-2465 or at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.