Before I left for a vacation in July, I made a Freedom of Information Act request to the city of Ann Arbor for sidewalk records regarding the sidewalk next to the Embassy Hotel on South Fourth Avenue, a sidewalk which is currently marked as closed to the public. When I came back, the request was ready, but I was surprised by the price tag I was expected to pay for it. I'm in the middle of writing the appeal to the City of Ann Arbor to get the cost down.

Here's an account of that FOIA request and the response I got, plus some suggestions from people who process FOIA requests routinely on how to keep costs down for everyone involved.

You want me to pay what?

The sidewalk repair FOIA request that I wrote about on July 2 included this paragraph, which is similar to what I include in many requests that I send to organizations. No news agency has an infinite budget for paying FOIA fees, so I asked the government agency in question (the City of Ann Arbor) to pause their work before racking up charges that were bigger than my budget for the request:

"I am willing to pay up to $10 for this request, and if the cost of fulfilling this request exceeds that amount, please notify me before proceeding."

The response letter that I received was signed by the Ann Arbor City Clerk, Jacqueline Beaudry. It states"

"The Michigan Freedom of Information Act specifically provides that a public body may charge a fee for searching for and copying a public record. The cost of the records is $159.44 payable to the City of Ann Arbor. Upon receipt of this amount, the documents will be released to you. Your documents may be picked up at the City Clerk’s Office (Second Floor, City Hall), Monday through Friday, between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m."

Obviously there has been a disconnect; I'm in the midst of working things out. The formal method of working things out when a FOIA request has been mishandled is to write an appeal.

I've written about reasons to file a FOIA appeal previously, but I haven't ever gone through the whole formal process to appeal the fees associated with the request. It's always worthwhile writing things down when you have a disagreement about the results of a FOIA request, because the law provides specific remedies that don't involve going to court, and the agency has discretion to reduce or waive fees to the degree that the request is in the public interest.

How to prevent high fees in the first place

Here are some suggestions on how to keep FOIA fees down. If you have a limited budget, it's important to make requests which are inside of your budget. If you make requests which are cheap to fulfill, the agency answering them will fill them faster and with less resistance. And, if you can avoid appearing to the clerk as a citizen who is full of zeal, and instead look like a bored intern who is working their way through someone's routine checklist, you can work from a position of assumed mutual good intent.

Agencies and municipalities reduce the costs of search for records by digitizing records. To the extent that documents can be published online and searched for by people who do their own searches and pay their own printing costs for anything they want printed, everyone involved has just a lot less work to do that requires FOIA. Strategic digitization and publication of frequently requested documents can cut FOIA processing costs considerably, if the Environmental Protection Agency's own account of its efforts is some indication. The agency claimed that digitizing one series of records that reflected 20 percent of its FOIA workflow reduced those requests dramatically.

After this latest sidewalk FOIA snafu, I will always recommend placing a maximum dollar limit you are willing to pay for any request that you make of an agency, even if you expect that the actual costs will be low and even if your budget is generous. No one likes to pay for someone else's mistakes, and you are always in a better negotiating position if your written instructions on maximum fees are clearly included in your letter. Agencies would be well served to include a spot on their standard FOIA forms for citizens to include a maximum dollar number, so that no one is surprised, angered, or enraged by fee estimates that are high.

The next FOIA request that I send in will include a phrase that asks to examine the records of interest in person prior to any expense that is not nominal for photocopying charges. With photocopy costs as high as $0.50 per page approved by the Ypsilanti City Council in its June 15, 2010 meeting, the ability to examine original records in person can avoid the need for staff time to run a photocopy machine. Bring along a digital camera capable of taking high resolution close up photographs so that you can do your own digitization on the spot on your own time and your own dime.

If you do send in a FOIA request, make a complete description of the records you are looking for. If you are looking for records associated with a property or parcel, you can save time and reduce ambiguity by providing the agency with parcel ID number or tax ID number of the property in question, as well as the full legal name of any owners that you are able to identify. The Washtenaw County property and parcel lookup site, or similar sites run by cities and townships, can zero in on property ownership and answer many questions without the need for FOIA.

It's always worthwhile to call the agency's FOIA coordinator or clerk and ask for help in identifying which department or departments is likely to have records responsive to your request. Some things are easy to find, some things are hard to find, and other records that may be in off site storage can be expensive to find, and a good FOIA coordinator knows how to have the set of interview questions which can guide you to the right place where information is likely to be stored. Depending on the department, you may or may not need a written request to get a response, but at least you will know where to ask.

Take your time to make the request, to save time on the response. A well-formed request should be unambiguous, simple and routine for all involved, so routine, in fact, that a good public records digitization process would have already published most of what you would have asked for so that no FOIA would have been necessary. An ill-formed request - one that is absurdly overbroad, hard to read, confusing, or accompanied by an angry polemic - is unlikely to get the best handling.

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