The City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) had at least a pair of reporters go to Grand Rapids and attend the Michigan Press Association's annual dinner on January 27, 2017.  In that conference, the topic of the FOIA came up, led by a speech by Michigan  Lieutenant Governor (and a leading potential Republican candidate for governor in 2018) Brian Calley (pictured below) on the topic it was covered in an article in this last weekend's COLDNews titled:   Lt. Gov., VanderWall agree on idea of expanding FOIA.

My interest in FOIA predates Calley's ascension to his current post in 2011; running into roadblocks with local and state agencies myself, I listen with interest when an official considering reforming the dissemination of information to the public speaks at a conference attended by those who should also have an interest like mine.   All too often they are just giving out chin music designed to make them look sympathetic to open-ness, otherwise doing nothing, or making things worse.  As his boss has done since taking his post in 2011. 

In the newspaper itself the headline was:  Calley:  'This is a new era of accountability'.  It's as if he is saying the administration has done something to merit this new era.  Yet, as noted in a comprehensive 2015 report on transparency and open government, Michigan ranks dead last in those topics.  Since then, what has Michigan government achieved to get out of the dark cellar of government secrecy?  Suffered from that furtiveness by having the Flint water crisis, where to this day, non-transparency in state and local agencies cripple investigations and resolutions. 

"I'm going to make it a priority to develop these policies (of transparency) over the course of the coming year with partners in the legislature," Calley said here.  One has to ask where was he, the governor, and the Republican lead Michigan congress over the last six years in tackling this issue? 

One could say they helped pass a law in 2013 that reformed Michigan FOIA into something better than it was.  When looked at objectively, these reforms did very little to improve the law, other than establishing more precise upper limits for how much a public body could charge for paper copies (still at the high rate of 10 cents per page) and the mechanism to sue if they charge too much.  There was really nothing other than that which assisted in making things more transparent.

Several 'reforms' in the law actually made it tougher on the information requester, and another public act that year compounded the difficulty for public records made by state agencies.   On November 12, 2013 Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed Senate Bill 652 into law.

The new law created a direct conflict with the language of Section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act which granted circuit courts specific jurisdiction to hear FOIA denial claims. The new Court of Claims would handle all claims, including FOIA, against the state. 

This new court would be ran by appointed, not elected judges, making one immediately question their ability to impartially decide a citizen's FOIA (or other) claim against a fellow state agency.  It also ran counter to the Michigan Constitution in a couple of places, a point argued here.  Since then, I have had a much harder time getting records from state agencies, since there really is no fair recourse if they refuse to honor the FOIA, other than appeal to the unfair-constructed Court of Claims, and the resultant waste of time and money. 

The FOIA 'reforms' of 2013 also changed the venue from the requestors' circuit court to the public body's circuit court.  A citizen from Escanaba who is blocked from getting a court record from Detroit has to go to the Wayne County Circuit Court for justice.  If it's a state agency, he now has to go to Lansing. 

Perhaps Lt. Governor Calley can also explain how and why Montcalm County officials Montcalm County officials sued the Greenville Daily News in the summer of 2016 in response to the newspaper using FOIA to request the personnel files of two Montcalm County candidates for sheriff.  A local judge threw the lawsuit out of court, but not before The Daily News paid $8,892 to defend itself while Montcalm County paid its own legal firm $13,540 in taxpayer dollars.

A house bill was thereafter introduced that would prohibit a public body that receives a FOIA request from suing the person making the request.  It overwhelmingly passed in the House, but died in the Senate last year, along with other FOIA reform bills, including a proposal to apply state FOIA law to the executive branch as well as a similar law for legislators.  Where was Brian Calley and other 'clear' thinkers?

Calley could easily open up his own office to FOIA by just agreeing to do so, but Calley admits in his speech at the conference that he realizes he would be left out of communications by others who are not subject to the act.  It makes me wonder:  Just who is he receiving communications from in his public capacity that fear having their conversations made public?  Isn't this why we have FOIA in the first place, to shed light on the dark corners of government decision making? 

Exemptions are in the act, more logical exemptions can be created to assuage those state legislators and executive branch officials when issues in need of confidentiality arises-- which should be rare in state politics.  But they still have to get past official obstructionists who have made their opposition to transparency known.  Local governments made their opposition to a clearer FOIA well known in the discussions of the 2013 reforms, but some powerful Republican legislators have been even more vocal. 

Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meeker of West Olive stated at this same meeting that "As long as I am leader, you will never get (constituent's correspondence)."  It's a sad viewpoint, realizing that such correspondence to and from city councilors and county commissioners in Michigan is fair game to the public as mandated by the FOIA. 

To get any kind of meaningful FOIA reform to pass, we need to elect legislators that realize that the citizens are entitled to public records made by all officials working for the public, unless there is a good public reason to have them exempted, and that is spelled out specifically in the law.  As long as we allow politicians to conduct their affairs in secret and keep their records secret, we will have the corruption that grows from such arrangements.

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Excellent editorial X. Great points and observations.

Thanks, Willy, our officials (and also much of our apologist media) need to always be reminded that government transparency means more than just offering hollow and insubstantial platitudes, offered before they shut out the public even more. 

On the national scale, Obama originally pledged commitments to transparency before becoming perhaps the most secretive administration ever as far as public records are concerned, even media liberal lapdog PBS reported they set the record for most withheld FOIA requests ever, surely eclipsing it even more in the two years since that article.  Thanks to notorious dudes like Snowden and Assange, we know that many of those non-disclosures were unlawful.

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