I once thought the City of Ludington was unique in allowing their city manager and city attorney to run roughshod with the rules at the expense of their duties to the public and transparency.  The City of Manistee has proved me wrong.

It might be suspected when we share the same Manistee-based city attorney law firm that features Richard Merlin Wilson III and George V. Saylor III, the two attorneys (pictured below) that made tens of thousands of dollars for representing the City of Ludington (COL) in my first FOIA lawsuit. 

That lawsuit, while not spotlighting all of the venal actions of this delinquent duo which includes grossly overcharging the COL for three years, had them:  employing the judge's son in their law firm and not divulging that fact, permitting COL's John Shay to willfully lie in a sworn affidavit about compliant records, asking for thousands of dollars in illegally priced FOIA requests that the COL never touched, and joking about making my co-plaintiff cry in a deposition.  These people are the stereotypical and detestable attorneys that spawn lawyer jokes.

Yesterday, I completed, filed and served my second lawsuit on the City of Manistee (COM), a supposedly-public body which has rebuffed me for over a year into getting the records concerning the COM-involved shooting of Manistee citizen Lee Pat Milks.  Frankly, it isn't just the city manager, or the police chief that has went above and beyond in blocking the release of the records, and that's why this second lawsuit against the COM needs to be implemented.

Three separate counts regarding three separate FOIA requests make up the lawsuit.  In every single case, the COM wanted to charge fees when none were applicable as noted by their own City FOIA guidelines.  The imposition of unreasonable fees, like an unjustified $246 for one police report, typically has the effect of having the requestor not follow through.  Instead of reviewing the whole lawsuit, for simplicity I will just review the first count, where I asked for the COM police report on the Milks homicide and received that proverbial unjustified $246 fee.  After that, I will display the rest of the twelve page complaint for those interested in the full breadth of the COM's corrupt FOIA schemes.

My request was for "The police report(s) including all pertinent audio and video recordings, photographs, and use of force reports of the incident involving the killing of Lee Pat Milks on the afternoon of March 28, 2017 by one of the City of Manistee's 'public safety' employees."  The full response (seen here:  18-04 FOIA.pdf) contains the above page labelled Exhibit 2 in the lawsuit, my request, and 5 pages explaining the COM FOIA policy.  

COM Manager Thad Taylor, who serves as the FOIA Coordinator, tells me the request is granted and lists no exemptions.  Rather, he uses his space to remark that I 'owe' the COM for two previous requests, so I am required to pay the full $246, whatever it is for, in order to receive the records.  If you recall, I tried to pay the city manager but he wouldn't take my money and sign a receipt explaining what actual debt the money was for.  

If you think that's an innovative way to keep the public from ever seeing sensitive public records, charging excessive fees and then not accepting payment of those excessive fees when given the opportunity, you understand count four of my complaint.  Unlike the previous two FOIA responses I received, this one failed to even have a fee estimation worksheet, a requirement by MCL 15.234(4):

Lacking this required itemization, the COM's response had no lawful fees asked for, and so when I appealed the decision administratively to the COM's city council, I asked for a free inspection of those non-exempt records.  Seems reasonable, but the venal Thad Taylor decided to introduce fees in an 'amended cost' worksheet, and knocked the ridiculously priced $246 police report records down to a ridiculously-priced $120.65.  Here's that worksheet sent to me before the administrative appeal was held:

Recall, two things.  I have asked to inspect (or receive via E-mail) the responsive records and even in the amended response sent with this, no exemptions were claimed.  So let's look at all six charges made:

1) $14.60 for 146 copiesMCL 15.234 which explains what fees a public body can charge only offers incremental remuneration for making paper copies (sec. 1(d)); copying a computer file, scanning and sending records via E-mail do not incur an incremental fee, neither does allowing somebody to peruse non-exempt records on inspection.  

2) Labor cost of $33.80 for a supervisor spending 45-60 minutes of time making digital copies of non-exempt records:   First off, a supervisor making $45 an hour should not be the lowest-paid employee used to do this, as the FOIA mandates in section 4.

And while public bodies can charge for the time it takes to make digital copies and send them, does it seem within the realm of believability that it would take anybody up to an hour to scan/copy 146 pages, when they have rather sophisticated copy/scan machines.  Your lowest paid employee puts 146 pages on the scanner feed, leaves for a minute or two to fetch Thad a coffee, and voila, it's all done by the time he gets back.

3)  Labor cost of $45.06 for a supervisor spending 60-75 minutes separating exempt from non-exempt information:  If you haven't figured this out yet, why do you need a supervisor to separate out the exempt information when the COM never claimed any material was exempt?   Sadly, by their own policy, they cannot charge for labor costs at any time unless they specifically identify unreasonably high costs accruing to the COM.  Looking up a police report so somebody could inspect it wouldn't seem to be an unreasonably high cost, and they definitely didn't write it down in specificity here.

 

4) CD $2.50:  As I asked to inspect pertinent photos and videos concerning this incident, one might expect this is a valid charge, and yet inspection of photos or videos preclude the need for them to transfer them to a CD.  They have not made the point as to why this wasn't considered.  If using a CD was warranted for some specifically stated reason, I definitely didn't stipulate that method:

Then the public body is limited to stating the actual and most reasonable economic cost of that media.  If you look on the internet, you can get recordable CD's for under a quarter when brought in bulk.  

Likewise, you can get them in smaller amounts at local brick and mortar stores like Meijer and Walmart for even less at times.  Anybody who uses a large amount of recordable CDs, like a city government, would be insane to pay $2.50 per CD and think it reasonable.  

5)  Thumbdrive $17.99:  Again, there is no justification for using a jump drive for record inspection, it's strictly a wasted expense created by Thad Taylor, and no stipulation is made in the request for it.  However, our local stores sell 16 GB of data storage in a thumb drive for around $7, and they could take a picture of every square inch of Mr. Milks property and still not fill it.  

6) Flat-rate mailing envelope for mailing at $6.70:  Inspecting records or receiving them electronically do not involve any use of the USPS.  

Every single charge on this phony "amended" fee estimate is phony.  It's pure fraud, pure attempted extortion, pure City of Manistee government.  The useful idiots on the Manistee city council had all three of these FOIA fee appeals come to them with my concerns for fraudulent charges well-stated.  They effectively ruled that their staff did everything correctly, every time.  

Yet every time, they were wrong.  But that's ultimately for a fair and just court to decide upon.  These useful idiots are currently being used by their city manager and attorney to write up a new budget that takes more away from restoring the infrastructure of their community while taking more away from the general public.  All while keeping most in the dark about what they are doing.  It's a shame.

COM FOIA2 Complaint p1.pdf

COM FOIA2 Complaint p2.pdf

COM FOIA2 Exh 1-6.5.pdf

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They are letting the roads crumble in hopes nobody can get down there to file FOIA's,lol.

They are letting the roads crumble because they don't have an inkling on how to spend money or any sense of urgency unless it's one of their own anointed one's streets at issue.  

Citizens of Manistee:  Your city leaders are allegedly buying CD-Rs for $2.50 each for recording information.  Yesterday, I went to Meijer's (they have one of those in Manistee that runs the same specials) and found a spindle of 100 DVD-Rs on sale for $19.99, that is twenty cents a unit.  DVDs contain over six times as much data as CDs, at about 4.7 GB per unit.  You can put about 2500 compressed 5 megapixel pictures on a DVD or about 7 hours of video.  

One twenty cent DVD would hold many times more photos, videos and audio than what this department recorded at the homicide scene, yet Fraud Taylor wants to charge $19.49 for a thumb drive and overpriced CD.  As a citizen, are you OK with one of these twenty cent DVDs, that you or I can buy, hold more data than 6 of Fraud's $2.50 CDs he tries to pawn off as the city's expense on FOIA requests?  That's 75 times the expense for a lower amount of data storage.

You of course realize that the common denominator in your dealings with Ludington and Manistee are the legal geniuses that they have hired. I can also assume that the legal councilors have dragged your reputation thru the mud from Ludington to Manistee and that is probably why the City of Manistee is acting like the zombie council of Ludington. It's to bad there is no evidence of "collusion" between both cities and their attorneys to stifle your search for public information. That would be a monster law suit in itself. Good luck X. At times I think you must be using a wheelbarrow to carry those family jewels.

Thanks, Willy, I will need all the luck I can get to have the Manistee County courts actually do their job by the rules.  One of the members of my serving party had her phone out at the city clerk's office pointed towards where a couple of clerks were working on notarizing the proof of service behind an inch-thick window. 

When they noticed the phone pointing their way, they lashed out at her with a simultaneous "You can't record here.  It's against the law."  The metamorphosis of their behavior was striking-- think of Sméagol going into a Gollum fit in the Lord of the Rings movies.  

After they were told that she was just looking at Facebook, they still didn't believe her; I'm half-surprised that the sheriff's office down the hall wasn't contacted and deputies with guns drawn dispatched for somebody possibly recording public servants doing their job.  I won't divulge whether she was recording or not, but photography is not a crime.  Corrupt public officials that never get challenged probably think it is.  Thankfully, nobody in our party got shot by law enforcement, that's a big accomplishment in Manistee, I hear.

After getting that accomplished, I tried to take the 'return' copy of the summons/complaint packet up to the circuit court to drop it off there; the return copy is often called the judge's copy.  Even though the proof of service was at the top and I explained I was dropping it off for the court, I was originally told to go back to the county clerk.  I had to explain that we had already went through that part of the process, and she eventually accepted it.  The lack of any legal knowledge by the 19th Circuit Court's administrators continues to amaze me.

Recording is NOT a crime. It's our building! I would love to be arrested for that and sue their asses off. Especially, if they put their grubby corrupt fingers on me... Many people do this lawful practice of filming in "Our" Court buildings, they call it "AUDITING", they do it to train these baboons what the laws actually are. And, when our rights are challenged we fight back with lawsuits and put them all on YouTube to show the world what idiots they are. For anyone who has never watched an "Audit" on Youtube here is one for your viewing pleasure.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXWhcJNvqVU     Know your RIGHTS! Challenge the Idiots!!    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOpBzq7HSMk

While I respect, admire, and support those that do such audits, it's a rather dangerous game when you are dealing with a government organization that has not only considered their agent's unlawful and unprovoked trespassing on Lee Milks property as proper, their agent's refusal to leave that property when asked as protocol, that agent's gunning down of an old man on his own property as necessary, and the cover-up of their likely-flawed and biased investigation as routine.  

I consider each and every city official of Manistee I have had contact with as an accomplice after the fact for this homicide, and when I do one day gain that police report and investigation from their bloody hands, despite all their unlawful efforts to dissuade me and others, they will have the mother of all audits.  Thanks for the youtubes.

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