The High Cost of Inefficiency at Ludington City Hall

[XLFD]

It's a shame that after nearly two hundred FOIA requests, including over one hundred denials/partial denials and nearly the same amount of unlawful FOIA fee charges apprised over the last five years between the City of Ludington and myself, that the City's FOIA Coordinator still tries to hide public information from the people using whatever means possible.  But once again, Ludington City Manager John Shay has decided to invent a new way to do so. 

 

This technique has actually been tried similarly in a few previous replies, like when he charged nearly $1000 to view the Building Inspector's annual summaries for a couple of dozen years, on the basis that three of those years had no summaries and I would have to go through all the property files with the Building Inspector overseeing me.  Or a charge of nearly $150 to show how the City spent its $40,000 on "Beach Safety" for 2011, a request that was made in the latter parts of 2011, when the summaries, receipts, checks, and/or invoices should have been still fresh in the Treasurer's hands. 

Ironically, even though I never seen these latter records, never agreed to the extortive pricing of this reply, Circuit Court Judge Mark Wickens, taking the place of our county's Circuit Court Judge Richard Cooper, who failed to disclose the impropriety that his son was representing the City of Ludington for over four months, ruled that I and my co-plaintiff in a FOIA civil action, were liable to pay that fee in full.  We still have not seen these records even after paying off the judgment, but we hold hope that the Michigan Appeals Court will use reason in our appeal to them, when they finally rule on this and set matters aright.

 

But I have recently been poring over several Waterway Agreements between the State and the City, dealing with matters where the State either fully-funded or at least half-funded projects started at the City's Municipal Marina.  A lot of these agreements either implicitly or explicitly has the following clause in them:

Such as this one from 2006 signed by Shay, and current DNR bigwig, Ronald Olsen.  You will note that "facilities" refer to the Ludington City Marina, and "commercial operations" has the dictionary meaning of operating in pursuit of profit, rather than by an inherent public interest or the like.  Most would agree that running a charter boat out of the Ludington City Marina is a type of commercial operation that has been permitted at the marina both before and after these agreements. 

 

But agreements between the State DNR and the City of Ludington do not seem to have any binding effect on either party as seen here:  public-marina-elitist-mindset.  So I set out to see whether any of the charter boats or other commercial enterprises that have operated out of the city marina had the express written permission from the City and the State, by sending this FOIA request:

 

Now, I would think that the limited amount of commercial operations given written permission by the State (and presumably also by the City) would be kept together in some computer file or even some manila folder if they were compiled in low-tech format.  I would also think that they would be available rather quickly, in case there was some dispute as to the legality of them doing their business at the marina.  There is after all a full time marina manager who basically has half the year off, and a full Municipal Marina Board, either of who should have some records of who is allowed to do commercial operations there, and has access to all the State's permits to do so.  However, here was my reply:

The City Manager has effectively told me it will take a clerk 4.5 hours to look through a bunch of records, costing me over $100, in a search which may reveal absolutely no records.  So... because they can't organize their permits (if any exist) into a database or into a summary or even a file folder, they will charge the public requester for a search of records that may probably show that the City is in violation of yet another agreement with the Michigan DNR, by not having the charter boat captains operating from their marina (about twelve such charters run) get written approval by the State.  Here's the supplement to the response followed by a blow-up of the part of interest:   8-16-2013 response  

Isn't it odd that if a government entity asks you to produce your appropriate permits, you either must spend your time and efforts getting those in order (at no cost to them) or risk possible fines or imprisonments... and yet, if you as an individual ask for the government entity to show their proper permits, they can charge you an exorbitant fee for having the temerity to ask, even if they produce nothing?   And the problem is that even if they come forth with all the appropriate documents from the State granting permission to these 'commercial operations', they still have the uphill battle of showing that the City of Ludington also granted permission for these commercial operations to be at the City Marina. 

 

Such an authorization of an agreement to allow charter boat operations on the City's public holdings would require an affirmative action by the Ludington City Council (Ludington Charter Sec. 13.1):  "The power to authorize the making of purchases, contracts, and leases on behalf of the City is vested in the Council...".   Yet, no such action has been done by the City Council since the advent of the City Marina, meaning that if there was such permission from the State, there was no proper permission from the City, as no such authorization seems to have ever been passed, which could have only been done in an open meeting.

 

 

So, I will save my $104.94 to purchase other unlawfully overpriced information that this City Manager wishes to remain under wraps instead of being shown to all transparently.  And wonder how sad it is that City of Ludington officials cannot follow the law, perform their jobs ethically, or abide by agreements.

[Willy]

I get so peed off when Shay pulls this crap. Holding our information ransom is to me a crime. This makes Ludington look like an uncooperative self serving non responsive Govnernment ran by people who couldn't care less about the public.

[XLFD]

As the Ludington City Hall makes more rules for us to live by, they disregard more rules that they are bound to live by, to the detriment of us.  What do you expect from a city council who was raising tax rates during a hard recession where people were losing a lot of the value of their houses?