Give the CIty Credit for Dodging Public Record Requests

[XLFD]

After three decades of serving as the county administrator, Fabian Knizacky is set to retire on February 1st.  Our best remembrance of Knizacky would be that he was always able to respond quickly to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and never charged a dime for the service.  In this way he was much like Scottville City Attorney Tracy Thompson, who advised his city's city managers that charging the public for FOIA requests was counterproductive.  Such gestures show that their public bodies are dedicated to transparency, and the Ludington Torch generally has would up making less FOIA requests to these agencies due to trusting them to be able to come clean when called upon.

In contrast, the City of Ludington (COL) has adopted a standard over the years where they go against transparency either by shielding public records using bogus FOIA exemptions and/or unlawful fees.  During the mayorship of Steve Miller (2019-2022), the COL followed Knizacky's lead and made genuine efforts to better transparency.  No longer would records be hid behind paywalls and false exemptions.  This was Ludington's golden age of transparency, an age that would end with the election of Mark Barnett as mayor.  

Barnett, the former LPD chief, had a history of breaking FOIA laws, best exemplified by his asking for nearly $2500 for the incident report concerning the famous Baby Kate case.  The Ludington Torch would go through the court process to show that what eventually turned out to be over 90 pages of a police report fully supplemented, had only one (unnecessary) exemption after the first three pages where the software redacted addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers.  Barnett was totally full of raw sewage: there wasn't the need for a police sergeant to spend 100 hours redacting information as he sworn in his certification at the time.  

Mayor Barnett decided that the Ludington Torch (or any other upstarts) would not make his beloved LPD look bad again by having the current chief, Christopher Jones, and the FOIA Coordinator, Ross "Sewage" Hammersley, adopt FOIA policies without authorization that the city manager at the time (Mitch Foster) said would not take place in Ludington with him in charge.  Foster was hired early in Mayor Miller's term and indicated through words and by example that he was dedicated to transparency for over four years.  

Not surprisingly, Foster would be job seeking the next month and landing a spot with the local community college.  He was able to remain long enough to see Barnett, Hammersley, and Jones make a mockery of his transparency, with the city council's complicity.  The Ludington Torch has an ongoing FOIA case in the circuit court looking to reverse policies that are in utter defiance of the FOIA in what they can charge for fees.  A new FOIA policy passed by the council after these fees were first appealed, allows FOIA Coordinator Hammersley more discretion to charge fees and obstruct disclosures than FOIA has ever allowed.

We made a simple request to look at the city's credit card transaction records for the calendar year of 2024.  When we made a similar request in 2020 for such records for the year 2019, we were charged nothing and we found a lot of issues where city officials were using our taxes to go out to restaurants, order take-out, buy funeral planters, etc.  Looking at the intervening years, our reporting in that series hasn't affected the way city officials abuse the spending of your money.  They are still using it for similar unlawful purposes and even spending it on dog food and pet insurance too.  

When I finally received a response, after a clarification of what I wanted (less than what I requested in 2020), I received a request for $41.65 based on three assessed fees.  I would not be able to figure out what they were. 

The first fee indicated that it would take two hours of one or more clerk's time to retrieve the records.  I'm not that organized, but I can track down (retrieve) my credit card transaction records of 2024 by just finding the file folder they are in.  That takes two minutes tops, not two hours.  Any clerk that takes two hours to find such a folder should not be in such a position to begin with, in my honest opinion.  

But I had seen enough to launch another FOIA fee appeal, and this is probably what the city attorney wants.  Every time I submit a FOIA appeal, he drafts a legal memorandum in support of his errors, takes several hours to do so and is able to claim a $1000 or more for doing so.  Sewage has shown this modus operandi throughout the years, failing to offer a sufficient resolution to craft a charter revision commission, and getting tens of thousands of dollars in defending his error all of the way up to appeals court, and then, failing in the end to get the charter revised.  I would address each unlawful fee in my appeal letter to the Ludington city council, and ingrain the city attorney's new monicker into their mind in the process:

Councilor, 

"This is one more FOIA FEE APPEAL, necessary due to new attempts by your villainous city attorney, Ross "Sewage" Hammersley to commit public extortion in order to prevent the public from looking at public records they are otherwise entitled to.  

Police Thief Jones has no complicity here, as you will see in the accompanying request for the city's credit card transaction records, you will also see that I made a deeper request for such records back in 2020, where then-FOIA Coordinator Carlos Alvarado provided these records without charge, because there shouldn't be any, according to the FOIA.  For some reason, Sewage wants to hide these records behind a paywall, and the reason is fairly obvious, city officials have been using the city's credit in violation of the state constitution's restrictions and the ethical considerations of using public money for non-public purposes.  

The email chain shows Sewage's complete responses to my request, but for purposes of my appeal, I will only focus on the FOIA fee estimation worksheet, a color-coded blowup picture of that is attached with the problem areas of the estimates boxed in, so that this council can once again see the attempt at public extortion using three different unlawful ways.  

But first, section 4(3) of the FOIA states:  " A fee as described shall not be charged for the cost of search, examination, review, and the deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information unless failure to charge a fee would result in unreasonably high costs to the public body because of the nature of the request in the particular instance, and the public body specifically identifies the nature of these unreasonably high costs."

In no part of Sewage's response is the nature of the unreasonably high costs identified, indeed the city's prior response to a much deeper diving FOIA request indicates that no such unreasonably high cost should be charged.  Providing electronic scans of a calendar year's credit card transaction records is not a difficult request to fulfill, as we will expand upon.  

1) In the yellow square of the blowup, inside other expenses, a figure of $4.06 is quoted without explanation in any of Sewage's responses.  A FOIAC cannot create a charge on a whim, without any explanation, and so as this charge is completely unfounded or speculative, it is repugnant to section 4 of the FOIA, if not Sewage's statute-breaking anti-transparent FOIA Policy many of you clowns passed last year without problem.  This is the first attempt at public extortion in order to hide records behind a paywall.

2) In the orange square, Sewage claims it will take clerical staff 15 minutes to separate exempt material out of the records requested, and yet Sewage never claims any exemption exists throughout the response, because there isn't any by the nature of these records.  He speculates in his response that there may be, but the FOIA does not allow for speculative fees that shouldn't exist due to the nature of the records.  This is the second attempt at public extortion in order to hide records behind a paywall.

3) In the red square, he suggests that it will take clerical staff two hours to retrieve these public records.  The verb 'retrieve' means "to recover information from storage".  Is the public to believe that it will take staff two hours to recover city credit card information from 2024?  In Sewage's response, he indicates that departments have already determined how many credit card statements there are, doesn't that indicate efforts have already been made to track down what should be readily available records placed into a folder of some sort?  This is not a reasonable cost for retrieval of credit card information less than a year old, and as Sewage has not provided a justification as required by the FOIA for this expense, it is the third attempt at public extortion in order to hide records behind a paywall.

As you can see, none of the charges are justifiable under the FOIA and exist solely to hide these records from the public, because many in the city are misusing the public's credit at high cost to the taxpayers.  Speaking of high costs to the taxpayers, Sewage will likely present to the council twenty pages of legal jargon and outright lies to validate his three new attempts at public extortion.  How much money do you think he will charge the city in trying to justify this attempted public extortion of a little over $40 from a citizen being targeted by the city?  Thousands, that's without counting the costs of another fee appeal in the local court.  Think of your constituents, think of your duties under the FOIA, and do what's right this time.  

Please have your criminal attorney provide the records for the proper cost (free) or prepare for more legal action."

 

While that was the end of the email, we feel the need to show you how bad the credit card excesses have been at the COL, here's just a small snapshot of the LPD's (Dept. 301) use of their credit card, payment of which is coming from the general fund as seen in the upcoming January 27 LCC meeting in the payment of the bills section of the agenda packet.  Any time the payee is the "First National Bank of Omaha", it signals a credit card purchase for the COL.

Chief Jones put the $106 of expenses of an unknown meeting at Jamesport Brewery on the card, surrounded by other meeting supplies purchases at Family Fare, Big Apple Bagels and Biggby's.  Though Jones told us that he wouldn't be spending any general fund money on the K9 unit, he has done so and continues to do so with two payments to the Animal Hospital of Ludington.  If you look at the prior page in the packet, you will even see a $312 payment for award plaques directed to "Safety Decals", co-managed by city hall's own much-conflicted individual Heather Tykoski.  

The corruption and sewage run so deep at Ludington City Hall, that you don't even need to see their credit card transaction records to put it in perspective.  But that still doesn't absolve them from giving a legitimate FOIA response for those records.

[Willy]

It doesn't seem that things will ever change permanently for the better. Dealing with Ludington's corruption is like having a colonoscopy without anesthetic. These local politicians have either been numbed down or dumbed down.

[XLFD]

The city's bowels are definitely experiencing blockage, and it only smells worse the deeper you push the colonoscope.  And the problem at city hall is that once you remove the obstructions from one set of intestines, another asshole steps forth with a more chronic problem.