FOIA School Flunkers of Ludington

[XLFD]

Two years ago, shortly after the Ludington Police Department (LPD) led by Police Thief Chris Jones decided to make the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) a profitable venture for them by using two illegal fee schemes, their administrative officials were granted FOIA training funding by what purports to be an advisory committee.  

An advisory standing committee's job under the laws of the state and the city is to explore issues then offer recommendations (or disapprovals) to the full council, not approve the use of public funds and exercise authority which isn't theirs-- but city officials don't believe they have to live by those sections of laws.  Much like the state's supposedly-advisory Waterways Commission directs where and what our DNR funds go to, our standing committees overstep their authority and take action they cannot lawfully make under the Michigan Open Meetings Act.

Looking beyond that violation, the tendency of Thief Jones to over-redact records released, and the two incredibly greedy schemes that would in one case assign a fee of $450 for redacting an eight minute video, a video needing no edits as confirmed by the county sheriff's bodycam footage of the same incident, we look instead at what that FOIA training approved in May 2024 amounted to in terms of improving the city's FOIA responses since.  

Take a brief moment to lock in a guess for this question:  Did the training result in better FOIA responses by the LPD with fees reflecting actual costs and with only lawful exemptions taken out of the records disclosed?  

Maybe this was too easy of a question; of course it didn't.  It has only gotten worse as they seem to be using their training only as a means of figuring out new ways to cover up their shame and get more profit from doing so.  We did a story on this just yesterday, where the whole narrative of the police report we received was darkened entirely other than the headings which indicated quite conclusively that it was severely over-redacted.  Before this FOIA training, even Chris Jones would exercise some restraint in FOIA redactions, now it has just become ridiculous as we will see.

But before that, a brief aside to look at the approval of up to $1200 for FOIA training, unlawfully approved by the Public Safety Committee as seen above.  In the "paying of the bills" section of the Feb, 10, 2025 packet (see p. 7), we find that each official taking the training spent had us spend $215 for their tutelage.  My math skills are sufficient to determine that only five people could be trained if your maximum to spend is $1200, a sixth person would push the tuition up to $1290.

We see, however, that Councilor Bulger, City Manager Aldrich, Asst. CM Christensen, Clerk Luskin, Clerk Vankampen, Clerk Marquardt, and Treasurer Caithamer were all seven billing $215 for you to pay for "FOIA training".  Our abacus says that's a figure over $1500.  Not only did they make a very non-advisory vote in an advisory committee and nowhere else, but they also overspent their ceiling by over 25%.  Since that training, the city council has had to field multiple FOIA appeals to them from multiple people, all unsuccessful with the council's unanimous votes against disclosure, while the appeals themselves had impressive amounts of merit each and every time.

Here's a very simple to understand example of how extremely anti-transparent our city leaders have become after being trained on the FOIA, a mechanism to get public records that public bodies won't openly share with the people.  At this link we see FORM MC-220, a standard form used by the courts in Michigan for warrant recalls, used typically after a bench or arrest warrant has found the person named thereon.  As it is a standard form, nothing on the form itself would be deemed to be exempt from FOIA disclosure.  

Let's compare that form with the MC-220 form used in the case against Amy Churchill, supplied to us by the LPD with a lot of redactions throughout the form-- and they were all explained away by the privacy exemption, indicating it would be invasive of Ms. Churchill's privacy:

When you compare, you see seven black boxes cover the word "LEIN", which stands for "Law Enforcement Information Network" on the form approved by the state; remarkably the number of times they scratched out this four-letter acronym eclipsed the number of other exemptions on the filled-out form, each of those lawful.  There is no FOIA exemption that allows for removing the acronym "LEIN" from a public record, especially when it's used throughout an unfilled standard government form.

Maybe another $1500 of your tax dollars can be unlawfully assigned by an advisory standing committee to get city officials retrained in order to fulfill one of their most important duties:  keeping the public informed and themselves accountable.  We'll give them better lessons for free, but since their aim is to keep everything as secret as possible, I don't think they will ask for our services and remain flunk-tards for FOIA forever.