Mark Brewer, AG FOIA Flap Documents - Part 2- AG Response

This is the AG's response. He has some good points - On Page Two, Cox notes that "the department recognizes that the purpose of FOIA is to promote access to government records in the most efficient and economical way possible." And he makes the point that Brewer's request has political connotations, quoting a section of the FOIA law states that fees "...shall be uniform and not dependent on the identity of the requesting person."
The next step on this case could be a courtroom. How much is too much? We can't wait.

Mark Brewer, AG FOIA Flap Documents - Part 1 - His Request

The man who has bedeviled state Republicans for years, Mark Brewer, is attempting to shine a light on State Attorney General Mike Cox. And Cox wants to charge him $143,000 for his trouble.
He’s accusing Cox of overcharging for an open records request related to a multi-million dollar settlement with Countrywide Financial Group. The money was in theory earmarked to help people who are hitting the financial skids keep their homes. But Cox also sent $500,000 of the cash to Grand Rapids to help with the cost of a couple of local parks/projects. One payment was $250,000 to the city. Another a donation for a park.
Many folks believe this is a case of political payback, some fiscal help to a friend or two in GR.
The $250,000 gift from the settlement for Kent County's Millennium Park is a obviously open to question. Peter Secchia is head of fundraising for the park, and Secchia donated nearly $10,000 to Cox campaigns in 2002 and 2005. This is, of course, political business as usual. But that doesn't make it immune from analysis. And it sure does a good job of helping voters make an informed choice.
Brewer filed a FOIA over the issue seeking records for “each federal or state lawsuit, complaint, of civil, criminal or administrative legal proceeding…involving corporate, commercial or business defendants brought, joined or participated in by the Attorney General and resolved by any means…”
Brewer seeks some simple things, including docket numbers, parties and venues. But he also asks for disposition of proceeds, all communications, including email text and phone records from the AG and his staff pertaining to the cases. It is a well-written, comprehensive request.
Cox fired back with a bill for $143,000 to comply. But he also says “Please be informed that nearly 8,000 pages of settlement documents currently are available on the Department’s website: www.michigan.gov/settlementcenter and the department continues to add to this site. The Department believes, based on your most recent media statements, that the settlements you are most interested in may be available on the Department’s website at no cost.”
Of course if they are available there at no cost, it would seem that the $143,000 in charges might be whittled down a bit.
This is often where open records hit a wall. When a body does not want to give them up, it simply trumps up the charges for processing those records, which usually discourages the filer and keeps the records sealed. It has happened to us before with this state.
We obtained copies of the FOIA and ensuing correspondence between Brewer and Cox’s office. We are posting it all here in two parts in an experimental fashion – you now have the tools to decide who is right and who is wrong, if there is such a thing here.
We also emailed John Sellek at the AG’s office last night asking for a copy of Brewer’s FOIA. After all, he is said to have claimed that “…Brewer is seeking to exploit the issue by filing a request so broad it would require the searching of thousands of boxes of documents dating back six years.”
We have yet to hear back from Sellek.

Who is Running These Newspapers? And Who is Reading Stories on Themselves?

An astute reader, Chetly Zarko, figured out that the transparency Web site referred to in the Traverse City newspaper and questioned by FreeMichigan last week was NOT the one for state Rep. Kevin Elsenheimer's noble transparency effort but is actually his site at the Republican House umbrella site on the lower left. It's a nice little report, although we again need to know just what the publications are that he spent $834 on in March. We don't doubt that the charge is legit - but wouldn't it make sense that we get some detail?
We would hope that Rep. Elsenheimer notified the newspaper pronto of the mistake, but when we checked, the mistken site is still posted. Did he read the story?
But the fact remains that transparency is a slippery little item when it is jammed amidst a host of other nice sounding notions that reflect well on government.
We are traveling the rest of this week but will again try to do some work here as time allows. This time the trip is to the desert Southwest, business, and temps are headed for the 100 degree mark. If we could find a sunny rock to perch on all day, we would.

KAE-MarchOfficeAllotmentReport

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Open Records and Vacation

Some civic minded state lawmakers continue to push for transparency in government. Senate Bill 382 holds hands with House Bill 4121 in asking for a public database in which residents can search for details of every expenditure by each state department and agency. We say excellent.
Also: Freemichigan is allowed some down time on occasion, as this is not our only project. We have articles to write, a script for a 10-minute documentary to write, an business proposal to put together and another book deal in the works. For the next week or so, I will be in Florida taking in some spring training games in the Tampa Bay area. We’ll be back the last week of the month at some point and take up where we left off. In the coming months, we will be attending more public meetings and bringing back the news to this spot. See you then.

More School Districts Put Spending Online; Cities Stay in the Dark

Good news in terms of school district transparency.
With districts in Macomb and Oakland Counties on board, can we expect some districts in Wayne County to follow? How about Ingham? Doubtful and that’s where most of the problems are and the transparency is needed. While the Mackinac Center’s effort is commendable, all it can really do is ask the least resistant to comply. The problem remains in the most unstable counties, where most of the money is spent.
We are also puzzled by the comment from Bill Matthewson, general counsel for the Michigan Municipal League, regarding the refusal of cities and other municipalities to post public information online:
“The public is privy to city spending through meeting agendas, Freedom of Information Act requests as well as open budget hearings, he said.”
Perhaps in some cases, but at an exorbitant and often prohibitive cost. Matthewson is a typical bureaucrat and a former lobbyist who has no idea what these things mean of cost and his defensive position on the issue is a smoke screen. Looking at his background, it appears he hasn’t has an honest job for some time, according to his LinkedIn profile.
So the trouble remains at the municipal level. And folks like Matthewson work hard to keep us in the dark. We'd post the 990 for the Michigan Municipal League. But the tax-exempt body hasn't made it available online.

More on Sunshine Week: National Roundup

We’ve said that Michigan feels like a laggard in terms of public records and transparency. We’ve even got four counties that have absolutely no online presence, which is at least a start. But according to a new report from the Associated Press, Michigan fares pretty well against its peers in terms of records posted online. The state is actually doing well, we have noticed, if one wants to take the time to dig into its many sites. But most folks don’t have the time or inclination to do that digging, leaving it to folks like us to help them. There should be an office, not related to the government, that would gather the information, put it into a simple form, and post it on a regular basis. Newspapers no longer allow a staff the time or resources to do this. Any ideas how to get this done?
The story that accompanies the graphic above does a fair job of giving the state of open records today. There are plenty of Sunday op-eds and stories on the issue to celebrate Sunshine Week (which we believe should be every week).
The Arizona Republic reports on its state’s high rating in terms of online accessibility while the Oklahoman decries the failure of some of its cities in online open records access. In Louisiana, it was found that Gov. Bobby Jindal isn’t very transparent even after all his campaign promises.
In Jackson, Mississippi, the alternative weekly Jackson Free Press calls it right, taking Jackson’s paper of record, the Gannett-owned Clarion-Ledger to task for its flaccid reporting and lack of knowledge of the state’s Sunshine laws.
Support of this open government is not a gutsy call for news organizations; it’s kind of like being against poverty. We’re all against, it. What are you going to do about it? We don’t recall any of these major corporations that now own most newspapers hiring lobbyists to advocate for better, more complete open records access and enforcement. Gannett had revenue last year of $6.7 billion. Scripps a paltry $1 billion. And astute Reuters tech and media editor Tiffany Wu posits that NBC Universal could be worth $30 billion. And none can spare some cash to advocate for open government, other than to push out some tepid, rote editorials that may or may not resonate with their dwindling readership.
We say the good money is on a new form of journalism that focuses on openness and spends more time chasing down records, bothering public officials and doing the investigations that news agencies forgot about as they chase the bottom line. Watch this space for more developments on that.