Steve Neavling
Steve Neavling, who runs the website Motor City Muckraker, writes that Mayor Mike Duggan's office is making government transparency cost-prohibitive.
After discovering that Mayor Mike Duggan was secretly lobbying the emergency manager to use his unprecedented authority to repeal a transparency law, I requested copies of e-mails between both administrations to get a better picture of what happened.
The city of Detroit responded that the cost “to conduct a forensic sweep” of the e-mails likely would exceed $12,000. And once the e-mails are identified, “most of the information will be redacted” because it is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, city attorney Ellen Ha wrote.
“Because all of the individuals identified in your request are public bodies within the meaning of Section 2(d) of the Act, MCL 15.232(d), their communications would be exempt from disclosure pursuant to Section 13(1)(m) of the Act, MCL 15.243(1)(m). This provision of the Act exempts from disclosure ‘communications and notes within a public body or between public bodies of an advisory nature to the extent that they cover other than purely factual materials and are preliminary to a final agency determination of policy or action.'”
The city also would charge $54.52 an hour for an attorney to comb through the communication to determine what to redact.
Neavling has been frustrated over recent months when trying to get city documents.
This is the third time in two months that the Duggan administration has demanded that we pay thousands of dollars for public records. In August, the charge for EMS records was $42,000. The bill for records of injured firefighters was $4,400.
