The Michigan State Court of Appeals sided with the City of Grand Rapids in a December ruling, arguing that the state’s Freedom of Information Act does not require municipal entities to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests in a timely manner.
The appellate court sided with a previous ruling issued by the circuit court, which sided with the City of Grand Rapids against the plaintiffs, the American Civil Liberties Union and Peter Armstrong Sr.
According to the ruling, following a FOIA request on the part of the plaintiff, Grand Rapids officials estimated that the request would take approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes to process, but added “that it would take 8 to 10 months to provide the records.”
The city reasoned that the Grand Rapids Police Department—the entity from which the ACLU was seeking information—receives over 2,000 FOIA requests per year, and so the timely fulfillment of all requests is not feasible.
After several appeals and further inquiries, the plaintiff filed a lawsuit arguing that the city’s extended response time constituted an “excessive delay.”
The plaintiffs argued that such a delay amounted to a constructive denial of the request and violated Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, which requires access to public records. The lawsuit aimed to compel faster disclosure and challenge the city’s backlog practices that hinder public transparency.
The governing statute, notably, does not provide clear guidance on the timeline for fulfilling requests. It does, however, contain a provision that requires municipalities to “furnish a requesting person a reasonable opportunity for inspection and examination of its public records.”
The plaintiffs claimed that relatively prompt timelines for fulfilling a request are one aspect of the statute’s “reasonable opportunity” clause. But the court determined otherwise, arguing that the relevant language pertained to the completeness and thoroughness of fulfilling the request more than the timeliness of its completion.
Thus, the appellate court judges affirmed the circuit court’s ruling: “Plaintiffs have not shown that the circuit court erred by granting summary disposition in favor of defendant,” they concluded.
The upshot of the ruling is that Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, while it purports to promote transparency, is very limited in what it can provide for individuals, media, and watchdog agencies that wish to obtain government documents in a timely manner.
The plaintiffs have not appealed the court’s decision.
FOIA has been scrutinized at length by the Mackinac Center of Public Policy on the grounds that its clunkiness as a law stops it from fulfilling its purpose.
According to the report, from inordinate delays and vague deadlines, to overbroad redactions and exemptions, to loopholes and biased internal mechanisms—the law, under the guise of transparency, only serves to make government more opaque.
The report adds that FOIA actually “enables these long delays,” because “it requires only that public bodies respond to a request within a set period.”
“There is no deadline, however, for when governments must produce and deliver the requested records,” it continues. “Instead, public bodies set their own nonbinding estimates for how long they will take to fulfill a request.”
The lack of an enforcement mechanism can lead to delays in releasing time-sensitive information, which in turn cultivates further misgivings about government.