LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – In Michigan, municipalities are charging organizations and individuals money to process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, then taking the money and refusing to deliver the information.

And it’s perfectly legal.

Legal loopholes.

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It’s a loophole in the state’s FOIA law that doesn’t put a time limit on when government has to release information for which it has already charged people.

On Dec. 11, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled against the ACLU in a lawsuit involving the length of time the City of Grand Rapids took to release information requested in a FOIA.

The ACLU said it would take the city 2 hours and 15 minutes to process the request but the city wasn’t going to release the information for 8 to 10 months, according to legal documents. The city cited a backlog, but did cash in a $73.82 deposit from the ACLU. The city eventually gave the ACLU the documents 15 months after the original FOIA was submitted.

“All parties agreed that defendant took 13 months to fulfill a FOIA request that needed only 3 hours and 30 minutes to process,” the court’s opinion stated. “They also agreed that, although FOIA contains deadlines for other actions, FOIA does not contain a strict deadline for the fulfillment of FOIA requests.”

Updates desperately needed.

Jennifer Dukarski, an attorney at the Butzel law firm who specializes in media and is general counsel to the Michigan Press Association, said FOIA law needs to be addressed to fix that issue.

” … there is a reason why we need updates to FOIA … desperately!” Dukarski said in an email to Michigan News Source.

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Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Charlie LeDuff has filed a lawsuit against the state attorney general’s office. LeDuff said that he filed a FOIA with the AG and it cashed his $3,147 check but hasn’t produced any documents in 150 days since.

“This case is about restoring FOIA to what the Legislature intended—a disclosure statute, not a waiting game,” said Philip L. Ellison, principal attorney at Outside Legal Counsel PLC, which is representing LeDuff in the lawsuit, in a press release. “When an agency says ‘we grant your request’ but then produces nothing for half a year or more, that’s not transparency. It’s loop evasion.”