The Wickman Record: what the documents show about Lauren M. Wickman.

In 35 of 43 requests, the office's answer turned on a record that it said did not exist. Sometimes that is true and the request was simply aimed at a document no one keeps. But the archive also contains cases where the office certified nonexistence and then produced the very thing, or conceded the underlying data existed once the requester pushed back.

The office quoted $385,131.42 across 20 requests. The public has paid $0 of it, because the quotes were high enough, and the deposits large enough, that the records were never produced. A fee estimate is a lawful part of FOIA. A fee estimate that prices a simple count out of reach is also a way of saying no without saying no.

25 of 43 requests were “granted in part.” In several, the part that was granted was not the part that was asked for: an annual table when the request said monthly, a stack of case files when the request asked for a five-column summary, a page that denies and a page that grants in the same signed letter. Partial production is not the same as responsive production.

9 requests were appealed, generating 27 recorded appeal events before the Delta County Board of Commissioners. Every appeal in the archive was upheld. The written decisions are one page, restate the coordinator's conclusion, and in at least one case were issued the same day the appeal was received. An appeal that always affirms is not a check. It is a formality.

FOIA 25-197 asked for complaints against the office and received its own federal lawsuits instead. Both cases name Lauren Wickman as a defendant. One, Roberts v. Jon Doe Delta County Prosecutor, was dismissed with prejudice in 2019 on absolute prosecutorial immunity. The other, Kobasic v. Delta County and Lauren Wickman, settled in 2022 for $60,000 with no admission of liability. Litigation is part of the public record of any prosecutor. It is not the whole of the complaint file.

The FOIA record does not exist in a vacuum. In 2023 a three-member majority of the Delta County Board moved to strip the prosecutor of her role as the county's civil counsel, rewrote the board's decorum rules over her objection, and published a letter calling her representation “inadequate.” A newly elected board reversed the counsel decision unanimously in June 2024. Local media covered each step. This page treats that coverage as context, not as proof of wrongdoing on either side.

Every request in this archive asked for a fee waiver under MCL 15.234(1). None has been granted. What makes 26-131 different is not the outcome but the paperwork: the county's own Detailed Cost Itemization has a “Public Interest” waiver line with a box to check if the waiver is granted and a line for the subtotal after waiver. On the 26-131 itemization the box is unchecked and the subtotal line is blank. The waiver was neither granted nor denied with reasons. It was not decided at all, and the fee was carried forward at full price.

The 26-131 itemization justifies its redaction charge by saying the office must review all 1,500 total files to find the roughly twenty that fit the request. The office's own earlier responses put felony filings at about 25 to 30 a month, or roughly 350 a year. A search that returns twenty files from a 350-file year does not require reading 1,500 files, and the office's case-management system has a search function its own vendor documents describe as a “powerful relational database” with “broad search capabilities.” The requester put that contradiction in writing, asked three numbered questions about the search actually run, and the April 24, 2026 response answered none of them and never used the word Karpel.

FOIA gives an office five business days to respond, extendable by ten. The 26-131 response met that deadline and then set a second clock: approximately thirty days from receipt of a 50 percent deposit, with no page copied until the deposit arrives. The deposit is $41.33. The fee is $82.66. Eighty percent of that fee is the office's own time spent reviewing its own files, and the production date does not begin until the requester pays for the review. Meeting every deadline that applies to the office while delivering nothing is not a delay in form. It is a delay in effect, and it is lawful.

The May 7, 2026 letter answered two requests about the same investigation very differently. FOIA 26-139 asked for autopsy findings and was denied with a reason a reader can check: no one died, so no autopsy was conducted. FOIA 26-140 asked for sixteen categories of fingerprint records and was denied with a certificate of nonexistence and a denial form checking box 2. The certificate does not describe a search, name a system, or say who looked. The contrast is the point. The office knows how to explain a denial when it chooses to, and on 26-140 it did not. An explained denial can be tested against the facts. A bare certificate cannot.

The four plea documents released under 26-142 show two bargains struck months apart. Aker pleaded no contest to an added count of assault with intent to commit sexual penetration, a ten-year maximum, and the state dismissed four counts, the habitual enhancements and a second file to get it. The recommendation was “no more and no less than 5 years”; the court imposed 80 months. Horvath pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment, a fifteen-year maximum and not a sexual offense, and received 71 months to 15 years. The man the state's own laboratory tied to the assault by a likelihood ratio of roughly 20 octillion has the shorter ceiling. The charge bargain, which is the prosecutor's decision, set that ceiling. The sentence, which is the court's, did not.

On September 11, 2022 the office petitioned the Attorney General for a special prosecutor and wrote, in paragraph 8 of its own petition, that it “believes we are disqualified from pursuing a criminal case” because the subject was a law enforcement officer, the witnesses were local law enforcement, and several people involved had close ties to the office. Four days later the Attorney General’s criminal division wrote “I don’t see a conflict,” and on September 19, 2022 PACC relayed that the request was denied “so you are able to keep it for prosecution.” On May 20, 2024, facing a second State Police incident involving the same person, the office declined to charge and added that the matter “was not sent for review to determine if a Special Prosecutor was needed” because there was “not a substantial change in the relationship” and the prosecutor “did not feel an additional determination was necessary.” The office’s own SPA checklist says to “act upon the conflict as soon as it is identified, preferably pre-charge,” and the PAAM best-practice recommendation it also produced says a petition must “rely on more than a mere claim that someone might question whether the prosecutor should be disqualified.” All of those documents came out of the same file. Whether the 2024 decision was correct is a legal question the record does not answer. What the record does show is an office that described itself as disqualified, was told by the Attorney General that it was not, and then two years later treated its own earlier judgment as settled without asking anyone.

Four requests in this archive asked the office for a number describing its own work in calendar year 2024, and all four were answered with a certificate of nonexistence. FOIA 25-134 asked how many criminal cases were dismissed; 25-136 asked how many plea agreements were offered and accepted; 25-137 asked for the average time from charge authorization to final disposition; 25-139 asked how many forfeitures were tied to cases that later collapsed. Each request offered to accept whatever table, spreadsheet, or internal report the office already kept. Each was faxed on the same morning in late June 2025, and three of them were answered with the same two-page letter. Yet the same office produced a full annual screening and charging table under 25-133, and produced aggregate criminal case filings and dispositions under 26-20. It also quoted $2,931.12 for 886 case-level time figures under 25-129 and $9,548 for a search of roughly 3,300 case files under 26-22. The office can count cases, and it can price the counting. What it will not do is publish the count. The certificate is the cheapest of the three available answers — cheaper than producing the record, and cheaper than pricing the work — and it is the only one that cannot be appealed as a fee.

FOIA 25-194 asked for one year of the prosecutor’s correspondence — emails, letters and texts — in four categories. The requester offered, in the request itself, to accept a log first: date, sender, recipient and subject, before any full text. The office answered with a Detailed Cost Itemization that prices 43,200 minutes of “locate” time at $6.21 an increment and 2,880 increments of “redact” time at $15.68 an increment. Forty-three thousand two hundred minutes is 720 hours. Divided into fifteen-minute increments it is 2,880 increments, and 2,880 is exactly the number of redaction increments the office then charges for. The same 2,880 units of time appear on both lines of the same form, at two different rates, for a total of $63,028.80 and a 50 percent deposit of $31,514.40. The form offers no log, no sampling, no narrowed alternative. FOIA 25-195, filed the same day and answered the same day, priced four pre-existing case-tracking reports at $5,961.60 by charging 480 locate increments and 480 redact increments at the same $6.21 rate — the identical locate-equals-redact structure. A fee estimate is lawful. A fee estimate whose arithmetic doubles the labor on a request the requester already offered to shrink is a number that answers the request without producing anything.

FOIA 25-196 asked for any audit, review or evaluation of the prosecutor’s office from 2019 through 2024 — financial, operational or compliance — including the correspondence that transmitted results and any response plan or corrective action report. The office answered with five annual county-wide financial statements, 734 pages in all, at no charge. Not one of them is an audit of the office. Each reports the prosecutor’s budget line among dozens of county departments. The request also named the fiscal years it wanted, and two of them — 2022 and 2024 — are absent from the release, while fiscal year 2018, which falls outside the window, was produced anyway. No cover letter, denial form, exemption citation or certificate of nonexistence accompanied the gap. The pattern is not refusal. It is substitution: answer an office-specific question with a thick, already-public county document, and let the volume stand in for the answer. The office will hand over 734 pages of county paper before it will hand over one page about itself.

FOIA 25-200 asked the office to name the software it runs on, the version of each product, and whether anything else is planned. The office answered in full: seven systems, three version numbers, no fee, no exemption cited, no page redacted, thirteen business days from receipt to signature. FOIA 25-201 asked for the ProsecutorByKarpel contracts and invoices and was also answered at no charge. Set that beside the rest of the archive. A conviction rate cost $9,548. Correspondence cost $63,028.80. Four case-tracking reports the office already had cost $5,961.60. The pattern is not that the office refuses everything. It is that the requests which describe the machinery are answered for free and on time, while the requests which would describe the results are answered with a price. A software inventory cannot embarrass anyone. A conviction rate can. This page does not claim the office set out to make that distinction. It claims only that the distinction is in the record, in dollars, and that a requester can see it without reading a single page of argument.

FOIA 25-202 asked for any request for proposals, vendor bid, purchase order or communication about acquiring a case-management system since January 1, 2020. The office certified that the first three do not exist — “under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body” — and then, in the same letter, produced thirteen pages of emails showing that the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan ran the procurement, that three vendors demonstrated in November 2022, and that ProsecutorByKarpel won 52 of 66 county votes in March 2023 at 78.78 percent. Both halves of that answer are honest. Together they describe something the public rarely sees: a multi-million-dollar acquisition that no county file records, because the buying was done by an association of the counties’ own prosecutors. The office’s own prosecutor forwarded all three vendors’ price sheets to the county administrator two days before the ballot closed and wrote that Karpel “definitely appears… the most popular choice.” That email is the only procurement document in the county’s possession, and it was produced for free. What was not produced was the rest: the office estimated roughly 500 responsive conversations, said the cost of processing them was “specifically outlined in the attached FOIA Fee Itemization,” and enclosed no itemization and no dollar figure at all. The grant was real and unusable. So the pattern is not concealment. It is diffusion: the record exists, it is held by a body the public has never heard of, and the county’s own answer is a certificate plus a pointer.

FOIA 25-199 asked for three things: the press and media communications of the prosecutor and two assistants from January 1 through August 16, 2025; the case files of Colton Brunette; and any written policy on speaking to the press. The September 8, 2025 letter grants the press releases outright, then grants the internal and external communications “subject necessary redaction,” and then, six pages later, certifies that same communications request nonexistent — “a review of the records reveals they do not exist.” The policy request is certified nonexistent too. The February 2025 case file is denied a third way, as already provided in FOIA 25-171, on the authority of a 1994 case about second copies. Three dispositions of one paragraph of one request, in one packet, none of them withdrawn. The substantive stake is small and checkable. The August 15, 2025 press release corrects a television story and states that the June 6, 2025 interaction produced 1.7 grams of ketamine. The district-court complaint the office produced for that same stop charges ketamine possession and alleges no quantity at all. The February 18, 2025 release had recorded about 1.950 grams from a different stop. This page does not claim the 1.7-gram figure is false, and it does not allege a motive. It claims only what the four documents show when set side by side: the number appears in the press release, not in the charging instrument, and the office answered the request for the records behind it by granting, re-granting and denying it at once.

The pattern is not a one-off. FOIA 25-215, received September 9, 2025 and answered September 15, 2025, does the same thing to a single question about case-processing times. The letter denies the “records, reports, … or summaries” documenting average or median processing times as nonexistent and attaches a certificate. It denies the “statistics, summaries, or reports” maintained internally or for external reporting as nonexistent and attaches a second certificate. Then it grants “data maintained by the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office that document average or median case processing times” subject to a redaction statute and a fee — and prices the reconstruction at $13,248, on the theory that roughly 1,000 files a year for four years must be read at five documents per file. The office certifies the data out of existence and estimates the cost of producing it in the same document. The Notice of Denial enclosed with the letter marks box 1 (Exempt), box 2 (Record Does Not Exist) and box 3 (Redaction) simultaneously and never says which reason governs which part of the answer. Two requests, two subjects, one method: split the request into pieces, dispose of each piece differently, and leave the reader to reconcile them. What the office produced under the grant was thirty pages of State Court Administrative Office clearance-rate screens for the 94th District Court and the 47th Circuit Court — the courts’ statistics, not the office’s own.

FOIA 25-234 is the most cooperative response in this archive, and it is also the clearest illustration of how a real production can leave the central question untouched. The request named six items: four Michigan State Police Forensic Laboratory reports from the April 2024 UPSET investigation of an Escanaba bar, the chain-of-custody cover sheets for each, and any transmittal or return correspondence with the laboratory. The office answered in seven calendar days, five business days, quoted no fee, required no deposit, redacted nothing, and produced all four reports. Two of the remaining items were certified nonexistent with a specific, checkable explanation: evidence seized by the sheriff’s office was turned over to UPSET, so the prosecutor’s office says it holds no separate custody paperwork. By the ordinary measures this site applies — speed, cost, redaction, statutory citation — that is a good response.

What the four reports show is where the pattern lies. Record No. 1 covers a trash pull on January 31, 2024 and reports cocaine residue on a plastic bag corner. Record No. 2 is the latent-print examination of the same item. Records No. 3 and No. 4 cover a traffic stop on April 30, 2024 and report cocaine, with Record No. 4 quantifying 26.4 grams — a little under one ounce, against the “approximately 4 ounces” the press reported. Not one of the four lists the bar, or the apartment above it, as the source of an item submitted for testing. The office produced a complete laboratory file for two locations and no laboratory file at all for the third, which is the one the request that opened this line was built around. The grant is real. It simply answers “what did the lab test” when the earlier request asked “who was charged and what happened to them.”

The comparison is exact because the two requests concern the same investigation. FOIA 25-130, answered July 3, 2025, asked for the defendants’ names and the final dispositions of the charges, in the plural. Two men were arraigned. The office produced two judgments of sentence for one of them and never mentioned the other, a man whose plea and sentence the office had described to the local newspaper three days before signing the response. Thirteen months later, the same office, asked for four named documents, found and released them in a week at no charge. The difference is not capacity. It is that one request named the documents and the other asked a question the office had to interpret.

FOIA 25-257 asked for five years of criminal-case dispositions and plea agreements, broken down by year, in a spreadsheet if one existed. The office answered with three certificates of nonexistence. It does not possess or maintain any “reports, data exports, or spreadsheets” of dispositions, whether by plea or not; the records for the second paragraph “do not exist”; the records for the third paragraph do not exist either. On the ordinary reading of a certificate, that is the end of the matter: there is nothing to produce because there is nothing to find.

Two paragraphs later the letter says the opposite in plain English. “However, the data related to the request is available.” To get it in raw form, the office explains, it would review each resolved case — about 1,200 files a year, five minutes each to pull the court’s disposition sheet and the charging document, three minutes each to redact under MCL 15.243 — and it prices that work at $19,840, with a $9,920 deposit and a 180-day production window. So the data does not exist and the data is available, in the same letter, about the same records. The certificate answers the question the requester asked; the estimate answers the question the office would rather be paid to answer instead. Both cannot be true, and the office does not reconcile them.

The pattern is not new, but 25-257 states it more sharply than any earlier request. FOIA 25-215 denied aggregate processing-time statistics and then priced their reconstruction at $13,248. FOIA 26-22 certified a conviction-rate worksheet nonexistent and quoted $9,548 for the files that would contain the answer. What 25-257 adds is scale and a named system. The office runs ProsecutorByKarpel, a case-management database that went live in June 2024 and that its own materials describe as searchable by case, charge and disposition. For the post-June-2024 slice of a 2020–2024 request, the data the letter calls unavailable is the data the system was built to hold. The letter never explains why the live system cannot answer for the period it covers. It simply prices a hand rebuild of all five years as if the system did not exist.

FOIA 25-254 asked for three things: the indexes, spreadsheets or logs recording when Brady and Giglio material was served on defense counsel; the letters, templates and checklists the office uses to decide when disclosure is required; and any ProsecutorByKarpel report or export that references Brady, Giglio or “officer credibility” fields. Paragraph 2 was granted outright, and the office produced two real documents — a five-question Brady/Giglio Compliance Form and a February 15, 2024 memo to six law-enforcement agencies on the continuing duty to disclose, with an eight-category addendum listing the officer-credibility information agencies must report. That is a genuine production, and this page does not treat it as anything else.

The fee itemization is where the record breaks. It charges $24.82 an hour with fringe, $6.21 per quarter-hour, and prints two labor lines: 8,000 increments to locate at $49,680, and 4,000 increments to redact at $24,840, for a subtotal of $74,520. Those are exactly the numbers on the 25-244 itemization issued on October 30, 2025 — one day before this request was faxed — including the same “6 YEARS requested” justification, for a request that covers 2022 to present rather than 2020 to 2025. The invoice was not costed for this request. It was carried over from the last one.

The arithmetic compounds it. The form's own rule is ten minutes a case to locate and five minutes a file to redact, billed in quarter-hours. Eight hundred cases at ten minutes is 8,000 minutes, which is 533 increments, not 8,000. Six thousand files at five minutes is 30,000 minutes, which is 2,000 increments, not 4,000. Applying the form's own method to its own stated volumes yields $15,729.93. Applying the letter's own volume figure — “approximately 200 cases per year” over four years — yields $4,967.40. The printed subtotal of $74,520 is exactly fifteen times that last figure. The letter also sets a 90-day production clock from the deposit; the itemization sets 180 days. And the public-interest waiver section, where a requester's fee waiver would be recorded, is left entirely blank.

Every fee estimate in this archive rests on a number of files. In FOIA 25-277 that number is stated in the office's own handwriting: “reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested).” Six thousand files, ten minutes each to locate, four minutes each to redact, 1,400 hours, $34,720.00. Unlike the 25-254 invoice, the arithmetic here is correct. Six thousand files at ten minutes really is 4,000 quarter-hour increments, and six thousand at four minutes really is 1,600. The multiplication is not the problem. The first number is.

That same figure — roughly a thousand case files a year — appears in the 25-215 paperwork, in the 25-244 invoice, in the 25-254 invoice, in 26-22, again in the 25-278 invoice, again in the 25-279 invoice, and twice more in 26-21, once in the February 5 letter and once in the February 12 amendment, in substantially the same words. The year count attached to it does not hold still: 25-277 says six years, 25-278 says four, and 25-279 is back to six, each time at the same 1,000 cases a year and the same per-file rate. The volume is fixed and the window floats to match whatever the request asked for. It has never been produced as a count. No annual report states it, no case-management query result supports it, and the office has never said which of its five self-defined case categories it is counting. Meanwhile its own filings put felony authorizations at roughly 25 to 30 a month, or about 350 a year, which is the figure Pattern 08 is built on. An office cannot be handling 350 felony filings a year for the purpose of explaining its caseload and 1,000 case files a year for the purpose of pricing a search without saying what the difference is. FOIA 25-278 makes the gap impossible to miss: it prices a 4,000-file manual review to answer a question whose one granted sub-item the office answered by reading its internal calendar and counting 62 trials over the same four years.

FOIA 26-29, issued on February 12, 2026, is where the figure finally breaks. The letter states that the office has “approximately 800 to 1000 files ‘open’ at any one time” and then, two sentences later, says that “an estimate to determine the exact number will use 500 files as a baseline.” Both numbers are in the same paragraph. The one the office describes as the actual caseload is 800 to 1,000. The one it prices against is 500. At the itemization’s own rates, 1,000 files would have produced a $2,066.66 estimate instead of the $1,033.33 quoted. The office halved its own premise inside a single letter without acknowledging that it had done so, and the halving cut the deposit from $1,033.33 to $516.66. That is the first time in this archive the volume figure has moved in the requester’s favor, and it moved by being quietly replaced rather than corrected.

FOIA 26-28, issued the same day, is the control. It is the request 26-29’s letter cites by number. It asks a question of the same shape — how many criminal cases were pending or in progress when Prosecutor Wickman took office — and it is answered from the same template, in the same paragraph, with the same sentence: “it is estimated that our office has approximately 800 to 1000 files ‘open’ at any one time.” The 26-28 letter then prices 800 files. Line 1 charges 800 files at three minutes for $992.00, line 3a charges 800 files at two minutes for $661.33, and the subtotal is $1,653.33 with an $826.66 deposit. So on February 12, 2026, the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office read one sentence about its own caseload twice and priced it at two different sizes: 800 files for the first requester, 500 for the second, a $620.00 difference on line 1 and a $248.00 difference on line 3a. Nothing in either letter explains why the same category of work was worth more in one file than the other. The lower number is not a correction of the higher one; both were mailed the same day.

FOIA 26-32, the 95-page release that produced the migration memos, adds a second input that moves the same way. The per-file time estimate — the other number every reconstruction quote multiplies — is stated three different ways across documents the office itself released in one file. The June 16, 2025 memo on Appeal of FOIA 25-94 prices reconstruction at 20 minutes per file, 105 files a week, over “104 weeks, or 1.87 YEARS,” for $66,648.40. The December 31, 2025 memo on Appeal of FOIA 25-278 and its itemization price the same work at 14 minutes per file. The February 2026 letters price it at 5 minutes per file. Same office, same task, same files — and the time it takes to do the work falls by three-quarters in eight months, without a word of explanation, while the volume premise stays fixed. A quote is a volume multiplied by a per-file time. Here both factors are chosen, and the archive can now show both moving independently of any change in the work itself.

This is the pattern that sits underneath several of the others. A fee estimate is only as good as its inputs, and here the input is a round number that has survived nine requests, seven invoices and one handwritten justification without ever being traced to a record. It has been stated as 1,000 a year, 1,500 a year, 1,100 a year, 3,300 over three years, 4,000 over four years, 6,000 over six years, 800 open at one time and 500 open at one time — the last two on the same day, in the same words, to the same requester. The archive can show that the arithmetic is right. It cannot show that the premise is, because the office has never shown it either.

FOIA 25-277 and FOIA 25-278 were filed on the same day, by the same requester, and received on the same day. They were answered on the same day, by the same coordinator, in letters built from the same template: no compilation exists, but the underlying data does, and the exemption will be worked out after the fee is paid. Fourteen of the fifteen comparison rows on the two pages match. That consistency is real, and it is the first time the archive can measure it directly. What the pair also produces is a bill.

The office priced 25-277 at $34,720.00, with a 50 percent deposit of $17,360.00. It priced 25-278 at $23,146.66, with a deposit of $11,573.33. Together that is $57,866.66, and $28,933.33 due before either review begins. Both estimates are built the same way: a per-file time multiplied by a volume figure the office asserts but has never counted. Both are arithmetically correct. And both were issued on December 18, 2025, for what the office itself describes as one review of the same roughly 4,000 files.

The office knew this. On every line of the 25-278 itemization — seven pages, sixteen footnotes — it repeats the same concession: that if the estimate on 25-277 is paid, “the documents in this request would be captured in that review, making this estimate moot.” That sentence is the finding. It says, in the office’s own words, that the second invoice covers work the first invoice already pays for. The office did not withdraw the second invoice on that basis. It issued it, stamped it with the same date, and left the requester to work out that paying one makes the other unnecessary. A requester who pays the smaller bill first, believing it is the cheaper path, funds a review the office has already said is subsumed.

Set that beside what the same letter actually produced. The one granted sub-item in 25-278 — the number of cases that proceed to trial — was answered by reading the internal calendar and counting 62 trials across four years, in a table of twelve numbers. The office can produce that in an afternoon. It priced the rest of the request as though each of 4,000 files had to be read by hand, at ten minutes to locate and four to redact, and then priced a second request the same way on top of it. The invoice is not a measurement of the work. It is a posture, and the posture is to make the answer expensive enough that the requester stops asking.

FOIA 25-279 asked for personnel and resource data — staffing levels, attorney caseload, training, budget and grant funding — for fiscal years 2020 through 2024, plus the current year. The office’s 48-page response letter marks dozens of sub-items “granted.” Position classification lists, the staffing report, part-time and full-time breakdowns, contract staff, training records, conference attendance, annual budgets, grant applications and awards, grant-funded job descriptions, salary ranges, turnover, headcount, the attorney-to-support ratio: all granted, in whole or in part, across five categories. The letter then says the office is providing the documents, and points the requester to three attachments.

The 74-page packet contains no responsive documents. It is the response letter, a one-page Notice of Denial, two photocopied pages of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, a page of FOIA policy notice, and three fee itemizations. There is not a single page of the personnel data the letter says it is granting. What the letter actually does is describe the records in prose — eight employees, three attorneys, four clerks and support staff, one victim advocate, twelve to fifteen vacancies “in the vault” at county administration — and then bill the requester for the privilege of receiving them. A grant that produces a description instead of a document is not a grant. It is a summary the office chose to write, priced as though it were a search.

The same packet also splits one request into three invoices. The requester had anticipated exactly this: the request carried a section headed “If the Office Claims This Request Is ‘Burdensome,’” offering to divide it into separate, narrower requests so each could be answered in turn. The office did not take the offer. It issued three separate estimates anyway — $176.96 for the vacancy and turnover files, $34,432.00 for the 6,000-file caseload review, $64.83 for the expenditure reports — for a combined $34,673.79 and $17,336.89 in deposits, and left the public-interest fee-waiver line blank on all three. The offer to narrow was on the table in writing. The office answered by multiplying the bills.

FOIA 26-21 asked for one figure: the total number of criminal convictions the office secured from the prosecutor’s election through December 31, 2025, as an aggregate count with no case information. The February 5, 2026 response granted it in part and denied it in part, certified that no such summary document exists, and offered instead to produce “the underlying information that would allow for your own compiling” — at a price. The attached itemization priced 3,300 files, three minutes each to review and four minutes each to redact, for a $9,548.00 estimate and a $4,774.00 deposit.

One week later the office sent an amended response. It changed a single number. The February 5 letter said the office handles “approximately 1,500 files per year (2023, 2024, 2025).” The February 12 amendment said “approximately 1,100 files per year (2023, 2024, 2025).” Nothing else moved: not the denial, not the MCL 15.233(5) basis, not the certificate of nonexistence, not the $9,548.00 fee, not the $4,774.00 deposit, not the 270-day production clock, not either footnote, not the appeal paragraph — and not the two typographical errors, “great than fifty dollars” and “the responsible, nonexempt public records,” which survived verbatim in both letters. A find-and-replace touched the volume figure and left the rest of the document, mistakes included, exactly as it was.

The correction was not cosmetic. At the itemization’s own rates — three minutes to review, four to redact, $6.20 per quarter hour — 1,500 files a year over three years is 4,500 files, which implies a fee of $13,020.00 and a deposit of $6,510.00. The office quoted $9,548.00 and $4,774.00, the figures that follow from 1,100 files a year. So the original letter stated a volume that contradicted the invoice stapled to it by $3,472.00, and the amendment quietly brought the prose into line with the bill. What the amendment did not do is say that the original figure was wrong, explain how it was derived, or explain how the corrected one was. It is a silent correction of a number the office had already used to demand money.

Between February 5 and February 12, 2026, the same requester filed six requests asking, in six different ways, how many criminal cases this office handles and what happens to them. FOIA 26-20 asked about caseload and staffing. FOIA 26-21 asked for the total number of convictions since the election. FOIA 26-22 asked for a conviction rate. FOIA 26-28 asked how many cases were pending or in progress when the prosecutor took office. FOIA 26-29 asked how many inherited cases ended in conviction. FOIA 26-30 asked how many cases were initiated from the election through December 31, 2025. Every one of them is a count. Not one of them produced a count.

What the five responses produced instead is a catalogue of ways to not answer the same question. 26-20 was answered with a fee. 26-21 was denied under MCL 15.233(5) with a certificate of nonexistence and a $9,548.00 estimate for the underlying files, then amended a week later to change one number in the premise and nothing else. 26-22 was priced at the same $9,548.00 on a shared invoice whose footnote names two request numbers that do not exist. 26-28 was answered with a certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.233(1) for the count itself and a grant of the “underlying data” at $1,653.33, priced on 800 files. 26-29 was answered that the office “cannot located any record” because it could not determine what the word “inherited” meant, while granting the underlying data at $1,033.33. 26-30 was refused outright on the ground that eight named reports had already been produced in 25-94 and 25-195, and then, in the same letter, denied a second time because compiling the total would require creating a new record — followed by the sentence that the total “can be gleaned from the previously provided documents.”

Read together, the six letters cannot all be right. If the total can be gleaned from documents already produced, then no new record is required and the MCL 15.233(5) denial in 26-21 and 26-30 fails. If no document compiles the total, then 26-30’s claim that the answer is available in documents already produced fails. If the office cannot determine what “inherited” means, then it cannot know which of its files the 26-29 estimate covers, and a $1,033.33 quote for an undefined set is not an estimate. And if 26-28’s reading of “pending or in progress at the time the current prosecutor assumed office” is the definition, as 26-29 says it is, then the office had the definition all along and searched against it. Each answer is defensible alone. Side by side, in the same week, from the same office, to the same requester, they describe an office that has not settled what it is counting — and prices the uncertainty anyway.

The pricing makes the point sharper than the prose does. The same underlying question about the same office was priced at $1,033.33 in 26-29, $1,653.33 in 26-28, $9,548.00 in 26-21 and 26-22, $23,146.66 in 25-278, $34,673.79 in 25-279 and $34,720.00 in 25-277 — a spread of more than thirty-three to one, driven entirely by which volume figure the office chose to assert that day. The two smallest quotes were mailed on the same date, from the same template, for the same category of work, and differ by $620.00 on the first line alone. Nothing in the archive shows a count behind any of them.

FOIA 26-30 asked for one number: the total criminal cases initiated by the office from the election through December 31, 2025. The February 12, 2026 response refused it twice, in two different ways, in the same letter. First it named eight documents — two 21st Century Reports, a Warrants Authorized by Agency report, two budget request memos with attachments, and three Charges on Authorized Case reports — and said they had “already been provided” in FOIA 25-94 and FOIA 25-195, so the office would not produce them “for a second time pursuant to Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994).” Then it said no document exists that states the aggregate total, that producing one “would require the generation or creation of a new public record,” and denied the request under MCL 15.233(5) with a certificate of nonexistence. Then it added a sentence that undoes both: “However, the ‘aggregate numerical total’ as requested can be gleaned from the previously provided documents.”

Those three positions cannot be held at once. If the total can be gleaned from documents already in the requester’s hands, the office has not withheld anything and the denial is unnecessary. If the documents are the answer, refusing to produce them a second time is refusing to produce the answer. And if the office’s own position is that the number is derivable from records it has already released, then the premise of the MCL 15.233(5) certificate — that no responsive record exists — is a statement about the format of the answer, not its availability. The office did not say the public cannot have the number. It said the public cannot have it in the shape it was asked for, and declined to say which of the eight documents contains it.

The citation is worth noting on its own. Densmore is printed as “203 Mich 363 (1994).” The correct citation is Densmore v. Dep’t of Corrections, 203 Mich. App. 363, 512 N.W.2d 72 (1994), Docket 148418, decided January 19, 1994, and released for publication March 4, 1994. The case holds that a public body need not answer a duplicate request where the requester gives no explanation of why the first copy did not suffice — lost, stolen or destroyed — reasoning by analogy to MCR 6.433(B)(2) and adopting Crooker v. U.S. State Dep’t, 628 F.2d 9 (D.C. Cir. 1980). The rule is real and the office is entitled to invoke it. But it is a rule about duplication, and it turns on whether the earlier production actually happened.

Here, the archive says it did not happen for all eight. Six of the eight match what FOIA 25-195 produced: two budget memos to the Board of County Commissioners and four Adult Case Tracking reports with run dates of 11/30/2023, covering misdemeanor charges, felony charges through November 30, 2023, felony charges through December 31, 2023, and warrants authorized by agency. The two 21st Century Reports — January 1 to January 31, 2024, and January 1, 2025 to July 3, 2025 — appear in neither 25-94, which produced three Warrants Authorized by Agency reports for 2021 through 2023, nor 25-195. And the Board’s June 27, 2025 decision on the 25-94 appeal upheld denial of item 1 for 2024 and 2025 while confirming it had been produced for 2021 through 2023. The 2024 and 2025 periods were being denied in June 2025, not produced. A refusal built on prior production has to be right about the production. For two of the eight documents, the record says it is not.

FOIA 26-32 is the mirror image, and it belongs here because it shows what happens when the same office is asked for the record directly. 26-30 had refused to reproduce documents on the ground that they had already been produced, and had said the number could be gleaned from them. 26-32 asked a different question — for “any records discussing how the system migration affects the office’s ability to respond to FOIA requests” — and the office produced them: the email thread, the three appeal memos, the cost itemization, the appeal as filed. It did not certify that they did not exist. It did not price them. It produced 95 pages in three business days. The records it produced are the office’s own written account of the migration failure — the account that the surrounding denials, each defensible on its own, had kept out of view. A refusal that concedes the answer in one letter and a production that surrenders the memos in another are the same record seen from two directions: the office knows what happened to its data, and it will say so when the request names the document that says it.

For two years the archive could only infer what happened to the Delta County Prosecutor’s case data in June 2024. The denials said a record did not exist; the fee estimates priced a reconstruction of data the office would not describe; the certificates said no compilation was kept. FOIA 26-32 ended the inference. Asked for “any records discussing how the system migration affects the office’s ability to respond to FOIA requests,” the office produced 95 pages in three business days, and the central document — the June 16, 2025 memo on Appeal of FOIA 25-94 — is the office’s own account of what it did and what it knew.

The memo states that “On June 10, 2024, the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office ‘went live’ with Karpel.” It states that “the data did not transition completely, or accurately due to different inputs.” It states that “This inconsistent and inaccurate transition was a possibility that we were warned of prior to the implementation.” It states that “access to the previous case tracking system or its exact data is no longer available.” And it states the structural reason the loss cannot be worked around: “Because the root files are not organized by year (only by name), searching for outcomes by any particular year is not viable.” Four sentences, each in the office’s voice, that together describe a foreseeable failure, a warning that was received and not acted on, a data loss that is now permanent, and a filing structure that makes year-based retrieval impossible by design.

The rest of the release fills in the consequences. The December 31, 2025 memo on Appeal of FOIA 25-278 says that “mistakes and issues” are being found “with the migrated information on nearly a weekly basis” — an office that knows errors are surfacing weekly is tracking them somewhere. The January 2026 email thread shows a commissioner, Christine Williams, proposing that ProsecutorByKarpel’s court-form ingestion feature be used to reconstruct the data, writing that it “may cost additional money but might be much less than what was quoted for manual preparation.” Prosecutor Wickman’s reply, on January 4, 2026, is the sentence that ties the whole pattern together: “We have not reentered this information because we don’t have time.” A cheaper technical route was on the table. The data was not reentered. The reason given was time.

Set that beside what the public was told. Across the archive the office answered requests for its own statistics with certificates of nonexistence and with manual-rebuild estimates built on a volume figure it never counted and a per-file time it stated three different ways — 20 minutes in the 25-94 memo, 14 minutes in the 25-278 itemization, 5 minutes in the February 2026 letters. It priced the reconstruction of data it had already decided not to reconstruct, at a rate it kept lowering, on files it says are organized by name alone. And when a requester finally asked the narrow question — what do your own records say about the migration — the office produced the memos that answer it. The pattern is not that the office cannot produce records. It is that the office produces the record that explains the failure only when the request names it, and prices everything around it as though the failure were an act of nature rather than a warned-about transition it chose not to reverse.

Five days in February 2026 settle a question the archive had been circling for a year. On February 12 the office answered a request for an aggregate figure by certifying that no responsive record existed and quoting $1,653.33 to build one. On February 17 it answered a request for a different aggregate figure by producing the number — 52 — at no charge, in a two-page letter, inside the statutory period. The legal proposition was identical in both letters: no document or record of an aggregate numerical total exists. The outcomes were opposite. The difference was not the law, the exemption, the requester or the fee schedule. It was where the underlying facts were stored. In the first case they sat in the office’s own migrated files, which the office says are organized by name alone and cannot be searched by year. In the second they sat on the District and Circuit Court dockets, which anyone can read and which the office could review in about 85 minutes.

That is the pattern, and it is narrower and more useful than “the office refuses.” When the answer lives on a docket, the office produces it. When the answer lives in the office’s own records, the office certifies that no aggregate is kept, prices a manual rebuild at a per-file rate, and leaves the waiver line blank. The same office, in the same week, demonstrated both that it can count and that it will not. The 26-35 letter even names the method — “the review of court dockets for entries that include a ‘plea’” — which is precisely the kind of search the archive’s fee estimates say is not viable inside the office’s own system.

The file also supplies the archive’s only measured labor time. The office reports that the January 2026 count took “approximately 85 minutes.” Fifty-two pleas in 85 minutes is about 1.63 minutes per item. Set that against the figures the office uses to price everything else: 20 minutes per file in the June 2025 memo on Appeal of FOIA 25-94, 14 minutes per file in the December 2025 itemization on 25-278, 5 minutes per file in the February 2026 letters. The one figure the office actually measured is between eight and twelve times faster than the figures it quotes to the public. That is not a rounding difference. It is the difference between a task and a rebuild, and it means the per-file estimates that generate the archive’s five- and six-figure invoices have never been checked against the office’s own experience of doing the work.

Two things keep 26-35 from being a clean win, and both belong in the pattern. The office’s letter misstates its own dates — it dates the request February 10 when it is dated February 9, says the request was received February 17 when the enclosed fax log shows 2:05 p.m. on February 9, and says the plea was observed on February 9 in one sentence and January 9 five sentences later — a slip of a month, in the sentence the office uses to make its argument. Counted from February 9, the February 17 answer is timely on the fifth business day only because February 16 is a state holiday. And the office frames the whole thing as discretion: the count “was done out of a courtesy and effort in transparency,” and “the granting of this request does not mean that future requests will not be subject to a fee estimation.” A statutory duty described as a courtesy, performed once, with a warning attached, is not a change in practice. It is a demonstration of capacity that the office reserves the right to withdraw.

Every request in this archive ends with a scope-limitation block, and the block exists to save the office money. It says, in substance: I am not asking you to compile, calculate, derive or create anything; give me the records you already keep. It is the sentence that is supposed to prevent a “we would have to build that” answer. FOIA 26-292 is the first file in which that sentence was used to refuse the request instead.

The request asked for twelve numbers — felony authorizations per month for calendar 2025 — and its subsection (f) said the office was not being asked to compile, calculate or derive anything. The October 29, 2026 response granted the premise and then reversed its effect: “Records allowing for the number to be calculated could be located and provided, subject to statutorily necessary redactions and exemptions. However, as you specify in your request under ‘Scope Limitations’ subsection (f) that is not a portion of your request. Should you wish to clarify your request, the request would be granted.” In three sentences the office conceded the records exist, conceded they can be produced, and declined on the ground that the requester had said he did not want them.

The move is elegant because it costs nothing and cannot be answered with an appeal that says the records exist — the office has already said so. It converts a clause written to protect the public body from unbounded labor into a clause that protects it from the request. And it leaves the requester holding an invitation: clarify, and it would be granted. Clarifying, of course, means removing the very sentence that was supposed to make the request cheap, which restores the office’s ability to price the work. The follow-up request on this site’s private list does exactly that, and asks for the written estimate first, so that the next answer is either twelve numbers or a number with a dollar sign in front of it.

Read beside the rest of the archive, the pattern is not about scope clauses. It is the same result reached by a new route. Where the office cannot say the record does not exist, and does not want to quote a fee, it can say the record was not requested. That is the third distinct refusal vocabulary in this archive, after the certificate of nonexistence and the manual-rebuild estimate, and it is the cheapest of the three.

Since FOIA 26-30 the office has had a second way to refuse without denying: the records were already given to you, so there is nothing left to produce. The rule comes from Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich App 363 (1994), which holds that a public body need not answer a duplicate request where the requester has not explained why the first copy was inadequate. It is a real rule. FOIA 26-290 shows what it looks like when the premise is false.

26-290 asked six questions about victim-services staffing and grant funding. Items 1 through 5 are each described as “granted” and then withheld in the same paragraph, because the records “will not be provided pursuant to Densmore” — they had been “previously provided” in FOIA 25-279, “sent on or about December 18, 2025.” The office describes that production as including a CVRP grant application, allocation documents for three fiscal years, and quarterly reports. FOIA 25-279 is already on this site. It contains a notice of denial, a blank appeal form, a policy notice, and three cost itemizations totalling $34,673.79 with $17,336.89 in deposits demanded. It contains no responsive documents at all. The requester never received the records the office says he already has.

Three things make this a pattern rather than an error. The letter cites no page, document or exhibit in the earlier production that answers any of the five items, so the premise cannot be checked from the face of the response. It cites no subsection of MCL 15.243, because Densmore is not an exemption under section 13; it is a case about duplicate requests, and the statute’s own test is whether the records have actually been published or made available. And the sixth item — whether any victim-services function is performed by a contractor — is not addressed at all, which is the one question a prior staffing production could not have answered.

The pattern generalizes. In 26-30 the office named eight documents as already produced and six of the eight matched what 25-195 actually contained. In 26-292 it named two earlier requests as the source of a report neither is described as containing. Each time the rule is invoked, the citation is to a request number rather than to a page, and each time the requester has to reconstruct the earlier packet himself to find out whether the claim is true. That is the move: a refusal that reads as a filing-cabinet fact, issued without the one detail — the page — that would let anyone verify it.

Patterns 10 and 13 describe the certificate of nonexistence: a one-page statement that no responsive record exists, issued without a description of the search. FOIA 26-34 adds a step in front of the certificate. Before the office says the record does not exist, it says the word in the request does not mean what the requester thinks it means. The category is narrowed until nothing is left inside it, and then the empty category is certified as empty.

The request asked for one number: the total criminal cases resolved through diversion programmes between 2022 and 2025. The answer, dated February 17, 2026, reasons that “diversion programs” is “traditionally a program only referring to juvenile diversion program administered by Probate Courts, as outlined in the Juvenile Diversion Act, Act 13 of 1988, MCL 722.821 et al.,” that those records “are maintained by the Probate Court of the juvenile’s respective county,” that the prosecutor “does not maintain records related to individuals placed within a juvenile diversion program,” and that “There are no other ‘diversion programs’ within Delta County.” On that premise the coordinator certifies that, “after a search for records,” the record “does not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body,” and checks box 2 on the Denial Form.

Read closely, the certificate is the conclusion of an argument about vocabulary rather than the record of a search. The letter asserts that a search occurred but names no system searched, no custodian consulted and no date range applied. The Denial Form’s “Exempt from Disclosure” box is unmarked and the line for “FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___” is left blank, because no exemption is being applied: the Juvenile Diversion Act is a records-custody and confidentiality provision governing Probate Court files, not a section 13 exemption for a record the prosecutor holds. The office never says the number cannot be computed. It says the number is not the number the requester named.

The same-afternoon comparison is what turns this from a reading of one letter into a pattern. FOIA 26-34 and FOIA 26-35 arrived in the same fax traffic on February 9, 2026, were clarified by the same 1:22 p.m. e-mail, and were answered on the same day by the same coordinator. 26-35 asked for a count of pleas and received it: 52, produced in 85 minutes, at no charge, with the office volunteering that its own figure was over-inclusive rather than redefining “plea.” 26-34 asked for a count of diversions and received a definition. One word was treated as fixed and the other as negotiable, in the same office, in the same week. The letter then invites “clarifying information related to this request” and offers to “review the matter anew,” which is a real avenue for reconsideration and also moves the burden of guessing the acceptable vocabulary onto the requester. The move generalizes wherever a request uses a category word the office would rather define: the cheapest denial is not “we searched and found nothing” but “you asked about something that does not exist here.”

Patterns 20 and 27 describe the same manoeuvre in different clothes: the office certifies that a number does not exist, then explains, in the same letter, how the number could be produced if the requester pays for the production. FOIA 26-33 is the cleanest version of it in the archive, because the office does not leave the concession to inference. It states it.

The request, dated February 9, 2026, asked how many criminal cases in Delta County were resolved through deferred prosecution or a deferred sentence between 2022 and 2025. The response, dated February 17, 2026, is granted in part and denied in part. The denial rests on MCL 15.233(4), the provision that relieves a public body of the duty to create a new record, and a certificate of nonexistence is attached with box 2 of the Denial Form checked. The grant is the sentence that matters: the office writes that “the underlying data exists to allow for the calculation.” It is not saying the answer is unavailable. It is saying the answer is not already assembled, and that assembling it is a service it will sell.

The price of that service is $9,093.33, with a fifty per cent deposit of $4,546.66 required before any work begins and an estimated completion window of 270 days. The itemization builds the figure from a volume assumption of 1,100 files a year across four years — 4,400 files — at three minutes per file to locate and two minutes per file to redact, billed at $24.82 an hour with fringe. Locating is $5,456.00 and redacting is $3,637.33. Every one of those inputs is asserted rather than counted, which is the Pattern 22 problem, but the arithmetic on the page contains a smaller and more revealing error. The form instructs, twice, that “all partial time increments must be rounded down.” The redaction line is 586.66 increments. Rounded down, that is 586, and 586 times $6.20 is $3,633.20 — not $3,637.33. The county’s own rule, applied to the county’s own numbers, produces a bill $4.13 lower than the one it sent.

The waiver section is the part that ties the pattern together. The requester asked for a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234, as this site’s requester has asked in every request in the archive. On the itemization the waiver section is present, both boxes are unmarked, “Subtotal Fees After Waiver” is blank, and the deposit is computed against the pre-waiver subtotal. Nothing in the packet grants the waiver and nothing denies it. It is simply not addressed, and the invoice proceeds as though the question had not been asked. Set that beside the sibling request faxed two minutes later. FOIA 26-34 asked about diversion and was told that “There are no other ‘diversion programs’ within Delta County” — while 26-33, from the same office on the same day, names MCL 771.1, MCL 769.4a, MCL 333.7411 and MCL 762.11 as the deferral provisions it would have to search. And set both beside 26-35, which asked for a comparable count and got it, in full, free, in 85 minutes. One afternoon produced three different postures toward the same kind of question: a number for nothing, a definition for nothing, and a number for $9,093.33.

Pattern 34 is a variation on Patterns 27 and 31, the duplicative-refusal pattern, but it is worth its own entry because of what the office chose to put on the page instead of a number. FOIA 26-31, dated February 6, 2026, asked for “any existing logs, reports, calendars, or aggregate records” reflecting instances in which a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor was physically present at a crime scene, from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2025, “aggregate numerical data only.” The request said, in terms, that it “does not require creation of a new record.” The office acknowledged it on February 9 and answered on February 12 — three business days, well inside the statute, and promptly enough to be credited.

The answer is a list. Under the heading of responsive records the letter names eight items: an MSP report numbered 80-03-24 and its attachments, four e-mail communications dated in 2024, a Petition for Appointment of Special Prosecutor, an Order for Special Prosecutor, and a Statement of No Action from the Mackinac County Prosecutor. A list of eight items is itself a count. The office could have written “eight” and been done. Instead it presented the inventory and then declined to produce it, on the ground that “these documents have already been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-267,” that the requester had “not provided any justification or need for the documents to be reproduced,” and that “the responsive records being duplicative, your request is DENIED,” citing Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994).

Three things about that list are worth setting down. First, every dated item on it falls in 2024, although the request covered 2021 through 2025, and the letter never says whether the list is complete for the other four years — whether there were no attendances in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025, or whether those years were simply not searched. Second, no log and no calendar appear on the list, which means that on the face of the response the office keeps no attendance log at all — a fact the letter neither states nor explains. Third, the entire denial rests on FOIA 25-267, a prior production this archive cannot locate: a full-text search of its published PDFs returns no hit for the MSP number 80-03-24 or for “Mackinac County Prosecutor,” and the archive’s 25-241 special-prosecutor production carries incident numbers 84-1384-22 and 84-717-24, neither of which matches 80-03-24. The premise may be true; the record here cannot confirm it, and the office supplied no index to check it against.

The paperwork compounds the problem. On the Notice of Denial, box 1 — “Exempt from Disclosure … FOIA Section 13, Subsection ___” — is checked, and the subsection line is left blank. Densmore is a judicial decision about duplicative requests; it is not a section 13 statutory exemption, so the box does not match the authority the letter actually invokes. And the letter adds a condition the Act does not impose: a requester must show “justification or need” before records are reproduced. MCL 15.233(1) governs the description of the record sought, not the reason someone wants it. Set beside 26-35, which answered a comparable count in full and free in 85 minutes, 26-31 shows the same office treating a request for a number as a request for a favour — and answering it with a list it then refused to hand over.