Illustration for FOIA 25-129: Case-duration data: denied, then $2,931.12
FOIA 25-129 · Granted in part — two items denied as nonexistent; $2,931.12 quote on the third

On June 26, 2025, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a two-page request asking how long criminal cases take to move through the office. Not a case file. Not a name. A number: the average and median days between arraignment and final disposition in 2024, felony and misdemeanor, plus the longest single case of the year, plus any summary report the office already keeps. The request offered to accept compiled statistics and offered to inspect records in person.

The office answered on July 17, 2025. It said the averages and medians do not exist and certified that fact in writing. It granted the longest-case question and then priced it at $2,931.12, with a $1,465.56 deposit and a 120-day delivery estimate. The itemization explains the price in one sentence: staff would have to review approximately 886 cases to determine arraignment dates and disposition dates.

That sentence is the whole file. The office certified that the information does not exist, and in the same packet described the 886 records from which the information is calculated. The requester appealed. On August 5, 2025 the Delta County Board of Commissioners received the appeal at a regular meeting. On August 18, 2025, at a special meeting, the Board voted to uphold the denial. Its letter, dated August 20, 2025, is five sentences long and does not mention the 886 cases, the $2,931.12, or a single reason of its own.

This is the first file in this archive with a documented Board of Commissioners determination. That makes it the right place to examine what the appeal actually is: not a hearing, not a review of the record, but a vote by the same county board that the statute names as the head of the public body — and, in practice, a vote to accept the coordinator's conclusion.

How to read this page

Documented facts come from the released records and are dated and quoted. The agency's position is what the office or the Board asserted or did. Legal interpretation is analysis of Michigan's Freedom of Information Act, labeled as such. Open questions are issues the record does not resolve. Nothing on this page asserts that the denial of a computed statistic was unlawful, that the fee was unlawful, or that anyone acted in bad faith. Where the record supports only a question, only a question is stated.

Summary

FOIA 25-129 asks for four things and gets three different answers. Item 1, the averages and medians, is denied as nonexistent. Item 2, the longest single case, is granted subject to a fee. Item 3, any existing summary report, is denied as nonexistent. Item 4, an offer to inspect in person, is never answered at all.

Five numbers organize the file. 886 is the number of cases the office says it would have to review. 3,544 is the minutes it says that review would take — exactly four minutes per case. 236 is the number of fifteen-minute increments that produces. $1,465.56 is what those increments cost, and the office charges that figure twice, once to locate and once to redact, for a total of $2,931.12. Against those, a sixth number: zero pages produced and zero dollars paid.

The arithmetic is unusually clean, and that is what makes it useful. Three thousand five hundred forty-four minutes divided by 886 cases is exactly 4.0. The office did not estimate a range or describe a methodology; it applied a flat four minutes per case, then applied it a second time for redaction. A reader can therefore test the quote against the office's own inputs, which is more than most fee estimates in this archive allow.

The second useful thing is the Board's letter. It is the only document in the file signed by anyone outside the Prosecutor's Office, and it adds nothing. It restates the coordinator's conclusion in the coordinator's own framing — records “deemed to not exist” — and does not engage with the fact that the office had just priced a 59-hour review of the records it said did not exist. An appeal that produces no reasoning is not a check on the agency. It is a second signature.

What was requested

The request is dated June 26, 2025 and captioned “FOIA Request for 2024 Case Processing Time Statistics.” It was transmitted by fax at 4:53 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, June 26, 2025 and logged by the county's fax platform at 7:54:38 p.m. The office recorded it as received on June 27, 2025, which is the correct date under the statute, as explained below.

It asks for four things, all limited to calendar year 2024 and to criminal cases excluding traffic infractions:

“1. The average and median number of days between arraignment and final disposition for: Felony cases; Misdemeanor cases. 2. The longest duration (in days) from arraignment to disposition for any single case in 2024. 3. If available, any internal or public summary reports or data tables prepared by the Prosecutor's Office that break down case processing timelines by charge level or resolution method (e.g., plea, trial, dismissal). 4. If the documents exist in a form that can be inspected without copying, I am willing to arrange in-person inspection.”

Four features of the request matter to how it should have been read.

It asked for statistics, and said so. The request did not demand a new report. It asked for two computed measures and, separately, for any report that already exists. It then added: “If these records are stored in digital format or within a case management system, I am happy to accept summary data or compiled statistics.” That sentence is a requester offering the office the cheapest possible path to compliance — a spreadsheet export, a database query, a number typed into an email.

It asked for a fee estimate in advance. “If fees are expected to retrieve or compile this data, please notify me in advance of any costs.” The office did. That part of the process worked.

It asked for exemptions to be cited and explained. “If you withhold any records or data, please cite the specific legal exemption(s) relied upon and explain how they apply.” The office cited none, because it did not rely on an exemption. It relied on nonexistence.

It offered in-person inspection. Item 4 is not a records request in the ordinary sense; it is a statement that the requester will come to the office and read the records rather than ask for copies. The response never addresses it. No inspection was offered, scheduled, or refused.

One drafting point fixed the scope of everything that followed. The request defines the period as “the calendar year 2024.” That is unambiguous, and it matters for a reason developed later: ProsecutorByKarpel, the office's case management system, went live in June 2024. A request spanning all of 2024 therefore straddles the system transition, and any honest answer has to say which months the office can actually report on.

The paper trail

Figure 1 · Nine dates, four of them deadlines

Select any date to read what happened and which clock it started or stopped.

The dates as a list
DateEventAuthority
2025-06-26Request faxed, 4:53 p.m. EasternFax delivery record
2025-06-27Deemed receivedMCL 15.235(1)
2025-07-07Five-business-day response deadlineMCL 15.235(2)
2025-07-17Denial, certificate and $2,931.12 itemization issuedMCL 15.235(5), 15.234
2025-08-05Appeal received at regularly scheduled Board meetingMCL 15.240(3)
2025-08-18Board determines to uphold the denial, special meetingMCL 15.240(2)
2025-08-20Board’s written notice datedMCL 15.240(2)
2025-08-3145-day deposit and fee-appeal windows closeMCL 15.234(14), 15.240a(1)(b)
2026-01-13180-day window for judicial review closesMCL 15.240(1)(b)
Figure 1. The request, the deemed receipt, the response, the appeal and the Board’s determination. On the response clock the office was timely: the fax arrived June 26, the deemed receipt was June 27, and the response issued July 17, inside the extended deadline of July 21. On the appeal clock the Board acted inside its ten business days but issued its written notice one day after them. Sources: the fax delivery record, the July 17, 2025 letter and Notice of Denial, the August 20, 2025 Board letter, and MCL 15.235(1), 15.235(2), 15.240(1)(b), 15.240(2), 15.240(3), 15.234(14) and 15.240a(1)(b).

June 26, 2025 — the fax

Documented: The county's fax platform records a two-page transmission to +1 906-789-5197 at 7:54:38 p.m. Eastern on June 26, 2025, with the sender's fax station identifier, redacted here because it is tied to the requester's fax line. The request itself is time-stamped 4:53 p.m., which is when it left the sender's machine; the platform time is when the county's line answered. The gap is a relay delay, not a dispute about the date.

June 27, 2025 — the receipt date, correctly computed

Documented: The letter states the request was “received by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on June 27, 2025.” The extension notice carries a “Date Received” field reading 6/27/25.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: That date is right. Under MCL 15.235(1), a request delivered by fax or email is not received by a public body's FOIA coordinator until one business day after the electronic transmission is made. June 26, 2025 was a Thursday. One business day later is Friday, June 27. The office applied the rule correctly and recorded the same date on two separate forms. On this point the file is clean, and the record should say so.

July 7 and July 17, 2025 — the response clock

Documented: The office issued a Notice to Extend Response Time, checking the box for a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records. The letter, the Notice of Denial and the cost itemization are all dated July 17, 2025.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Five business days from June 27, allowing for the July 4 holiday, was July 7, 2025. The statute permits one extension of up to ten business days, which moved the deadline to July 21, 2025. The response issued on July 17, the eighth business day of the extended period. It was timely by two business days. The extension was taken properly and used within its limits.

That is worth stating plainly because it is the one procedural step in this file that the office got exactly right, and because the more serious questions in this file have nothing to do with the clock. They are about what the office said existed.

What was produced, and what was withheld

The response is a twenty-five page packet that produces no records. It contains a two-page letter, a Notice of Denial, an excerpt of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, a seven-page cost itemization, the fax record, the original request reproduced twice, and a page pointing to the county's FOIA policies online. Every page is about the request. None of them answers it.

The disposition of the four items can be stated in a table.

ItemWhat was askedDispositionBasis given
1Average and median days from arraignment to final disposition, felony and misdemeanor, 2024Denied“the records do not exist,” with a certificate of nonexistence
2Longest single duration from arraignment to disposition, 2024Granted, subject to feeNo exemption cited; $2,931.12 estimate, $1,465.56 deposit, 120 days
3Any existing summary report or data table breaking down processing time by charge level or resolution methodDenied“the records do not exist,” with the same certificate
4In-person inspection if the records can be inspected without copyingNot addressedNo response in the letter or on any form

Two of these deserve separate treatment. Item 4 is the simplest: the request offered a cheaper alternative — the requester comes to the office and reads the records instead of asking for copies — and the response is silent. Silence is not a denial with a stated basis, and it is not a grant. It is an unanswered question, and it sits in the file as one.

Item 2 is the more revealing. The office granted it. That grant is the office's own admission that the underlying records can be identified and retrieved: you cannot promise to produce the longest case of 2024 unless you can find arraignment and disposition dates for the cases of 2024. The grant and the denial therefore rest on the same body of records, and the office treats them as if they were different things. They are different things — a computed maximum versus a computed average — but the office never says so. It simply denies one and prices the other.

The certificate and the 886 cases

This is the center of the file, and it can be stated in two sentences that the office wrote itself.

From the letter: “The undersigned hereby certifies that, after a search for records described above, and to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief, the public records requested do not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.”

From the itemization, line 1: the charge is for “reviewing approximately 886 cases to determine arraignment date, disposition date, and sentencing records that document the corresponding dates.”

What the office saidWhat the office's own itemization says
“The records do not exist.”There are approximately 886 cases containing arraignment dates and disposition dates.
A search was completed and the result certified.The review of those 886 cases has not happened yet; it is being estimated at 3,544 minutes.
No exemption is claimed and no redaction is claimed.Line 3a charges 3,544 minutes to separate exempt from nonexempt information.
Nothing can be produced for items 1 and 3.Item 2 can be produced from the same 886 cases, for $2,931.12.
Figure 2. The four statements on the left appear in the July 17, 2025 letter and Notice of Denial. The four on the right appear in the itemization attached to the same letter. They cannot all describe the same set of records at the same moment. Sources: the July 17, 2025 letter, the Notice of Denial form, and the Detailed Cost Itemization, line 1 and line 3a.

There is a defensible reading of the denial, and it should be given first because it is probably the office's actual position. An average is not a record. Nobody at the Prosecutor's Office keeps a document titled “average days from arraignment to disposition, 2024.” The office would have to compute it. Michigan's Freedom of Information Act does not require a public body to compile, summarize, or create a new record: MCL 15.233(4) says the act does not require a public body to make a compilation, summary, or report of information, and MCL 15.233(5) says it does not require the creation of a new public record. On that reading, “the record does not exist” is literally true of the average, and the certificate is a proper use of MCL 15.235(5)(b), which allows a certificate of nonexistence “if that is the reason” for the denial.

That reading does not survive contact with the rest of the packet, for three reasons.

First, the office never distinguished the statistic from the records. The letter does not say “no compiled statistic exists, but the underlying case records do, and here is what they would cost.” It says “the records do not exist” and attaches a certificate that the public records requested do not exist “under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.” A reader of that sentence would conclude that the office has no data about arraignment and disposition dates. The itemization says it has 886 cases of exactly that data. The two documents were stapled together.

Second, the certificate describes a completed search, and the itemization describes work not yet done. A certificate of nonexistence is a statement about the result of a search. Line 1 is an estimate of the labor required to conduct a review. Both cannot be true of the same 886 cases in the same week. Either the search happened — in which case the office already knows what is in those 886 cases and the 59-hour estimate is for something else — or the search has not happened, in which case the certificate was issued before the search it certifies.

Third, the office charged to redact records it says contain nothing exempt. The Notice of Denial marks only “Record Does Not Exist.” It does not mark “Exempt from Disclosure” and does not mark “Redaction.” Yet line 3a of the itemization charges 3,544 minutes — the identical figure as line 1 — to “separate exempt from nonexempt information.” If no exemption applies and no redaction is needed, there is nothing to separate. If redaction is needed, the denial form should say so and should identify the exemption. The packet does neither.

Open question: Which of the two documents is the office's actual answer? The archive cannot resolve it, and this page does not guess. What the archive can say is that the two documents were issued together, over the same signature, and that no reader could reconcile them without asking.

The $2,931.12 quote

The itemization is the most detailed document in the packet, and it is internally consistent. It is also, on its face, a bill for the same work twice.

Figure 3 · Two labour lines, one set of 886 cases

The office charges 3,544 minutes to locate the records and 3,544 minutes again to redact them. Switch the unit to see the same quote as dollars, as hours, or as cost per case.

Total quoted$2,931.12
Deposit, 50%$1,465.56
Minutes billed7,088
Hours billed118.1
Per case, both passes$3.31

Both lines resolve to exactly 3,544 minutes, which is 886 cases at 4.0 minutes each. The itemization does not explain why separating exempt material from two date fields takes precisely as long as finding them.

Figure 3. The quote has two labour lines and no other charge. Copying, mailing and contracted redaction are all zero. The total is $2,931.12 and the required deposit is half of it. Source: the Detailed Cost Itemization dated 07/17/2025.

Documented: The itemization prints an “Hourly Wage with Fringe Benefit Cost” of $24.82 and a “Charge per ¼ hour” of $6.21. At 236 increments of fifteen minutes, each line totals $1,465.56. Two lines total $2,931.12. Because the estimate exceeds $50, the office required a deposit of fifty percent, $1,465.56, and estimated 120 days from receipt of the deposit to produce the records.

The arithmetic checks out at every step. Two hundred thirty-six increments times $6.21 is $1,465.56, and doubling it gives the subtotal. The per-case figure is equally clean: 3,544 minutes divided by 886 cases is 4.0 minutes, and $1,465.56 divided by 886 is $1.65 per case per pass. The office did not pad a range or bury a rounding error. It applied a flat rate and applied it twice.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The rate itself appears to sit inside the statute. MCL 15.234(2) caps labour at the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the work, and allows fringe benefits to be added for records not already on the county's website, up to fifty percent of the wage. The form's $24.82 is a fringe-loaded figure; dividing by four gives $6.205, which the office rounds to $6.21. The fifty-percent deposit is the ceiling MCL 15.234(8) permits. None of that is the problem.

The problem is the second pass. MCL 15.244 requires a public body to separate exempt material from nonexempt material and to make the nonexempt portion available. It does not require, or authorise, a second full search of the same records at the same cost. The itemization's own boilerplate explains when redaction labour may be charged: where the material is “of a personal nature that could clearly constitute a violation of an individual's privacy.” An arraignment date and a disposition date are public court events. They are on the register of actions. They are not private facts about a defendant, and the office does not claim they are.

So the second $1,465.56 buys something the itemization never identifies. It is not copying, which is zero. It is not contracted review, which is zero. It is 59 hours of county staff time to remove exempt material from records that the Notice of Denial says contain no exempt material. Open question: what, specifically, is being redacted from a date field, and under which exemption?

Two smaller points belong here. The form never prints the base wage or the percentage multiplier that produced $24.82, so the fringe calculation cannot be checked from the face of the document. And the public-interest waiver section is blank. The requester did not ask for a waiver in this request, so the blank is not a failure to decide anything — unlike FOIA 26-22, where a waiver was requested and left undecided. The distinction matters, and this page draws it.

The June 2024 line

Documented: The request covers calendar year 2024. ProsecutorByKarpel, the office's case management system, went live in June 2024.

That fact cuts in both directions, and honesty requires saying so.

It explains, without excusing anything, why no pre-built report exists for part of the year. If the office had no case management system in January 2024, it had no system-generated report in January 2024. A request for “any internal or public summary reports or data tables prepared by the Prosecutor's Office” covering January through May 2024 could legitimately come back empty for those months. This page does not fault the office for lacking system-generated reports before its system existed.

But the go-live does not explain the answer the office actually gave. The request asked for all of 2024 and expressly offered to accept compiled statistics. The itemization describes a review of 886 cases — a figure that can only be reached by looking across the year, including the months before the system went live. If the office can review 886 cases spanning 2024 to find arraignment and disposition dates, then the transition is a question about how the data would be assembled, not about whether it exists. The office never said that. It said the records do not exist, and then priced the review of them.

The honest answer available to the office was a sentence it never wrote: “No compiled statistic exists. The underlying case records for 2024 do exist; the portion before June 2024 would have to be assembled from court records rather than exported from our system, and here is what that would cost.” That sentence would have been lawful, accurate, and useful. Its absence is the transparency failure in this file.

The Board of Commissioners appeal

This is the first file in this archive where the appeal was actually decided, and the decision is documented. It is worth examining closely, because the Board of Commissioners appeal is the remedy the statute offers and the one most requesters will actually use.

What the statute sets up

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Under MCL 15.240(1)(a), a person whose request is denied may submit a written appeal to “the head of the public body” that specifically states the word “appeal” and identifies the reasons for reversal. Under MCL 15.240(2), the head must, within ten business days after receiving the appeal, do one of four things: reverse the denial, issue a written notice upholding it, reverse it in part and uphold it in part, or — under unusual circumstances — issue one notice extending the response period by up to ten business days. No second extension is allowed.

For a county, the “head” is not the prosecutor. It is the Board of Commissioners. And the statute contains a provision written specifically for that arrangement. Under MCL 15.240(3), “a board or commission that is the head of a public body is not considered to have received a written appeal under subsection (2) until the first regularly scheduled meeting of that board or commission following submission of the written appeal.”

That provision is not a technicality. It means the ten-day clock does not start when the appeal lands in a mailbox. It starts at the next regular meeting. A board that meets twice a month can therefore take up to a month, in calendar terms, before its ten business days even begin to run. The statute tolerates that because the alternative — requiring a part-time board to convene specially for every FOIA appeal — would be unworkable. But it also means the remedy is slower than a reader might assume, and it means the date of the next regular meeting is a fact worth recording.

What happened here

Documented: The Board's letter is dated August 20, 2025, is signed by John Malnar, Chair, and says three substantive things. It confirms that the appeal was “received at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Delta County Board of Commissioners on August 5, 2025.” It records that “the Board determined to uphold the disclosure denial at the special meeting on August 18, 2025.” And it gives a reason: “Your request was initially denied because the response excluded records that the Delta County FOIA Coordinator determined were deemed to not exist.”

Three observations follow from the dates alone, and they point in different directions.

The Board acted inside its ten business days. Counting from Tuesday, August 5, 2025, the business days run August 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18 and 19. The tenth is August 19, 2025. The Board's determination came on August 18, the ninth. On the substantive deadline, the Board was timely. That should be said clearly, because it is the kind of point an accountability page is tempted to skip when the outcome is unwelcome.

The written notice came one day after the deadline. The statute requires the head to “issue a written notice” within those ten business days. The letter recording the determination is dated August 20, 2025 — the day after the tenth business day. That is a one-day gap between the vote and the notice, and it is a genuine timing question. It is not, on this record, proof of a violation: the statute does not say whether “issue” means the date of the letter, the date of mailing, or the date of receipt, and a one-day difference may be explained by ordinary mail handling. Open question: on what date was the notice mailed or delivered? The letter does not say, and the archive has no envelope.

The determination was made at a special meeting, not a regular one. The statute's receipt rule keys to regular meetings, but nothing in MCL 15.240 requires the determination itself to be made at one. A special meeting is a lawful meeting if it is noticed under the Open Meetings Act, MCL 15.265, which requires public notice at least eighteen hours before the meeting and, for a meeting held by electronic means, an opportunity for public participation. Open question: was the FOIA appeal listed on the posted agenda for the August 18 special meeting, and was that agenda posted eighteen hours in advance? The archive holds the letter but not the notice or the minutes. This is a records request waiting to be made, and it is identified in the last section of this page.

Why this appeal is significant

The Board of Commissioners appeal is supposed to be the moment when a denial is examined by someone other than the person who made it. The coordinator decides; the Board reviews. That is the structure the statute creates, and it is the only administrative check Michigan offers before a requester must go to circuit court.

In this file, the check did not function as a check. The Board's letter does not identify which items were appealed. It does not mention the $2,931.12 estimate or the $1,465.56 deposit. It does not mention the 886 cases. It does not say whether the Board reviewed the itemization, the certificate, or the request itself. It does not record a vote count. And its single sentence of reasoning is not the Board's reasoning at all — it is a restatement of the coordinator's conclusion, in the coordinator's own vocabulary: records “deemed to not exist.”

That phrasing is the tell. “Deemed to not exist” is not the language of the statute, which speaks of records that do not exist under the name given or any other name reasonably known. It is the language of a form. A board that had examined the file would have had to confront the sentence on line 1 of the itemization — the one describing 886 cases with arraignment and disposition dates — because that sentence is the whole dispute. The letter does not confront it. It does not mention it.

None of this proves that the Board did not read the file. A one-page letter is not a transcript, and the Board may have deliberated at length before voting. But the letter is the only record the public has, and under MCL 15.240(2)(b) a written notice upholding a denial is the document that fixes the requester's rights: it is the final determination from which the 180-day clock runs. A notice that adopts the coordinator's conclusion without stating a basis gives the requester nothing to argue against and gives a reviewing court nothing to review except the coordinator's file.

That is the significance of this file. The appeal exists, it was decided, and it left no reasoning behind. The remedy the statute provides was used and produced a second signature on the first decision.

What the statute required, and what it did not

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The obligations in play here are narrower than they first appear, and the office met some of them.

The response was timely under MCL 15.235(2), which allows five business days plus one extension of up to ten. The receipt date was computed correctly under MCL 15.235(1). A denial notice was issued, and it explained the basis as nonexistence rather than exemption, which MCL 15.235(5)(a) requires when an exemption is claimed. A certificate of nonexistence accompanied it, which MCL 15.235(5)(b) permits “if that is the reason” for the denial. The right of appeal was explained using the word “appeal” and naming the chairperson of the Board of Commissioners, which MCL 15.235(5)(d) requires.

The act did not require the office to compute an average. MCL 15.233(4) relieves a public body of any duty to make a compilation, summary, or report, and MCL 15.233(5) relieves it of any duty to create a new public record. A requester who asks for a statistic the office has never calculated is asking for a new record, and the office may say no.

What the act did require is that the office be straight about which of the two things it was refusing. The certificate it used speaks to the existence of records, not to the existence of a calculation. Having chosen that form, the office took on the burden of describing a search that came up empty. Its own itemization describes a search that had not yet been performed and a body of 886 records that would be reviewed. The two statements cannot both be accurate, and the statute's disclosure obligations attach to whichever one is true.

There is also the matter of MCL 15.244, the segregation duty. Where a record contains both exempt and nonexempt material, the public body must separate them and release the nonexempt portion. The office charged $1,465.56 to do that separation, which is an implicit acknowledgment that separation was necessary. But its Notice of Denial marks no exemption and no redaction. A charge for segregation without an identified exempt category is a charge the requester cannot evaluate and a court cannot review.

Authorities and sources

Show the statutes, cases, and sources cited on this page

The statutory provisions relied on in this analysis, with the proposition each supports.

  • MCL 15.231 et seq. — the Freedom of Information Act.
  • MCL 15.232(h)(iii) — a county board, department, commission, council, or agency is a public body; the Prosecutor's Office qualifies.
  • MCL 15.233(4) — the act does not require a public body to make a compilation, summary, or report of information.
  • MCL 15.233(5) — the act does not require the creation of a new public record.
  • MCL 15.234(2) — labour may not be charged above the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the work; fringe benefits may be added for records not already on the website, up to fifty percent.
  • MCL 15.234(8) — a good-faith deposit may be required where the estimate exceeds $50, and may not exceed one-half of the total estimate.
  • MCL 15.234(14) — a request is considered abandoned if the deposit is not received within 45 days after the deposit notice is sent, absent a fee appeal.
  • MCL 15.235(1) — a fax or email request is not received until one business day after transmission.
  • MCL 15.235(2) — five business days to respond, with one extension of up to ten business days.
  • MCL 15.235(5)(a) — a denial must explain the basis for any claimed exemption.
  • MCL 15.235(5)(b) — a certificate of nonexistence may be provided if nonexistence is the reason for the denial.
  • MCL 15.235(5)(d) — the denial must explain the right to appeal to the head of the public body, using the word “appeal,” or to seek judicial review.
  • MCL 15.240(1)(a) — a written appeal to the head of the public body, stating the word “appeal” and the reasons for reversal.
  • MCL 15.240(1)(b) — a civil action within 180 days after the final determination.
  • MCL 15.240(2) — the head must reverse, uphold, reverse in part, or extend within ten business days.
  • MCL 15.240(3) — a board or commission that is the head is not considered to have received an appeal until its first regularly scheduled meeting after submission.
  • MCL 15.240(7) — a $1,000 civil fine and $1,000 punitive damages where the public body arbitrarily and capriciously violated the act by refusal or delay.
  • MCL 15.240a(1)(b) — a civil action over a fee within 45 days after receiving notice of the fee.
  • MCL 15.244 — the duty to separate exempt from nonexempt material and release the nonexempt portion.
  • MCL 15.265 — notice requirements for special meetings of a public body under the Open Meetings Act.

No judicial decision is cited on this page, because none is needed to support what is said here and none was relied on by the office in this file. Where the analysis turns on the text of a statute, the text is quoted or paraphrased directly. Where it turns on a fact, the fact is dated and sourced to a document in the packet.

Correlation note — added October 23, 2026. FOIA 25-133, now in this archive, is priced on the same form as this request and by the same arithmetic. It uses the same Detailed Cost Itemization, the same $24.82 hourly wage with a 50% fringe multiplier, the same $37.23 blended rate, the same $6.21 charge per quarter-hour increment, and the same rule requiring a 50% deposit before production. What differs is the posture. In 25-129 the office produced responsive records alongside its quote and offered inspection. In 25-133 it produced one annual table, certified that the monthly version did not exist, and then demanded $1,407.60 before producing anything further — while estimating 180 days to deliver. The forms are identical. The willingness to hand anything over is not.

What remains open, and what can be done

Both of the statutory clocks have run. The 45-day window for a fee challenge under MCL 15.240a(1)(b) closed on August 31, 2025, the same date on which the deposit would have had to arrive under MCL 15.234(14). The 180-day window for judicial review under MCL 15.240(1)(b) closed on January 13, 2026. No deposit was paid, no records were produced, and this archive contains no record of a court filing. The fee quote and the denial are therefore unlitigated rather than adjudicated.

What remains available is a new request, drafted around what this packet now establishes. Six things are worth asking for, and each is grounded in a document the office has already produced.

One: the 886 cases, as a list. The itemization names a number. A request for the case numbers, arraignment dates and disposition dates underlying that figure is a request for existing records, not a compilation. If the office can review 886 cases, it can identify them.

Two: the redaction basis. The office charged 3,544 minutes to separate exempt from nonexempt information. A request for the exemption relied on, and for any redaction log, tests whether that charge had a basis.

Three: the Board's file. A request to the Board of Commissioners for the appeal as submitted, the August 18, 2025 special meeting notice, the agenda, and the minutes would establish whether the appeal was noticed and deliberated in public. This is a request to a different public body, and it is the most direct way to test the check described above.

Four: the pre-June 2024 data. A request limited to January through May 2024, and a separate request limited to June through December 2024, would separate what the system can generate from what must be assembled. Splitting at the Karpel go-live is the fair way to ask, and it removes the office's best explanation in advance.

Five: the fee waiver question, asked properly. This request did not seek a waiver. A future request can, and can ask for the itemization before processing rather than after.

Six: item 4, answered. The offer of in-person inspection was never addressed. A short letter asking whether inspection is available for records that can be inspected without copying would put the question back on the record.

For anyone pursuing this file, three practical points are worth keeping. The 180-day clock runs from the final determination, which in this case is the Board's August 20, 2025 letter, not the coordinator's July 17 letter — an appeal does not pause the clock so much as restart it from the head's decision. The 45-day fee clock is separate and shorter, and it runs from the fee notice. And a request that is denied as nonexistent is not the end of the matter: it is a statement about a search, and the scope of that search can be tested by asking for the records the agency's own fee estimate says it has.

A note on what this page does not claim. It does not claim that the denial of a computed average was unlawful, because the act does not require the office to compute one. It does not claim that the fee exceeded the statutory rate, because the rate appears to sit inside MCL 15.234(2). It does not claim that the Board violated the Open Meetings Act, because the notice and minutes are not in this archive. It claims that the office issued a certificate of nonexistence and a fee estimate for the same records in the same packet, that the two documents cannot both be accurate, and that the Board's review left no reasoning on the record. Those are documentary observations, and they are enough.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-240, now in this archive, is priced on the same county form and by the same arithmetic as this request. It uses the same Detailed Cost Itemization, the same $24.82 hourly wage with fringe, the same $6.21 charge per quarter-hour increment, and the same 50 percent good-faith deposit rule. The posture is what separates them. In 25-129 the office produced responsive records alongside its quote and offered inspection, so the requester could judge the records before paying to copy more. In 25-240 the office produced nothing: it certified three of four parts nonexistent, granted the fourth only for incidents in which an officer is not the suspect, and set a $931.50 deposit as the condition for beginning the search at all. The 90-day production estimate on 25-240 is also shorter than the 180 days this office has quoted elsewhere, which suggests the estimate is set case by case rather than by a fixed rule.

Documents

These are redacted copies prepared for publication. Requester names, home addresses, personal phone numbers, and email addresses have been removed. Unredacted originals are not hosted on the public web server.

FOIA Request (redacted) The two-page request faxed on June 26, 2025, with the four numbered items and the offer to inspect records in person. Requester identifiers removed. Response Letter, Notice of Denial, Certificate and Itemization (redacted) The July 17, 2025 response letter, the Notice of Denial form, the certificate of nonexistence, and the eight-line cost itemization quoting $2,931.12 and a $1,465.56 deposit. Board of Commissioners Appeal Decision (redacted) The August 20, 2025 letter from Chair John Malnar upholding the denial, recording receipt of the appeal on August 5, 2025 and the determination at a special meeting on August 18, 2025. Notice to Extend Response Time (redacted) The county's extension form for request 25-129, with reason box 1 checked — the need to review “a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records.” It records the request as received 6/27/25 and is dated 7/2/25; the extended response date and estimated time frame are handwritten and not reliably legible in the released copy. This form was misfiled inside the FOIA 25-139 response packet and is reproduced here with the request it actually belongs to.