Illustration for FOIA 25-200: The software the office runs on
FOIA 25-200 · Granted in full

On the morning of August 18, 2025, a six-page fax reached the Delta County Prosecutor's Office at 10:09:30 a.m. Eastern. It carried four separate Freedom of Information Act requests, each asking to be logged and tracked on its own. The first of them was a software inventory: the names, vendors and versions of every case management, records management, prosecutorial tracking, electronic discovery, digital evidence and body-worn camera system the office used, formerly used, or planned to use since January 1, 2020.

Twenty days later, on September 8, 2025, the office answered. It wrote one word for the disposition: GRANTED. No exemption. No redaction. No fee. No deposit. No certificate of nonexistence. A two-page letter naming seven systems, with version numbers where the office had them and a plain statement of where it did not.

This is the only complete grant in the archive. Every other file on this site involves a denial, a partial production, a certificate, an exemption, a quote, a deposit, or an appeal. This one involves none of those things. The office was asked what software it runs and it said what software it runs.

That makes the page unusual, and it changes what the page is for. There is no evasion here to document and no denial to test. What the response does instead is draw a line — a bright, visible line — between the information this office will hand over for free and the information it will price at five figures. The inventory of its tools cost nothing. Its own performance numbers have been quoted at $9,548 and $63,028.80. That contrast is the story, and it is a contrast the office created itself, in writing, in the same twenty-day window.

How to read this page

Documented facts come from the released packet and are dated and quoted. The agency's position is what the office 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. This page does not claim that the office violated the act. It did not. A full grant, delivered inside the statutory clock, with no fee and no exemption, is the best possible answer to a FOIA request, and this page says so plainly. What the page examines is what the grant reveals: which questions about this office are cheap to answer, which are expensive, and who decides.

Summary

The request is one sentence long, and it is a good sentence. It asks for “the names, vendors, and versions of all case management systems, records management systems, prosecutorial tracking systems, electronic discovery platforms, digital evidence portals, and body-worn camera/evidence management software used, formerly used, or planned for use by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from January 1, 2020 to the present.”

Three words in that sentence do a lot of work. Names means the product. Vendors means the company behind it. Versions means the specific build — the number that tells you whether a system is current, whether it has been patched, and whether the office is running something the vendor stopped supporting years ago. A list of names alone would be a brochure. Names, vendors and versions together are an inventory, and an inventory can be checked.

The office's answer supplies all three where it can. ProsecutorByKarpel is identified as the primary case management and records management system, at version 7.5.03.21.2025 as of September 8, 2025. NextCloud is identified as in use, described as open-source file and sharing software, with no version given. Motorola Video Manager is at version 2025.7.23, administered by Escanaba Public Safety. WatchGuard Evidence Library is at version 4.4.4, administered by the Delta County Sheriff's Office. Axon Evidence.com, administered by Hannahville Tribal Police, carries no version the office can supply. WatchGuard CloudShare, administered by the Michigan State Police, carries none either. And Adult Case Tracking and Juvenile Case Tracking, administered by the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, were used “until approximately June 10, 2024.”

Six numbers describe what came back. 7 systems named. 8 distinct products, because Adult and Juvenile Case Tracking are two. 3 version numbers supplied. 4 systems administered by other agencies. 0 exemptions claimed. $0 charged.

And one number that is not in the response at all: 0 systems described as “planned for use.” The request asked for that category by name. The response does not mention it, does not deny it, and does not say whether anything is in the pipeline. That silence is the one place where a full grant is not a full answer.

What was requested, and how it arrived

The fax cover letter is worth reading on its own, because it shows a requester who understood exactly how a public body loses track of paperwork. It submits four requests in a single transmission and asks that each be “logged and processed individually with its own tracking number.” The four are titled, in the cover letter's own words:

1. FOIA Request – Names of Case Management, Record, and Evidence Systems
2. FOIA Request – Contracts, Invoices, and Licensing for Systems
3. FOIA Request – Bids, Proposals, and Future System Acquisitions
4. FOIA Request – Training and Policy Materials for Systems

The county's fax platform logged the transmission at 10:09:30 a.m. on August 18, 2025, six pages, and the office recorded the request as received on August 19, 2025. The request number assigned to the first of the four is 25-200.

Two of the four are now published on this site. 25-201, the contracts and invoices request, was answered the same day as this one, September 8, 2025, and produced a 46-page package. The third, on bids and proposals, is not yet in the archive. The fourth, on training and policy materials, is not either. A single fax, four questions, and a public record that is being assembled one request number at a time.

The request itself asks for records from January 1, 2020 forward. That window matters, because it straddles the transition. It reaches back through the years when the office ran the PAAM tracking systems and forward into the years when it ran ProsecutorByKarpel. A request that started in 2025 would have missed the predecessor entirely. This one catches both sides of the change.

Three procedural requests accompany the substantive one. The requester asks for segregation and release of all reasonably segregable non-exempt material under MCL 15.244. He asks for an itemized fee estimate in advance if charges would exceed $20. He asks for the records electronically, by email. He also asks, in the cover letter, for a waiver of all fees under MCL 15.234.

None of those procedural requests needed to be reached. The office quoted nothing, so the estimate never arose. It withheld nothing, so segregation never arose. It charged nothing, so the waiver never had to be granted or denied. This is what a request looks like when the answer is yes.

The paper trail

Figure 1 · Interactive

From the retired system to the answer

Select a marker to read what happened on that date. The request window opens in 2020; the system change lands in June 2024; the request and the answer close it out in 2025.

Record
Calendar days to answer20
Business days to answer13
Statutory clock5 + 10
Fee assessed$0

Source: the fax cover letter and transmission record, the response letter of September 8, 2025, and the county's own date-received entry. Business days counted from August 20 through September 8, excluding weekends and Labor Day.

Figure 1. The request was faxed on August 18, 2025, logged on August 19, and answered on September 8 — thirteen business days, inside the five the statute allows and inside the fifteen it allows with a full extension. The packet also contains a Notice to Extend Response Time on the volume ground; its handwritten dates are not reliably legible and this page does not assert them.

Seven systems, and what the office said about each

The response is organized as a list, and the list is more informative than a list usually is. For each system the office gives what it has: a name, a vendor or administering agency, and a version where one is known. Where a version is not known, it says so. That is a small thing that matters, because a response that guesses at a version number is worse than a response that admits it does not have one.

Two entries deserve to be quoted exactly, because the office's own wording carries the information.

On NextCloud, the letter states that the office uses it, and then states that “no ‘record’ exists for this software as it is an open source file and sharing software.” That sentence is doing something unusual. It is not a denial of the system's existence — the system is in use and the office says so. It is a statement that the office has no record about the system. The scare quotes around “record” are the office's.

On the two PAAM systems, the letter states that Adult Case Tracking and Juvenile Case Tracking were used “until approximately June 10, 2024,” that they were administered by the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, and that no version information is now reachable. That date is the most consequential fact in the packet. It is the first time this office has put any date on the end of the system that preceded Karpel.

Figure 2 · Interactive

Seven entries, three version numbers

Select an entry to read what the office said about it. Filter by whether a version number was supplied.

Select an entry

Source: the response letter of September 8, 2025, entry by entry. Version strings are quoted as the office wrote them.

Figure 2. Seven entries, eight products, three version numbers. The three versions the office could supply all belong to systems it either runs itself or shares with a county agency. The four it could not version are the ones held by PAAM, the tribe, and the state police.

What the request asked for, category by category

The request names six categories of software and adds a seventh dimension: systems “planned for use.” Setting the response against those seven buckets shows where the inventory is dense and where it is empty.

Figure 3 · Interactive

Six categories asked for, and the pipeline

Select a bar to read which systems landed in that category. Two bars are empty, and one of them is the category the office never addressed.

Categories asked6 + 1
Categories with a named system5
Empty categories2
Products named8

Source: the request's six enumerated categories plus its “planned for use” clause, compared against the seven entries in the September 8, 2025 response. NextCloud is named in the response but fits none of the six categories as the office describes it.

Figure 3. Five of seven buckets hold a named system. Electronic discovery holds nothing, and the response never mentions the “planned for use” clause at all. NextCloud, the one system the office describes as file and sharing software, does not fit any of the six categories in the request.

Four of the seven belong to somebody else

The single most useful thing the response reveals is not a product name. It is a custody map. Four of the seven entries — Motorola Video Manager, WatchGuard Evidence Library, Axon Evidence.com and WatchGuard CloudShare — are administered by other agencies. Escanaba Public Safety runs one. The Delta County Sheriff's Office runs another. Hannahville Tribal Police runs a third. The Michigan State Police runs a fourth.

That is not a scandal. It is how digital evidence works in a county with a city police department, a sheriff, a tribal police force and a state police post all feeding cases into one prosecutor. Each agency buys and runs its own evidence platform, and the prosecutor's office receives access. A prosecutor cannot be expected to version software she does not administer.

But the map is worth publishing because it shows how thin the office's own visibility is. When the office answered the request, it could give a version number for exactly the systems it runs or shares with the county. For the four held elsewhere, it had either a version it could quote or nothing at all. And the two it had nothing for are the tribal and state systems — the two furthest from the county's own IT footprint.

There is a practical question buried here, and it is a fair one to ask of any prosecutor's office in Michigan, not just this one. When a case turns on body-worn camera footage or a digital evidence portal, the prosecutor has to be able to establish the chain of custody for a file she did not create, on a system she does not run, at a version she may not know. That is a real operational risk, and it belongs to the office that has to prove the case. The response does not describe how that chain is documented. It only names the platforms.

The one system the office does run itself is Karpel, and the office knows its version to the day: 7.5.03.21.2025. That string looks like a build date — 2025, month 03, day 21 — though the office does not say so and this page does not assume it. What can be said is that the office treats its own system with precision and treats the systems it borrows with a shrug. That is human, and it is also the shape of the gap.

The three things the grant does not cover

A full grant is not the same as a complete answer, and this one leaves three edges visible.

First, NextCloud. The office says the system is in use and then says “no ‘record’ exists for this software as it is an open source file and sharing software.” The logic does not hold. Open-source software has version numbers — that is what a release is. It also has a deployment: a server, an administrator, a configuration, a patch history, a set of users. The office is running a file-sharing platform that holds, or can hold, case material. It says it has no record of which version. That is either a records problem or a drafting shortcut, and the response does not say which. The scare quotes around “record” suggest the coordinator knew the sentence was doing something unusual.

Second, the missing versions. Four systems carry no version number. For Axon Evidence.com and WatchGuard CloudShare, the office's explanation — that it does not administer them — is reasonable on its face, and a cloud platform's version is the vendor's business anyway. For Adult and Juvenile Case Tracking, the explanation is that the systems are retired and no version is now reachable. That is also plausible. But a retired system's version is exactly the kind of fact that becomes unrecoverable if nobody wrote it down, and the office's own records of its PAAM years are the only place it would have been written down.

Third, and most important, “planned for use.” The request asked for systems used, formerly used, or planned for use. The response accounts for the first two and is silent on the third. It does not say nothing is planned. It does not say something is planned and decline to name it. It simply does not address the clause. In a full grant with no exemption claimed, that silence is the one place where the office's answer and the request do not meet.

This is where the companion request matters. The third of the four requests in the August 18 fax asked for bids, proposals and future system acquisitions — the paperwork of procurement. That request is listed in our internal working list and is not yet in the archive. If it is answered the way this one was, the pipeline question closes. If it is answered the way the statistics requests have been answered, the silence becomes something else.

The pattern: the inventory is free, the numbers are not

Here is the fact that makes this file worth a page of its own.

In the same twenty-day window, the same office, answering requests from the same fax, produced a complete software inventory at no charge and a 46-page contracts package at no charge. Neither cost the requester a dollar. Neither was met with an exemption. Both were answered on September 8, 2025.

Set that against the rest of the archive. When this office was asked for a conviction rate, it said the record did not exist and then quoted $9,548.00 for search and redaction labor on the underlying files, with a 50 percent deposit of $4,774.00 required before work would begin. When it was asked for every email and text the Prosecutor sent in 2024, it quoted $63,028.80, demanded a $31,514.40 deposit, and estimated 270 days from the day the check cleared. When it was asked for reports on the office's own work, it produced ten documents, withheld a category on attorney-client privilege, certified performance reviews nonexistent, and quoted $5,961.60 with a $2,980.80 deposit and the same 270-day timeline.

Three requests about the office's performance: priced, deposited, delayed. Two requests about the office's tools: free, immediate, complete.

There is an innocent explanation, and it should be stated first because it is probably partly true. A software inventory is cheap to produce. The coordinator knows the systems, or can ask the person who does. There is nothing to redact, because a version number is not personal information and a vendor name is not a secret. The labor is an hour of typing. The statistics requests, by contrast, genuinely do involve searching mailboxes, reviewing documents for exemptions, and redacting names. A fee schedule that reflects that difference is not, by itself, evidence of anything.

But the innocent explanation has to account for three things it does not comfortably explain.

The first is the size of the gap. An hour of typing and a $63,028.80 quote are not two points on the same cost curve. They are different orders of magnitude, and the difference is not explained by the labor involved. The 25-194 itemization charges the same 2,880 fifteen-minute increments twice — once to locate the records and again to redact them — a duplication this site has documented separately. The number is not a measurement of work. It is a number that makes the request go away.

The second is what the free answer contains. The inventory is not trivial information. It tells the public which case management system holds the docket, which evidence platform holds the video, and which agency controls each. It is the map you would need to ask a smarter question next time. The office gave that map away without being asked twice, and gave it accurately, versions and all. Whatever else is true of this office, it is not hiding its infrastructure.

The third is the timing. The request arrived on August 18, 2025. The response is dated September 8, 2025. The 25-194 quote for $63,028.80 and the 26-22 quote for $9,548.00 sit in the same archive, on either side of that date. The office was, during the very weeks it was pricing its own correspondence at five figures, capable of producing a clean, complete, unredacted, no-fee answer to a well-drafted request. The capability was never in doubt. What varies is the subject.

So the pattern is not that the office refuses to answer. It answers readily when the answer is about its equipment. It answers reluctantly, expensively, or not at all when the answer is about its results. The inventory is free because the inventory costs the office nothing to give. The statistics are expensive because the statistics are the thing that would let the public judge the office, and pricing them is a way of not producing them.

That is a reading of the record, not a finding of bad faith, and the distinction matters. Every fee in this archive was quoted under a statute that permits fees. Every denial cites something. The office has not broken a rule that anyone has yet shown. What it has done is reveal, in a single clean grant, exactly how much it is capable of when it wants to be — and that revelation makes the other answers harder to read as mere bureaucracy.

There is one more thread, and it is the one that will matter most to anyone following the Karpel story. The office states that Adult Case Tracking and Juvenile Case Tracking were used “until approximately June 10, 2024.” This site has treated Karpel's go-live as June 2024 on the strength of the contracts and invoices produced in 25-201, while being careful never to assert an exact implementation date, because no document stated one. Now one does. The office itself has put a date on the end of the predecessor system, and that date is consistent with everything else in the record.

It took a software-inventory request to get it. Not a request about the contract, not a request about the transition, not a request about the money — a request about version numbers. The office volunteered the date because the question was framed as an inventory rather than an inquiry. That is worth remembering the next time a request about this office's performance comes back with a five-figure estimate attached.

The legal framework, in plain terms

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233 makes “all public records” of a public body subject to disclosure, and defines a public record to include a writing that is “prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by” the body in the performance of an official function. A software inventory sits squarely inside that definition when it is written down. The office did not contest the point.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235 sets the clock. A public body must respond within five business days of receipt, may extend that period once by up to ten business days on stated grounds, and must, when a requested record does not exist, certify that fact in writing. The office answered in thirteen business days from its recorded receipt date, which is inside the five-day period plus a full ten-day extension. The packet contains a Notice to Extend Response Time on the volume ground, which is one of the grounds the statute allows. Nothing about the timing of this response is out of order.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234 governs fees and fee waivers. A public body may charge for search, review, redaction, copying and mailing, and must furnish an itemized estimate on request. It may also waive or reduce fees where the request is in the public interest. Here the office quoted nothing, which means the waiver question was never reached: there was no fee to waive. The requester asked for the waiver anyway, and this page records that he asked, as it does for every request in the archive.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.244 requires segregation. Where a record contains exempt and nonexempt material, the body must separate the exempt from the rest and release what remains. The office invoked no exemption in this response, so segregation never became necessary. That is the cleanest possible application of the section: nothing to separate because nothing was withheld.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.240 gives a requester the right to appeal a denial to the head of the public body or to circuit court. A full grant produces no denial, so no appeal right attached. The packet nonetheless includes the county's FOIA Appeal Form, the MCL 15.240 excerpt and the appeal-rights paragraph, because the office encloses them with every response. Their presence is not an invitation to appeal; it is boilerplate.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: the one place the statute's structure meets the response's silence is the “planned for use” clause. A public body is not required to create a record it does not have, and it is not required to answer a question that is not a request for an existing record. If no document describes a planned system, the office owes nothing. But if one exists — a proposal, a bid, a board packet, an email about a future purchase — then it is a public record, and the response's silence is a gap rather than a limit. The record does not resolve which it is, and this page does not either.

Authorities and sources cited on this page

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

Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq.; MCL 15.233 (public records subject to disclosure); MCL 15.234 (fees, estimates and waivers); MCL 15.235 (response time, extensions, certificates of nonexistence); MCL 15.240 (appeals); MCL 15.243 (exemptions); MCL 15.244 (segregation).

Documents: the August 18, 2025 fax cover letter submitting four separate requests; the request headed “FOIA1-SystemNames”; the county fax-platform transmission record showing six pages received at 10:09:30 a.m. Eastern; the Notice to Extend Response Time included in the packet; the September 8, 2025 response letter granting the request in full; and the Delta County FOIA Appeal Form, MCL 15.240 excerpt and county FOIA guidelines page enclosed with the response. All are published on this page in redacted form.

Related files on this site: 25-201 (contracts, invoices and licensing for the same systems, answered the same day); 26-22 (the $9,548.00 conviction-rate quote); 25-194 (the $63,028.80 correspondence quote); 25-195 (the $5,961.60 reports quote and the attorney-client withholding).

What would move this forward

The obvious next request is the one already sitting in the same fax. The third of the four asks for bids, proposals and future system acquisitions. If the office answers it the way it answered this one, the “planned for use” gap closes with a document instead of a silence. That request is drafted and waiting in our internal working list.

A second request would close the NextCloud question with one sentence. It would ask for the version, hosting location, administrator and configuration record of the office's NextCloud installation, and for any written policy governing what may be stored there. If the office truly holds no such record, a certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.235(4) would settle it, and the certificate itself would be a fact worth publishing: an office running a file-sharing platform with no documentation of it.

A third would test the custody chain directly. It would ask for the written procedure the office uses to establish and document the chain of custody for digital evidence it receives from Escanaba Public Safety, the Delta County Sheriff's Office, Hannahville Tribal Police and the Michigan State Police, and for any audit or review of that procedure. That is not a question about software. It is a question about whether the office can prove where a file came from, and it is the question the inventory raises without answering.

All three are listed in our internal working list.

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.

Request letter and fax cover, August 18, 2025 The fax cover letter submitting four separate FOIA requests for individual logging, and the first request in the set, headed “FOIA1-SystemNames.” Requester name, address, phone and email removed. Response letter and system inventory, September 8, 2025 The two-page response granting the request in full and naming each system, vendor and version the office could identify. Requester name removed. Notice to Extend Response Time The county extension form included in the packet. The handwritten request number, notice date, extension date and estimated time frame are not reliably legible and are not reproduced on this page. Requester contact block removed. Fax transmission record The county's fax platform receipt showing six pages received on August 18, 2025 at 10:09:30 a.m. Eastern, and the notification email that carried it. Sender fax number removed. Appeal form and statutory excerpt The Delta County FOIA Appeal Form, the MCL 15.240 excerpt, and the county's FOIA guidelines page, all enclosed with the response.