FOIA 25-201: ProsecutorByKarpel contracts, invoices, and licensing

Watchdog Alerts

Why isn’t this basic information available to the public?

1. The contract was produced. The statement of work, the licensing terms, and the data-migration plan were not. Why is the price public but the scope of what was bought withheld?
2. The invoices are itemized by line, but the base hourly wage and the fringe-benefit multiplier are blank. How is a public body's software cost auditable without the rate behind it?
3. The public-interest waiver section is blank. Was the waiver considered at all, and if so, what was the reasoning?
4. The office disclosed four facts without labelling them as disclosures — including that the system was not fully implemented on schedule. Why are the most consequential facts the ones stated in passing?

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024, so the manual and its reporting features are post-go-live documents. This page does not use the manual to judge the 2020–2023 contract period; it uses the manual only where the record concerns the period after go-live.

On August 18, 2025, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a request for every contract, purchase agreement, invoice, licensing agreement, and renewal document connected to the software the office uses to run criminal cases — case management, records management, prosecutorial tracking, electronic discovery, and digital evidence. Twenty days later, on September 8, 2025, Prosecutor Lauren M. Wickman signed a response granting the request in part and denying it in part. The office produced a contract and six invoices. It also certified, three separate times, that records about the rest of its software do not exist.

What makes FOIA 25-201 worth a page is not the size of the production. It is the shape of the denial. The office did not claim a single statutory exemption. It did not redact a single page. It did not charge a single dollar. Instead it used the one answer that ends a FOIA request outright — the certificate under MCL 15.233(1) that a record "does not exist" — to dispose of four categories of records that plainly do exist somewhere, and in one case to dispose of records that the office's own responsive documents prove were in use.

The records that were produced are more revealing than the records that were withheld. Buried on page 13 of the contract is a vendor-drafted clause declaring that the software "shall be considered exempt from disclosure" under FOIA, and obligating the county to help the vendor fight any court order compelling its release. On page 17 the same contract puts disputes under Missouri law and St. Louis County venue. In Appendix B the county agreed to feed defendant and charge data into a statewide search system hosted by the vendor. None of that was withheld. All of it was simply handed over without comment, in a 46-page packet that no one at the office appears to have read closely enough to flag.

Summary

FOIA 25-201 is one of four requests the requester submitted to the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on the same day, each demanding its own tracking number. This one was captioned "Contracts, Invoices, and Licensing," and it asked for the paper trail behind the office's technology stack from January 1, 2020 forward. The office assigned it number 25-201 and answered it on the twentieth day.

The production consists of one contract and seven invoices. The contract is a licensing and hosting agreement between Karpel Computer Systems, Inc. — doing business as Karpel Solutions, of St. Louis, Missouri — and the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, for the benefit of the Delta County Prosecutor's Office. It covers PROSECUTORbyKarpel, the case management system the office went live on in June 2024. The invoices are three from Karpel and three from WatchGuard Video, the in-car camera vendor.

Those records establish, with unusual precision, what the county spent. The one-time implementation cost was $65,175. Annual support runs $11,075. The three Karpel invoices total $98,400, which is exactly the one-time cost plus three years of support — a clean reconciliation that leaves little room to argue about the arithmetic. The three WatchGuard invoices add $30,052.51, but they were billed to the Delta County Sheriff's Office, not the Prosecutor's Office, and they are for in-car video hardware rather than case management software. Their presence in this production is a responsiveness question examined below.

The denial is where the file gets interesting. The office certified that no records exist for Motorola Video Manager, Axon Evidence.com, WatchGuard Cloudshare, NextCloud, "Adult Case Tracking," or "Juvenile Case Tracking." Three of those six are systems the office affirmatively states it uses in the same letter. Two more are systems the office's own contract paperwork records as the systems it was running when it signed the Karpel agreement. The certificate of nonexistence, in other words, is being asked to carry weight it cannot bear.

What was requested

The request is dated August 18, 2025 and was transmitted by fax from a number the requester controlled (redacted here) through TelNet Worldwide to [email protected]. The fax platform's receipt records delivery at 8.18.2025 10:09:30 AM −04:00, six pages received, with a transmitting station identifier that is redacted here because it is tied to the requester's fax line. The request invokes the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq., and asks for:

"Copies of all contracts, purchase agreements, invoices, licensing agreements or renewal documents related to any case management systems, records management systems, prosecutorial tracking systems, electronic discovery platforms, or digital evidence systems used by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from January 1, 2020 to the present."

Three additional provisions matter to how the request should have been processed. First, it asked that any exempt material be segregated and the remainder released, citing MCL 15.244 — the statutory rule that a public body may not withhold an entire record because part of it is exempt. Second, it asked for an itemized written estimate before processing if costs were expected to exceed twenty dollars. Third, it asked for electronic delivery.

The scope language is broad but not vague. It names five functional categories of software rather than specific products, which is the correct way to draft a request when the requester does not know the vendor's name. It sets a clear start date. It covers the entire period during which the office has been running PROSECUTORbyKarpel, which went live in June 2024, and the two years before that when it was running something else.

The paper trail

August 18–19, 2025 — the request arrives, and the clock starts twice

Documented: The fax receipt is unambiguous: the transmission landed on August 18, 2025 at 10:09:30 a.m. Eastern. The office's own Notice of Denial form records "Date Received 8/18/2025." The office's own Notice to Extend Response Time records "Date Received 8/18/25."

But the cover letter signed by Prosecutor Wickman on September 8 states that the request was "dated August 18, 2025 received by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on August 19, 2025." That is a one-day discrepancy between the office's letter and the office's own forms. It is small, and it may be nothing more than a clerical slip. It is noted here because in this archive receipt dates have mattered before, and because a public body that controls the receipt date controls the deadline.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The difference is not academic. Under MCL 15.235(2) a public body has five business days to grant, deny, or extend. Counting from Monday, August 18, the fifth business day is Monday, August 25. Counting from Tuesday, August 19, the fifth business day is Tuesday, August 26. Add the single permitted ten-business-day extension and the outer limits become September 8 and September 9 respectively. The response was issued September 8 — which is exactly at the ceiling on the earlier receipt date and one day inside it on the later one. The office's choice of the later date is the choice that buys it a day.

August 19, 2025 — the extension, taken before any search could have happened

Documented: The office issued a "Notice to Extend Response Time for FOIA Request," form number 25-201. It checks the box for receipt by fax. It checks the first listed reason for extension: that the county "needs to search for, collect, or appropriately examine or review a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records." It names Emily DeSalvo at 906-789-5100 as the contact. It extends the response date "for no more than 10 business days, until 9/7/25," and states an estimated time frame to provide records of 09/08/2025.

Two details on that form deserve attention. The first is that the field labeled "Date of This Notice" is blank. The form is undated. The second is that the extension date and the estimated production date do not match: the notice extends to September 7 and then estimates production on September 8, one day past its own extended deadline. September 7, 2025 was a Sunday.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: An undated extension notice is a real problem for a public body, because the notice's timeliness is the whole point. MCL 15.235(2)(d) permits an extension only if the body issues notice within the original five-business-day window. A notice with no date on its face cannot establish that it was issued inside that window. The office may well be able to prove timeliness from its internal mail or fax logs. But the document it chose to send the requester does not do it.

There is a second, subtler point. The stated reason for extension is that the records are voluminous and must be searched, collected, and reviewed. That reason was checked on a form issued, at the earliest, on the day the request arrived — before anyone at the office could have opened the six-page fax, identified the seven systems named in it, located the contract file, or formed any view about volume. An extension reason asserted before the search begins is not a finding about volume. It is a placeholder.

That is not to say the extension was improper. The office was entitled to take one, and it took only one. But the record does not show that the statutory predicate — "unusual circumstances" grounded in actual volume — was evaluated rather than assumed.

September 8, 2025 — the response

Documented: Prosecutor Wickman signed a three-page letter dated September 8, 2025, captioned "Re: FOIA Request #25-201" and addressed to the requester. It acknowledges the request, quotes it in full, and states the outcome in capitals: "Your request for the above referenced records is GRANTED IN PART, DENIED IN PART."

The letter then lists six records as granted, and follows with three paragraphs of denial. It closes with the standard appeal paragraph: an appeal may go to "the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners," or to the Delta County Circuit Court, and if the requester prevails in Circuit Court he "may be entitled to receive attorney fees, costs, and disbursements as well as actual or compensatory damages, and punitive damages of $1,000.00."

Attached to the letter are the county's Notice of Denial of FOIA Request form, an excerpt of MCL 15.240 printed on the back of that form, the Notice to Extend Response Time, and a page of the county's FOIA procedures. The Notice of Denial checks exactly one box: "2. Record Does Not Exist." Box 1, "Exempt from Disclosure" under FOIA Section 13, is unchecked. Box 3, "Redaction," is unchecked. No subsection number is inserted anywhere.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: That single checked box is the most important fact in this file. It means the office is not asserting that any record is exempt. It is not asserting that any record was redacted. It is asserting that the records are not there. Under MCL 15.233(1) a public body that makes that assertion must certify that "the public record requested does not exist under the name given in the request or by another name reasonably known to the public body." The certification is a sworn statement about the contents of the office's own files. It is not a statement about what other agencies hold, and it is not a statement about whether a record is confidential.

No fee estimate was issued. No deposit was demanded. No invoice was sent. FOIA 25-201 cost the requester nothing, which is to the office's credit and which distinguishes this file sharply from FOIA 25-118, where a $1,041.60 estimate and a $520.80 deposit demand stopped production cold.

What was produced

The responsive file runs 46 pages and is organized in four parts. Pages 1 through 19 are the Karpel contract and master terms. Pages 20 through 27 are Appendix A, the Client Agreement Form and implementation plan, including the full cost schedule. Pages 28 through 33 are Appendix B, a Memorandum of Understanding on statewide data sharing. Pages 34 through 37 are Appendix C, the FBI's CJIS Security Addendum. Pages 38 through 42 are three Karpel invoices. Pages 43 through 46 are three WatchGuard invoices spread across four pages.

The contract

Documented: The agreement is between Karpel Computer Systems Inc., a Missouri corporation doing business as Karpel Solutions, and the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, for the Delta County Prosecutor's Office. Section 2.2 states that "PAAM has agreed to be the central billing entity until September 30, 2026. After that date each client will be billed individually." The Association's primary contact is listed as Dianna Collins, with a state of Michigan email address.

The contract carries four signature blocks. Karpel's CEO Jeffery L. Karpel signed on September 7, 2023. The Delta County addendum was signed for the county by David Moyle, Chair of the Delta County Board of Commissioners, with a handwritten date in September 2023. PAAM Executive Director Cheri Bruinsma signed on October 4, 2023. A separate MOU signature page in Appendix B was also executed by Moyle for the county.

Documented: The Client Agreement Form on page 21 records the office's configuration at the time of contracting. It lists nine users. It names Brandon Couvillion as system administrator. It records the "Current Case Management System" as "PAAM Adult Case Tracking" and answers the question "Does your office use program for tracking Juvenile?" with "PAAM Juvenile Case tracking." It records the email system as Zimbra and internet service at 1,000 megabits per second up and down.

Those two lines are the ones to remember. They are the office's own handwriting, in a document the office itself produced, and they are examined again in the denial section below.

The money

Documented: The cost schedule on pages 25 and 26 sets out the full economics of the deal. The one-time build is $65,175: software at $23,225 (nine PROSECUTORbyKarpel licenses at a list price of $2,250 each, discounted to $2,025 each for a net $18,225, plus a $5,000 External Agency Portal), installation services at $2,950, professional services at $11,800, training at $7,200, customization at $20,000 (LEIN interface $5,000, VINE interface $5,000, MSP Lab interface $10,000), and zero travel.

Annual support is $11,075: PROSECUTORbyKarpel maintenance at nine times $450 for $4,050, External Agency Portal at $1,000, hosted services at nine times $100 for $900, unlimited eDiscovery at $1,125, and three interface maintenance lines — LEIN at $1,000, VINE at $1,000, MSP Lab at $2,000.

Those three invoices reconcile exactly. The first two together equal $76,250, which is the $65,175 one-time cost plus the first year of $11,075 support. The third invoice is precisely two years of support at $11,075. The total of $98,400 is therefore the one-time build plus three full years of maintenance, hosting, eDiscovery, and interface support, with no unexplained residue and no arithmetic that requires a charitable reading.

The invoices are addressed to "Delta County Prosecutor's Office-MI, Attn: Dianna L. Collins," at 310 Ludington Street, Suite 237, Escanaba. Collins is identified elsewhere in the same contract as PAAM's primary contact. That is consistent with the central-billing arrangement: the vendor bills the prosecutor's office address, but the account relationship runs through the association.

The WatchGuard invoices

Documented: The office also produced three WatchGuard Video invoices, spanning four pages:

Every one of these invoices is billed to the Delta County Sheriff's Office, Attention Accounts Payable, 310 Ludington Street, Escanaba. Two of them ship to "Emergency Vehicle Conversion c/o Delta County Sheriff's Office" in Kalamazoo, an upfitter. The third ships to a named individual at 2800 College Avenue in Escanaba. The line items are in-car video recorders, panoramic cabin cameras, wireless radio base bundles, wearable cameras, and mounting hardware.

None of that is case management software. None of it is records management, prosecutorial tracking, electronic discovery, or a digital evidence platform in the sense the request used those terms. These are hardware purchases by a different county office, produced as responsive to a request aimed at the Prosecutor's Office's software contracts.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: A public body must produce records it possesses that are responsive to the request. The Sheriff's Office invoices are not the Prosecutor's Office's records, and the Prosecutor's Office was under no obligation to produce them. Producing them was not harmful — it disclosed spending that would otherwise have stayed buried — but it is evidence that the search was not tightly scoped. And it sits awkwardly beside the denials: the office reached outside its own four walls to produce another agency's camera invoices, while certifying that its own digital evidence systems generated no records at all.

There is also an unexplained discrepancy. The cover letter lists two WatchGuard invoices as granted: one dated 01/13/2020 and one dated 05/27/2021. The production contains three. The third, dated 09/23/2020 for $1,408.45, appears nowhere in the letter. A record was produced that the granting paragraph does not describe. That is a small failure of the itemization the statute requires, and it is the kind of gap that makes a reader wonder what else was produced without being listed, or listed without being produced.

What was denied, and why the reason does not fit

The denial section of the September 8 letter is three paragraphs long. Each paragraph ends with the same formula: the undersigned "certifies that, after a search for records and to the best of the undersigned's knowledge and belief, the public records requested, and described below, do not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body."

That formula is the MCL 15.233(1) certificate. It is a statement about existence. Read carefully against what the same letter says elsewhere, it is being used to answer a different question.

"Maintained by outside agencies" is a custody claim, not an existence claim

Documented: The first denial paragraph reads, in full:

"Delta County Prosecutor's Office further utilizes Motorola Video Manager, Axon-Evidence.com, and Watch Guard Cloudshare as 'digital evidence systems.' However those systems are maintained/administered by outside agencies (Escanaba Public Safety, Hannahville Tribal Police, and Michigan State Police). As such, and after a review of records, no such records are kept, maintained or possessed by the public body."

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Three things are happening in that paragraph at once, and they do not fit together. The office first affirms that it uses these three systems. It then states that the systems are administered by other agencies. It then concludes that no records are "kept, maintained or possessed" by the office — and certifies that the records do not exist.

Those are different claims with different legal consequences. "We do not possess it" is a custody answer. "It does not exist" is an existence answer. The statute provides a certificate for the second. It does not provide a certificate for the first, because the first is not a ground for denial at all — it is a ground for telling the requester which body does hold the record, and for referring the request onward.

More to the point, the office's own contract contradicts the premise. Appendix B establishes statewide data sharing through HOSTEDbyKarpel, and the contract's definitions treat "Client Content" — the data the office puts into the system — as belonging to the client. If the office uses Axon Evidence.com, it has a user account, an agency administrator, a retention configuration, and a sharing policy. Those are records the office creates and controls even when the servers belong to someone else. A user agreement, an onboarding letter, a retention schedule, or an audit configuration is not the same thing as the video files, and none of them are "maintained by" the Escanaba Public Safety Department.

The same logic applies to WatchGuard Cloudshare. The office produced WatchGuard invoices in this very production. It certified that WatchGuard Cloudshare generated no contract, invoice, licensing agreement, or renewal document. Both statements cannot be comfortably true at once.

"It is open source" is not an answer to a request for procurement records

Documented: The second denial paragraph states that the office "further utilizes NextCloud but no 'contract, purchase agreement, invoices, license agreements or renewal documents' exist related to the use of that record management system as it is an open source file and sharing software."

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: This is a category error, and it is the clearest one in the file. Open-source status means the software license carries no fee. It says nothing about whether the county signed a hosting agreement, paid an integrator to install and configure it, bought support, purchased storage, or issued a purchase order for the server it runs on. Public bodies routinely spend real money deploying free software, and every one of those transactions generates a record.

If the office truly has no document of any kind relating to NextCloud — no purchase order, no support contract, no hosting invoice, no implementation work order, no internal memorandum approving its use — then the office deployed a records management system without any procurement record whatsoever. That is itself a finding, and a more serious one than the denial. The certificate of nonexistence forces a choice between two unflattering readings, and the office does not say which is true.

The office's own contract proves the Adult and Juvenile Case Tracking systems existed

Documented: The third denial paragraph states that the office "previously utilized 'Adult Case Tracking' and 'Juvenile Case Tracking', until approximately June 10, 2024. This system was administered by the Prosecuting Attorney's Association of Michigan." It then denies the request for contracts, purchase agreements, invoices, licensing agreements, and renewal documents relating to those systems, certifying that they do not exist.

Page 21 of the same production is the Client Agreement Form that the office filled out when it bought PROSECUTORbyKarpel. Two lines on that form read:

Current Case Management System: PAAM Adult Case Tracking
Does your office use program for tracking Juvenile? PAAM Juvenile Case tracking

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The office's own responsive document establishes that both systems existed and were in use at the time of contracting. The denial does not dispute that. It says the systems were "previously utilized" and that PAAM administered them. Then it certifies that records about them do not exist in the office's possession.

Again the office has answered a custody question with an existence certificate. The correct answer, if PAAM holds the records, is to say so — and, under the statute's spirit, to identify PAAM as the body likely to hold them. PAAM is not a private vendor beyond the reach of public records law; it is a public entity created by Michigan prosecutors, and its records are subject to FOIA in their own right. A requester told "PAAM has them" has somewhere to go. A requester told "they do not exist" has nowhere to go, and is in fact misinformed.

There is a further wrinkle. The contract states that PAAM is the central billing entity until September 30, 2026. If PAAM billed Delta County for Adult Case Tracking licenses before June 2024, then invoices for those licenses exist, and the office has almost certainly received copies of them. The certification that no such invoice exists is difficult to reconcile with an office that was on the receiving end of a billing relationship for years.

The four things the office disclosed without saying so

The most consequential material in FOIA 25-201 was not withheld. It was produced, unredacted, and left for the reader to find. Four items in the contract deserve to be pulled out and set in the open, because each one bears directly on how much of the office's business the public can see.

1. The contract contains a FOIA preemption clause

Documented: Section 8.5 of the master terms, on page 13, reads:

"The software Program(s) were developed exclusively at private expense and are Karpel Solutions' trade secrets. For all purposes of the Freedom of Information Act or any other similar statutory right of 'open' or public records, the software Program(s) and Documentation shall be considered exempt from disclosure. The software program(s) are 'commercial computer software' subject to limited utilization 'Restricted Rights.' The software program(s), including all copies, are and shall remain proprietary to Karpel Solutions. In the event that a third party seeks to compel disclosure and/or production of the Software program(s) or Documentation by court order or otherwise, Client shall promptly give notice to Karpel Solutions so as to allow Karpel Solutions to take whatever steps it deems necessary to prevent such disclosure and/or production, and Client agrees to cooperate with Karpel Solutions in connection therewith."

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: A private contract cannot amend a public statute. MCL 15.231 et seq. defines what is exempt, and it does not delegate that definition to vendors. A clause purporting to declare software "exempt from disclosure" for "all purposes of the Freedom of Information Act" is, as against the statute, a nullity. No Michigan court has held otherwise, and it is difficult to see how one could.

But the clause is not harmless, and the second half is the reason. The county did not merely agree that the software was exempt. It agreed to notify the vendor whenever a third party seeks to compel disclosure, and to cooperate with the vendor in the vendor's efforts "to prevent such disclosure and/or production." That is an affirmative contractual commitment by a public body to assist a private company in resisting a court order for public records. It is not an agreement to follow FOIA. It is an agreement to litigate against it.

Whether Delta County has ever invoked this clause is unknown, and nothing in this production suggests it has. What the record shows is that the county signed it without alteration, in a contract where the vendor supplied all the paper.

2. The contract is governed by Missouri law, in St. Louis County

Documented: The governing law provision, on page 17, states that the agreement "is to be construed and governed by the laws of the United States and the State of Missouri," and that "any dispute arising out of or in connection with this Agreement must be brought exclusively in the appropriate court(s) located in St. Louis County, Missouri," with the client waiving all objections to jurisdiction and venue.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: A Michigan county office agreed that disputes over its case management system would be decided under Missouri law, in a Missouri court, 600 miles from Escanaba. That is a standard vendor term and a common feature of software contracts. It is also a term that a public body with in-house counsel might reasonably have negotiated, and there is no indication in this production that anyone tried.

The practical consequence is that if the county ever needed to enforce the contract — over data return at termination, over a security failure, over a service-level breach — it would do so in the vendor's home forum, under the vendor's home law, at its own expense. The county's leverage in that posture is not obvious.

3. The county feeds case data into a statewide search system

Documented: Appendix B is a "Memorandum of Understanding Between Delta County and Karpel Solutions for Participation in Statewide Data Sharing." It recites that the parties "are Prosecution offices that are willing to contribute potentially confidential, Personally Identifiable, criminal justice information to a statewide search system for purposes of information sharing with other Prosecution offices." It provides that when PROSECUTORbyKarpel recognizes identical persons across offices, a "statewide button" becomes available, allowing a user to see data contributed by other jurisdictions. It permits Karpel to use the statewide search function for demonstrations using fictitious data.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: This is a disclosure of county case data to a vendor-hosted system that other prosecutors can search. It is not necessarily improper — statewide data sharing is a legitimate and widely used prosecutorial tool, and the MOU is a public document precisely because someone thought it should be. But it is a significant fact about how Delta County criminal case data moves, and it is not the kind of fact a resident would learn from the county's website or from a Board of Commissioners meeting summary.

It also bears on the denials. If the office contributes data to HOSTEDbyKarpel and can search other offices' contributions, then the office has a user relationship with a shared system, an administrator, a data-sharing configuration, and a set of access rules. Those are records. They were not produced, and they were not discussed.

4. There is no procurement record in the file

Documented: The 46-page production contains a contract, an implementation plan, a cost schedule, a data-sharing MOU, a federal security addendum, and seven invoices. It does not contain a Board of Commissioners resolution, a request for proposals, a competitive bid tabulation, a sole-source justification, a purchase order, a county board meeting minute approving the expenditure, or a PAAM master agreement.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The request asked for "purchase agreements" and "contracts." A county commission resolution authorizing a $65,175 commitment plus $11,075 in annual recurring cost is a purchase agreement in any ordinary sense. Its absence may mean the county approved the purchase by some other mechanism, or that the approval record was not searched for, or that the records were held by PAAM. The production does not say.

The contract's own structure suggests an answer. It is a PAAM-negotiated agreement with a "Public Agency Participation" clause — the provision that lets other public agencies adopt the terms without running their own procurement. Delta County appears to have joined an existing statewide award rather than soliciting competing bids. That is lawful and common. But it means the county's own decision record is thin, and a requester asking "who decided to spend this money, and on what basis" will not find the answer in this production.

How other jurisdictions handle the same records

The most useful check on any FOIA response is not what the statute requires in the abstract. It is what comparable agencies actually publish, as a matter of routine, without being asked. On this subject the comparison is unusually direct, because several other jurisdictions have contracted with the same vendor — Karpel Solutions — and have published the resulting records in full.

Tulsa County, Oklahoma

Tulsa County's District Attorney's Office executed a PROSECUTORbyKarpel and HOSTEDbyKarpel agreement approved by the Board of County Commissioners on March 28, 2022. The entire package is posted on the county's public website as part of the commissioners' agenda materials: the procurement director's transmittal memo, the full contract, the table of contents, the investment summary, the service-level commitments, the master terms, and the signature page.

The published investment summary lists 118 PROSECUTORbyKarpel licenses at $450 each, eDiscovery at $14,750, hosting at $11,800, eleven terabytes of additional storage at $11,000, an OSBI interface at $1,000, and an external portal at $6,000 — a total annual support figure of $97,650. It also lists optional pricing for law enforcement and court interfaces, per-document template conversion, post-implementation training rates, and an hourly rate for personnel. A member of the public can read that document and know exactly what Tulsa County pays, for what, and what it would cost to add a capability later.

The contrast with Delta County is not about the amount. Delta County's contract is smaller. The contrast is about how the record reaches the public. Tulsa County published it as part of governing. Delta County produced it only because a requester asked, and produced it without the board approval record that would explain the decision.

There is a second, sharper contrast inside the same boilerplate. Tulsa's contract contains the identical FOIA preemption sentence in its section 7.5. But Tulsa's version also contains a carve-out that Delta County's does not. Tulsa's definitions section states that "Karpel Solutions understands that Client is a political subdivision of the State of Oklahoma, and that as such, 'Confidential Information' is limited by law, including 51 O.S. 24A.1, et seq." — the Oklahoma open records statute. Tulsa's governing law is Oklahoma, and its exclusive venue is Oklahoma.

Delta County's contract contains no such carve-out. Its confidentiality definition is unqualified, its governing law is Missouri, and its venue is St. Louis County. The same vendor offered the same paper to both jurisdictions. One of them negotiated a public-records acknowledgment and kept the forum at home. The other did not.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Minneapolis City Attorney's Office contracts with Karpel for the same product and publishes its contract actions through the city's Legislative Information Management System. A request for committee action dated April 7, 2025 authorizes a $27,000 increase to contract COM0006064, bringing the total not-to-exceed amount to $664,650. The published document describes the system's function in detail: it houses all office data, generates and stores case documentation, automates calendars through state court integrations, e-charges through the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, automates discovery delivery to the Hennepin County Public Defender, and curates an entity directory.

It also discloses that the original contract was awarded as a single-source contract — a fact a vendor or agency might prefer to leave unstated — and explains why: the product was the only solution that packaged all required integrations. A separate fiscal note is published alongside.

That is the standard Delta County did not meet. Minneapolis disclosed the contract number, the total value, the amendment amount, the integration inventory, the procurement method, and the justification, in a document written for a public committee meeting.

Rochester, Minnesota

The Rochester City Attorney's Office published a request for council action dated November 2, 2022 authorizing a $75,800 service contract with Karpel Solutions for a case management upgrade. The staff report explains that the office had vetted an alternative to its existing system, that the Olmsted County Attorney's Office had already transitioned to the same product in 2019, that the annual cost should be comparable to or lower than the incumbent, and that contingency funding had been authorized by resolution six weeks earlier. The full contract is attached as a public exhibit.

Rochester's document answers the question a resident actually asks: why this vendor, and what happens to the money afterward. Delta County's production answers neither.

Whatcom County, Washington

Whatcom County posted a competitive solicitation, numbered 22-09, for a "Prosecutor Case Management System Software" solution. The bid posting itself is a public record that establishes a competitive process existed, identifies the evaluation criteria, and creates a documented trail from need to award.

Delta County's production contains no equivalent. Whether a solicitation occurred is unknown from these records, and the contract's piggyback clause suggests it did not.

What the comparison establishes

The point of these examples is not that Delta County is uniquely secretive. It is that the records FOIA 25-201 sought are, in other jurisdictions, ordinary published governance documents. Contracts with this vendor are posted on county websites. Cost schedules are attached to council agenda items. Amendments are summarized in public memoranda. Procurement methods are disclosed, including when they are single-source.

Against that baseline, the Delta County response is not a wall of secrecy. It is something more specific and more frustrating: a production that hands over the contract but not the decision, the invoices but not the procurement file, the data-sharing MOU but not the access rules, and a certificate of nonexistence for the systems the office says it uses every day.

Procedural observations

Five items in the record are worth flagging without characterizing them as violations.

The receipt date is stated two ways. The cover letter says August 19, 2025. The denial form and the extension notice both say 8/18/25, and the fax receipt says August 18. The later date is the one that extends the response deadline by a day.

The extension notice is undated. The "Date of This Notice" field is blank. The notice extends to September 7, 2025 — a Sunday — and estimates production on September 8, one day beyond its own extended date.

The extension reason was checked before a search could have occurred. The form asserts a voluminous volume of separate and distinct records. It was issued on or about the day the request arrived.

Three denial certifications, one checked box. The Notice of Denial form checks only "Record Does Not Exist." No exemption is claimed, no statutory subsection is cited, and no redaction is described. The MCL 15.244 segregation requirement the request invoked was therefore never engaged, because the office's position is that there was nothing to segregate.

A produced record is missing from the grant list. The letter lists two WatchGuard invoices. The production contains three. The third, dated 09/23/2020 for $1,408.45, is unaccounted for in the letter's itemization.

What this record does not show

Several things a reader might expect to find are not here, and their absence should not be read as proof of anything.

The record does not show whether Delta County conducted a competitive procurement for PROSECUTORbyKarpel, because no procurement file was produced and none was requested by name. It does not show whether the Board of Commissioners voted on the expenditure, because no board record was produced. It does not show whether the county negotiated any term of the contract, because only the executed version was produced and there is no redline. It does not show whether the FOIA preemption clause has ever been invoked, because no correspondence between the county and Karpel about a records request was produced or requested.

It does not show what Motorola Video Manager, Axon Evidence.com, or WatchGuard Cloudshare cost the county, because the office says it holds no records about them. It does not show what NextCloud cost, for the same reason. It does not show what the Adult and Juvenile Case Tracking systems cost, because the office certifies those records do not exist.

And it does not show that any of the denials was unlawful. A public body may lawfully certify nonexistence when a record genuinely is not there. The question this file raises is narrower and more answerable: whether the office searched for the right thing, and whether it told the requester the truth about why the records were not produced.

Next steps and remedies

Documented deadlines. The September 8, 2025 determination started two clocks. Under MCL 15.240(1) a written appeal to the head of the public body must specifically state the word "appeal" and identify the reasons for reversal; a civil action to compel disclosure must be filed within 180 days of the final determination, which ran to approximately March 7, 2026. Under MCL 15.240a a fee appeal follows a different track, but no fee was charged here, so that provision is not in play.

A narrowed follow-up request is the strongest move. The denials rest on the office's assertion that it holds no records. That assertion can be tested directly, without arguing about legal characterization, by asking for specific documents by name and date rather than by category. Four targets stand out.

First, ask for the county's user agreement, agency administrator designation, retention configuration, and sharing policy for Axon Evidence.com and Motorola Video Manager — documents the office necessarily creates as a user of those platforms, regardless of who owns the servers. Second, ask for purchase orders, work orders, and any invoice relating to NextCloud, on the theory that deploying a records system generates procurement paper even when the license is free. Third, ask PAAM directly, under its own FOIA obligations, for invoices and licensing records for Adult Case Tracking and Juvenile Case Tracking covering 2020 through June 2024. Fourth, ask the county for the Board of Commissioners resolution, purchase order, or budget amendment authorizing the $65,175 one-time payment and the $11,075 annual commitment.

A fifth request should target the omission that matters most. Ask for all correspondence between the Delta County Prosecutor's Office and Karpel Solutions concerning FOIA, public records, confidentiality, or disclosure, from September 2023 to the present. If the section 8.5 clause has ever been invoked, the correspondence will show it. If it has not, the answer is a certificate of nonexistence that is at least cleanly true.

On appeal. If the requester pursues the MCL 15.240 route, the appeal to the Board of Commissioners chairperson must be in writing, must use the word "appeal," and must be decided within ten business days. The board may reverse, uphold, or reverse in part. If the board upholds and the requester sues and prevails, MCL 15.240(6) and (7) provide for attorney fees, costs, disbursements, actual or compensatory damages, and a civil fine of $1,000 plus punitive damages of $1,000. The September 8 letter recites the $1,000 punitive figure but omits the separate $1,000 civil fine, which is worth noting for anyone weighing the remedy.

A records-preservation letter is prudent. If litigation is contemplated, a written demand that the office and Karpel preserve all records relating to the contract, the statewide data-sharing arrangement, and any FOIA correspondence should go out before the 180-day window closes.

Authorities consulted

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

The statutory analysis above rests on the text of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act as published by the Michigan Legislature. The provisions most directly engaged are MCL 15.233(1) (certificate that a record does not exist under the name given or another name reasonably known), MCL 15.235(2) (five business days, one extension of up to ten business days under unusual circumstances), MCL 15.240 (written appeal, 180-day civil action, de novo review, attorney fees, $1,000 civil fine and $1,000 punitive damages), and MCL 15.244 (segregation of exempt material and release of the remainder).

The comparative material comes from published government records: the Tulsa County Board of County Commissioners agenda packet for March 28, 2022, including the Karpel Computer Systems agreement; the Minneapolis Legislative Information Management System request for committee action RCA-2025-00300; the Rochester, Minnesota request for council action dated November 2, 2022 and its attached contract; and the Whatcom County, Washington bid posting 22-09 for prosecutor case management system software.

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.

Related FOIA requests

• FOIA 26-292 — FOIA 26-292: The office used the requester's own cost-saving clause to withdraw the request, then offered to grant it if he removed the clause (Granted in part, denied in part — no records produced; the office conceded the data exists and refused the aggregate on the ground that the requester's own scope limitation excluded it, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-291 — FOIA 26-291: The office answered a request for a privilege log with nine document titles — and cited a subsection of the FOIA that does not exist (Granted in part — a nine-row title-and-date table supplying two of the eleven requested fields, no count, and a citation to a subsection of MCL 15.243 that does not exist, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-290 — FOIA 26-290: The office refused the victim-services records because it says you already have them — from a packet that contained none (Refused — five paragraphs labelled “granted” but zero pages produced, on the authority of a prior production that contained no responsive documents; the sixth paragraph received no disposition, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-131 — FOIA 26-131: Twenty case files, priced at $82.66 before a single page is copied (Granted in part — release conditioned on a $41.33 deposit; no records produced yet, April 17, 2026)
• FOIA 26-35 — FOIA 26-35: The office counted 52 pleas in 85 minutes — eight days after saying the same kind of aggregate did not exist (Granted — 52 pleas reported from the District and Circuit Court dockets, no fee quoted, no exemption cited, no pages withheld; the count is over-inclusive by the office's own admission, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-34 — FOIA 26-34: The office denied a count of diversion cases by defining “diversion” down to a programme it does not run (Denied — certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.233(1), Denial Form box 2 checked, on the ground that the only diversion programme in Delta County is juvenile diversion administered by the Probate Court; no exemption cited, no fee quoted, no waiver determination, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-33 — FOIA 26-33: Asked to count deferred prosecution agreements, the office certified the total nonexistent and priced the underlying data at $9,093.33 (Granted in part and denied in part — the aggregate record denied as requiring creation of a new record, with a certificate of nonexistence and Denial Form box 2 checked; the underlying data granted subject to a $9,093.33 estimate, a $4,546.66 deposit and a 270-day production estimate; public-interest fee waiver left undetermined, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-32 — FOIA 26-32: What the office's own memos say about the migration that broke its records — a 95-page production that answers its own denial (Granted in part, denied in part — five records produced across 95 pages, with only personal contact information redacted under MCL 15.243(1)(a); no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-31 — FOIA 26-31: Asked how many crime scenes a prosecutor attended, the office listed eight documents and denied them as duplicative (Denied in full — refused as a duplicative request under Densmore v Department of Corrections, on the ground that the eight listed records were already produced in response to FOIA 25-267; Denial Form box 1 checked with the section 13 subsection left blank; no aggregate figure supplied and no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-30 — FOIA 26-30: Eight documents, one number, and a Densmore refusal built on a premise the record does not fully support (Denied — no aggregate total produced; eight responsive documents identified but not reproduced under a Densmore prior-production rationale; no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-29 — FOIA 26-29: A count of inherited convictions the office could not locate — priced at $1,033.33 for the work of counting (No count produced — office could not locate a record; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,033.33 with a $516.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-28 — FOIA 26-28: A headcount of cases open when the prosecutor took office — denied, then priced at $1,653.33 on an 800-file baseline (Denied in part, granted in part — no record states the headcount, with a certificate of nonexistence; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,653.33 with an $826.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-22 — FOIA 26-22: A conviction rate the office says does not exist, priced at $9,548 (Denied — record does not exist; $9,548 quote for the underlying files, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-21 — FOIA 26-21: A count of convictions the office says does not exist — then a quiet amendment that changed the number behind the bill (Denied as a compilation — no count produced; fee of $9,548.00 quoted for underlying files; amended response revised the volume figure without explanation, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-20 — FOIA 26-20: The aggregate case total, and the records that would let you count it (Denied — record does not exist, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 25-279 — FOIA 25-279: The office granted the personnel and budget records on paper — then sent three invoices totaling $34,673.79 and none of the records (Granted in part on paper — dozens of records listed as enclosed and none enclosed; three cost itemizations totaling $34,673.79, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-278 — FOIA 25-278: The office says it never tracked plea bargaining — then bills $23,146.66 for a 4,000-file review it says is already covered by another invoice (Granted in part — 62 trials produced from the calendar; plea-offer data certified not to exist; a $23,146.66 estimate the office says is moot if the twin invoice is paid, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-277 — FOIA 25-277: No annual statistical report exists, the underlying data does, and the office prices it at $34,720 (Granted in part — no statistical report exists; the underlying data is granted at a $34,720 estimate built on a volume figure the office has never counted, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-257 — FOIA 25-257: Three certificates of nonexistence, then a $19,840 bill to rebuild the data by hand (Denied — three certificates of nonexistence, with a $19,840 estimate to rebuild the same data by hand, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-254 — FOIA 25-254: Two certificates of nonexistence, two documents produced, and a $74,520 itemization copied from an earlier request (Granted in part, denied in part — two documents produced, two certificates of nonexistence, and a $74,520 estimate identical to FOIA 25-244's, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-244 — FOIA 25-244: Ten service slips, thirteen policy manuals, and a $74,520 quote (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-241 — FOIA 25-241: The special-prosecutor petition the office filed, and the 2024 memo that says it did not need another one (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-240 — FOIA 25-240: Officer use-of-force referrals, and the $1,863 bill for the one part the office would search (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-239 — FOIA 25-239: The Brady/Giglio list and how the office tracks officer credibility (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-234 — FOIA 25-234: Four lab reports, two certificates, and 26.4 grams where the press said four ounces (Granted in part, October 1, 2025)
• FOIA 25-202 — FOIA 25-202: No RFP, no bid, no purchase order — and the emails that show how the system was picked (Granted in part, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-200 — FOIA 25-200: The software the office runs on — seven systems named, one of them retired in June 2024 (Granted in full, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-197 — FOIA 25-197: A request for complaints against the office came back as the office's own civil-rights lawsuits (Granted in part, denied in part, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-196 — FOIA 25-196: Audits of the office, 2019 through 2024 — five county financial statements produced, two fiscal years missing (Granted in part — five annual county financial statements produced; fiscal years 2022 and 2024 absent from the release; no exemption cited and no certificate of nonexistence, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-195 — FOIA 25-195: Reports on the office's own work — four case-tracking reports produced, performance reviews certified nonexistent, county reports withheld as attorney-client (Granted in part and denied in part — ten documents produced; county reports withheld on attorney-client privilege; performance reviews certified nonexistent; $5,961.60 estimated, $2,980.80 deposit, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-194 — FOIA 25-194: Every email and text the Prosecutor sent in 2024 — a $63,028.80 estimate on a request the requester offered to narrow (Granted in part and denied in part — exemptions cited; $63,028.80 estimated, $31,514.40 deposit required, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-215 — FOIA 25-215: Three answers to one request — two certificates of nonexistence, a grant, and a $13,248 estimate (Granted in part, August 9, 2025)
• FOIA 25-180 — FOIA 25-180: Two boxes checked — the trial records both “already provided” and “do not exist” (Denied in full — certificate of nonexistence plus an exemption box checked; no fee, no pages produced, August 2, 2025)
• FOIA 25-139 — FOIA 25-139: Forfeitures in cases that ended without a conviction, certified not to exist — while the same office took an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-137 — FOIA 25-137: The average time from charge to disposition, certified not to exist — after a ten-day extension for “voluminous” records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-136 — FOIA 25-136: The plea-agreement count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-135 — FOIA 25-135: The office denied the 2024 trial summary as a record that “does not exist” — then produced eight case files on the next page (Granted in part — 8 case files produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-134 — FOIA 25-134: The dismissed-case count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-133 — FOIA 25-133: The office certified the monthly count did not exist — then attached an annual one and offered to sell the underlying data for $2,815.20 (Granted in part — one annual screening table produced; monthly counts withheld; $2,815.20 quoted with a $1,407.60 deposit, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-129 — FOIA 25-129: Arraignment-to-disposition times the office certified do not exist, then priced at $2,931.12 (Granted in part — two items denied as nonexistent; $2,931.12 quote on the third, June 26, 2025)
• FOIA 25-118 — FOIA 25-118: Final case outcomes for January and February 2025 (Fee estimate issued, June 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-94 — Prosecutor Case Outcome Statistics, 2021–2025 (Granted in Part, May 23, 2025)