Illustration for FOIA 25-257: Three certificates, then a $19,840 bill
FOIA 25-257 · Denied — three certificates of nonexistence, with a $19,840 estimate to rebuild the same data by hand

On October 31, 2025, a request went to the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office asking for five years of criminal case dispositions and plea agreements — 2020 through 2024 — in the form the office already keeps them: a report, a data export, a spreadsheet, anything generated from its case-management system. The request was faxed that morning at 11:27:03 and logged as received on November 3. The office filed a notice to extend on November 6 and answered on November 20, 2025. In that answer it certified, three separate times, that the records do not exist. Then, in the paragraph immediately following the third certificate, it wrote that “the data related to the request is available.”

To get that data, the office said, it would have to pull and read approximately 1,200 files for every one of the five years, five minutes per file to find the disposition and three minutes per file to redact it. It priced that work at $19,840.00, demanded a 50 percent deposit of $9,920.00 before starting, and estimated 180 days to deliver. The request asked for a public-interest fee waiver. On the county’s own itemization form, the waiver section is left entirely blank.

How to read this page

This page separates five things that are easy to blur together. First, what was asked. Second, what the office certified. Third, the sentence that contradicts the certificates. Fourth, the arithmetic behind the $19,840.00, which is internally consistent and worth following line by line. Fifth, what the request asked for that the response never addresses — a database query instead of a manual read of six thousand files.

Where the record supports criticism, the criticism is made and the page cites the document. Where the record is silent, the page says so rather than filling the gap. The office’s letter is quoted at length because its own words are the strongest evidence of the structure this page describes. The redacted documents are linked at the bottom of the page.

Summary

The request was organized in three numbered paragraphs, and each asked for the same five years of plea and disposition data in a different form. Paragraph one asked for any report, data export or spreadsheet from the office’s case-management system — the request named ProsecutorByKarpel as an example — listing cases with a final disposition recorded as “Plea” or “Plea accepted.” Paragraph two asked, for each such case, for six fields: case number, defendant name or initials, offense description or statute number, charge level or class, date of plea or final disposition, and prosecutor of record. Paragraph three asked for any existing log, annual summary or internal communication compiling plea-agreement activity. The requester asked for the records broken down by year, in Excel, CSV or PDF, and said expressly that the office should not deny the request in full if records for some years were unavailable — produce what exists for the years that exist.

The office denied all three paragraphs. Each denial rests on a certificate of nonexistence. For paragraph one the letter states that the office “does not possess or maintain any ‘reports, data exports, or spreadsheets’ related to cases dispositions, whether by plea or not.” Paragraph two is denied on the same theory. Paragraph three is denied because, the letter says, no such logs, summaries or communications exist.

Then comes the sentence that changes the shape of the whole response: “However, the data related to the request is available.” The office explains that to produce it in “raw” form it would have to review each resolved case — approximately 1,200 files per year — at five minutes per file to pull the disposition from the court’s disposition sheet together with the charging document or Felony Information, plus three minutes per file to redact under MCL 15.243(1)(a), MCL 15.243(1)(b)(xiii) and MCL 15.243(d), the Crime Victims Rights Act.

Five years at 1,200 files is 6,000 files. Five minutes each is 500 hours. Three minutes each is another 300 hours. At $24.82 an hour with fringe benefits, billed in quarter-hour increments of $6.20, that is $12,400.00 to locate and $7,440.00 to redact, for a total of $19,840.00. The arithmetic is correct. Every line adds up, and this page follows it line by line below, because the fact that it adds up is part of what makes it work.

What was asked, and how the office answered

The request is dated October 31, 2025. The fax receipt in the packet shows transmission at 11:27:03 a.m. that day, and the office’s letter acknowledges receipt on November 3, 2025. On November 6 the office filed a Notice to Extend Response Time. The response is dated November 20, 2025 and signed by Emily DeSalvo as FOIA Coordinator, on letterhead naming Lauren M. Wickman as Prosecuting Attorney and Civil Counsel.

On the question of timing, the office complied. Five business days from a Monday, November 3 receipt runs to Monday, November 10. The ten-business-day extension available under MCL 15.235(4) runs to November 24. A response signed November 20 sits inside that window. This page does not fault the timing, and it says so here rather than burying it, because a record that criticizes one thing and credits another is more useful than a record that does only one.

The request asked, in substance:

“Any reports, data exports, or spreadsheets generated from the office’s case management system (such as ProsecutorByKarpel) that list criminal cases with a final disposition of ‘Plea’ or ‘Plea accepted’ for calendar years 2020 through 2024; for each such case, the case number, defendant name or initials, offense description or statute number, charge level or class, date of plea or final disposition, and prosecutor of record; and any existing logs, annual summaries, or internal communications compiling plea-agreement activity” — broken down by year, in Excel, CSV or PDF, with electronic delivery, a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234, and notice if any fee would exceed $50.

The disposition line reads “DENIED.” The letter then addresses each paragraph in turn, and the certificates are printed in full. The paragraph on paragraph one is the one to read twice:

“The Delta County Prosecutor’s Office does not possess or maintain any ‘reports, data exports, or spreadsheets’ related to cases dispositions, whether by plea or not.”

That sentence is probably true as written. No one is likely to keep a document titled “plea dispositions, 2020–2024.” A public body is not obliged to create a record it does not have, and a request that asks for a document the office never made can lawfully be answered with a certificate. That is the charitable reading, and it is available here.

But the request did not only ask for a document that exists. It asked for a report or export generated from the case-management system, and it named the system. The office runs ProsecutorByKarpel, a relational case-management platform whose vendor documentation describes broad search and custom reporting. A request that says “give me the output of a query on this field for these five years” is a request for existing data in a new container, which is the ordinary middle ground between “a record you already have” and “a record you must invent.” The response does not engage with that middle ground. It answers the narrow version — is there a spreadsheet sitting in a folder — and then prices the widest possible alternative.

Nothing in the letter describes a search. It does not say what was queried, by whom, against which system, or what came back. It does not say whether Karpel was opened at all. The only account of the office’s own effort is the estimate: 6,000 files, read by hand.

The paper trail

The chronology is short, and it is set out here as a table rather than a graphic because the dates are the least interesting thing in the packet. What matters is the sequence of documents and what each one commits the office to.

FOIA 25-257 — documents and dates as they appear in the packet
DateDocumentWhat it establishes
Oct 31, 2025Request letter, three numbered paragraphsScope: 2020–2024 plea and disposition data, as a report or export, six fields per case, plus any existing compilation. Fee waiver requested under MCL 15.234. Express instruction not to deny in full if some years were missing.
Oct 31, 2025, 11:27:03 a.m.TelNet fax portal receiptTransmission time, to the second.
Nov 3, 2025Office receipt dateThe operative receipt date, stated in the response letter.
Nov 6, 2025Notice to Extend Response TimeA ten-business-day extension, filed on the fourth business day after receipt.
Nov 20, 2025Response letter and Notice of DenialThree certificates of nonexistence, the statement that the data “is available,” and the $19,840.00 estimate.
Nov 20, 2025Detailed Cost Itemization, seven pages$12,400.00 locate, $7,440.00 redact, $19,840.00 subtotal, $9,920.00 deposit, 180-day estimate. Waiver section blank.

Two footnotes in the letter matter more than anything in the body. Both reference FOIA Request 25-177, which the letter describes as a substantially similar request limited to January 1 through December 31, 2024, for which a cost itemization was sent “on or about August 22, 2025” and which “has not been paid or fulfilled.” That is the office telling the requester, in its own footnotes, that this exact question was already asked once, priced once, and abandoned once. The current request is that same question widened from one year to five.

Three certificates, then a sentence that undoes them

The structural problem with this response is not that the office denied a request. Public bodies deny requests, and the statute provides for it. The problem is that the response contains two incompatible accounts of the same fact and never chooses between them.

Account one: the records do not exist. This is stated three times, once per paragraph, each with a certificate. Account two: the data exists and can be produced, at a price. This is stated once, in the pivot paragraph, and it is the account the rest of the letter is built on — because you cannot estimate the cost of reading 6,000 files unless the 6,000 files contain something responsive.

Read narrowly, both statements can be defended. “Records” means documents the office already holds. “Data” means the underlying information inside those documents. The office is saying: we have no document that answers your question, but we have the raw material from which such a document could be assembled, and assembling it is expensive. That is a coherent position. It is also a position that, taken seriously, concedes the request.

Because if the underlying data exists in the office’s files, then the question the requester asked — how many cases resolved by plea, in which years, on what charges — is answerable from records the office holds. The only issue is the form of the answer and who pays for the assembly. The office chose the most expensive possible form: a human being opening 6,000 paper or scanned files one at a time. It did not choose the form the requester asked for, which was a query against the system the office uses to track exactly this information.

The letter never explains that choice. It does not say Karpel cannot produce the list. It does not say Karpel can, but that the output would be incomplete. It does not mention Karpel at all. The system appears once, in the request, and never again in the response. A reader of the response alone would not know the office had a case-management system, let alone what it can do.

The $19,840.00, line by line

The itemization is a seven-page county form, and it is worth reproducing because it is the most concrete thing in the packet and because it is, on its own terms, careful work. The office did not round, did not pad, and did not double-count. The numbers are set out exactly as printed.

Detailed Cost Itemization, FOIA 25-257, dated November 20, 2025
LineItemBasisAmount
1Labor cost to locate2,000 quarter-hour increments × $6.20$12,400.00
2Labor cost for copying—$0.00
3aLabor cost to redact1,200 quarter-hour increments × $6.20$7,440.00
3bContract labor cost to redact—$0.00
4Copying and duplication—$0.00
5Mailing—blank
Subtotal fees$19,840.00
Deposit required (50 percent)$9,920.00
Estimated time frame180 days (paragraph 1) · 90 days (paragraph 2)

The rate is $24.82 an hour with fringe benefits, which is $6.20 per quarter hour. The file count is where the estimate gets its size, and the letter states it plainly: approximately 1,200 files per year. The table below shows how that count becomes the two line items, and it shows why the numbers are internally consistent — which is the point.

How 1,200 files a year becomes $19,840.00
StepLocateRedact
Files per year, as stated in the letter1,2001,200
Years covered by the request55
Total files6,0006,000
Minutes per file53
Total minutes30,00018,000
Total hours500300
Quarter-hour increments2,0001,200
Cost at $6.20 per increment$12,400.00$7,440.00

Eight hundred hours of county labor, at a published rate, for a request covering five years. Nothing in that arithmetic is hidden or inflated. If the premise is right — that the only way to answer the request is for a person to open 6,000 files — then $19,840.00 is a defensible price, and the office has done the requester the courtesy of showing the work.

The premise is the whole question. The letter says the office reviewed each resolved case to extract the disposition from the court’s disposition sheet and the charging document. But a disposition sheet is a court record, and the office’s own case-management system tracks case number, defendant, charges and disposition as structured fields — that is what a case-management system is for. If those fields are populated, the list the requester asked for is a query, and a query costs minutes. If they are not populated, that is itself a fact about the office’s recordkeeping that the public has an interest in knowing, and the letter does not say it.

There is a third possibility, and it is the least flattering: the fields are populated, the query would work, and the manual read is the form of production chosen because it produces a number large enough to end the request. This page does not assert that. It asserts only that the letter does not describe a search, does not mention the system, and does not explain why the expensive method was chosen over the cheap one. On a $19,840.00 estimate, that explanation is the least a requester could ask for.

A denial form that checks two boxes at once

Page five of the packet is the state-issued Notice of Denial form. It records request number 25-257, date received 11/03/2025, date of notice 11/20/2025, and received by email and fax. In the field labeled “Record(s) You Requested” it contains the number 12,400 — the locate line from the itemization, entered where a description of the records should be.

Two reason boxes are checked. Reason 2 is “Record Does Not Exist.” Reason 3 is “Redaction,” with the description “victim names/information.” The contact listed is Emily DeSalvo at 906-789-5100.

Those two reasons cannot both be true of the same record. A record that does not exist cannot be redacted, and a record that is redacted exists. The form is a template with numbered reasons, and it is designed to be filled in for one disposition. Here it records two, and it does not say which reason applies to which part of the answer.

There is an innocent explanation: the office denied the report as nonexistent and separately described the redactions it would apply if it produced the underlying data. That is what the letter says, more or less. But the form does not say it, and the form is the document a requester would attach to an appeal. A reader of the form alone would conclude that the office withheld existing records by redacting victim information. A reader of the letter would conclude that the office certified the records out of existence and priced a manual reconstruction. Those are different decisions, and the file contains both descriptions of the same response. This is the same documentation failure that appears in FOIA 25-202 and 25-215, where the form and the letter describe different decisions and neither document reconciles them.

The waiver section, left blank

The request asked for a public-interest fee waiver under MCL 15.234. On the county’s own itemization form, the Public Interest section is present and completely empty. Neither the box for “all fees are waived” nor the box for “all fees are reduced by ___ percent” is checked. The line for “Subtotal Fees After Waiver” is blank. The indigence section is unchecked. The nonprofit discount section is unchecked. The section for an increased deposit due to previously unpaid fees is blank as well.

This is the quietest move in the packet and, on this record, the most consequential. Declining a waiver with a written reason creates a decision that can be reviewed, appealed, and argued about. Leaving the section blank creates nothing. There is no finding to challenge, no rationale to test, no date on which a decision was made. The full $19,840.00 simply stands, and the requester’s request for a waiver is answered with white space.

MCL 15.234(7) permits a public body to waive or reduce a fee where the request is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. Five years of plea dispositions in a county prosecutor’s office is close to a textbook example of the first prong. The office did not have to grant the waiver. It did have to say something.

The footnote about 25-177

Both footnotes in the response reference FOIA Request 25-177. The letter describes it as a substantially similar request limited to calendar year 2024, for which a cost itemization was sent on or about August 22, 2025, and which “has not been paid or fulfilled.”

That footnote does two things. First, it discloses that this question has been asked before, in a narrower form, and priced before. Second, it explains why the office is requiring a deposit now: the requester did not pay the last estimate. The itemization form even has a section for an increased deposit due to previously unpaid fees, and that section is blank — so the office noted the prior unpaid estimate in its letter but did not invoke the mechanism its own form provides for it.

What the footnote does not do is tell the requester what the 25-177 estimate was, whether the 2024-only version would still cost what it cost in August, or whether the office would produce 2024 alone for a fraction of the $19,840.00. The request expressly asked not to be denied in full if some years were unavailable. A response that priced five years as one indivisible block, while its own footnote references a one-year version of the same request, leaves the obvious question unanswered: what would one year cost?

The archive does not contain FOIA 25-177. It is referenced only in these footnotes. This page describes it as the office described it and does not speculate about its contents.

Opinion: the sentence in the middle

I have read a lot of FOIA responses from this office, and most of them are legible. They grant, they deny, they cite a statute, they tell you what it costs. This one is different, and the difference is a single sentence sitting in the middle of a four-page letter: however, the data related to the request is available.

That sentence is the most honest thing in the packet. It is also the thing that makes the three certificates before it hard to read charitably. Because if the data is available — and the office says it is, in its own words, in a signed letter — then the office knows where the answer to the question lives. It is not lost, not destroyed, not held by another agency, not exempt. It is in the office’s files, in 6,000 documents, and the only barrier between the requester and the answer is the labor of extracting it.

That is a real barrier. I do not want to pretend otherwise. Six thousand files is a lot of paper, and a small county prosecutor’s office does not have a data team sitting idle. If the only way to answer this request were to read every file by hand, then $19,840.00 would be a fair price and the office would be entitled to charge it. The problem is that the office does not claim that. It does not say the system cannot do it. It does not say the fields are empty. It says nothing about the system at all, and then prices the most expensive method available.

Here is what I keep coming back to. The request named the system. It said, in effect: you run ProsecutorByKarpel; Karpel stores case number, defendant, charges and disposition; run a query on the disposition field for five years and send me the output. That is not a request to create a record. It is a request to look something up in a database the county bought for the purpose of looking things up. The office’s answer was to describe a world in which that database does not exist, and then to bill for the world it described.

Maybe the database cannot do it. Maybe the 2020–2023 records were migrated as scanned images with no structured fields, and the only way to know how a case ended is to open the file and read the disposition sheet. That is entirely plausible, and if it is true, the office could have said so in one sentence and the whole response would read differently. Instead the response says the records do not exist, then says the data does exist, then quotes a price built on the assumption that the data can only be reached by hand. Three positions, none of them reconciled to the others.

And then there is the waiver. A request for five years of plea data from a county prosecutor is about as public-interest as FOIA gets. It is not commercial. It is not personal. It is the raw material of any serious account of how criminal justice works in Delta County. The office had a form with a box for exactly this, and it left the box blank. Not checked. Not denied with reasons. Blank. I have seen that blank box in FOIA 26-131 and I have seen it here, and I have come to think of it as the signature move of this office’s fee process: the one part of the form where a human being has to write down a reason is the one part that is consistently left empty.

There is a version of this story in which the office is simply overwhelmed. A small office, a broad request, a coordinator doing FOIA on top of other duties, a template form that gets filled in from habit. I believe that version is partly true. But an overwhelmed office that wanted to help would run the query, see what came back, and tell the requester what it found — even if the answer was “the old records are scans and this will cost you.” The response here does the opposite. It answers the narrowest possible reading of the request, certifies the rest out of existence, and then prices the widest possible reading at a number designed to be declined.

I am not accusing anyone of a crime. I am not even accusing anyone of bad faith. What I am saying is that this response, read as a whole, does not answer the question it was asked, and that the reason it does not answer is visible in its own structure: a certificate that closes the door, a sentence that opens it, and an invoice that closes it again. If the office wants this page to say something different, the fix is small. Run the query. Describe what it returned. Price that. The record would look nothing like this one.

What the office got right

A record that only counts failures is not a record. On this packet, several things were done properly, and they should be stated as plainly as the problems.

The response was timely. Received November 3, extended November 6, answered November 20 — inside the extended window, with the extension noticed in writing and filed on the fourth business day. The packet is complete: it contains the response letter, the Notice of Denial, the full seven-page itemization, the appeal rights, the text of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA appeal form, the Fee Appeal Form, the text of MCL 15.240a, the county’s written FOIA policy, a blank extension form, the fax transmission records, and a copy of the original request. A requester who wanted to appeal had everything needed to do so, in one envelope.

The estimate is itemized and arithmetically correct. It identifies the hourly rate, the fringe treatment, the increment size, the file count, the minutes per file, and the split between locate and redact. It does not double-count: the letter explicitly addresses whether paragraph one and paragraph two would be billed twice and explains that they would not, because the records are duplicative. That is a level of care many responses in this archive do not show. The $9,920.00 deposit is exactly half of $19,840.00, as the statute permits.

The letter also acknowledges the prior request, 25-177, in its footnotes rather than concealing it. A requester reading the packet knows that this ground has been covered before. That disclosure is to the office’s credit.

The criticism on this page is therefore narrow and specific. It is not that the office was slow, incomplete, or careless with its arithmetic. It is that the office certified the records out of existence and then priced their reconstruction, and that in between those two positions it never described the search it made or the system it runs.

How this compares to the rest of the archive

This is the fourth request in the archive built around the same underlying question — how many cases, resolved how, in which years — and the fourth to be answered without a number. FOIA 25-133 asked for monthly felony and misdemeanor charge counts for 2024 and received one annual screening table, with the monthly counts priced at $2,815.20. FOIA 26-20 asked for aggregate case totals and was answered with a certificate of nonexistence. FOIA 26-22 asked for a conviction rate and was answered with a certificate and a $9,548 quote for the files that would contain the answer. FOIA 25-215 asked for average case processing times and was answered with two certificates, a grant, and a $13,248 estimate for reading roughly 1,000 files a year for four years.

25-257 is the largest of these by scope and by price. It covers five years instead of one or four, and it asks for six structured fields per case rather than a single statistic. At $19,840.00 it is the second-largest estimate in the archive, behind FOIA 25-244’s $74,520 and ahead of 25-194’s $63,028.80 only in the sense that it is smaller — but it is the largest quote the office has ever attached to a request for case-outcome data specifically.

The pattern across the four is consistent enough to state as a finding rather than an impression. When the office is asked for a document it already has, it often produces it, sometimes for free and sometimes quickly. When the office is asked for a number derived from its records — a count, a rate, a time, a disposition tally — the answer is a certificate, a price, or both. The archive now contains no instance in which the office produced a complete set of prosecutor case-outcome statistics in response to a FOIA request. That is not an allegation of intent. It is a description of what the documents show.

The legal framework, in plain terms

The statutes below are the ones the response relies on, plus the ones that govern the parts of the response that are missing. They are set out so a reader can check the analysis against the text rather than against this page’s summary of it.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233(1) requires a public body, upon written request, to provide a requesting person a reasonable opportunity to inspect or copy a public record. The right is to the record, and it is not conditioned on the requester’s purpose. A certificate of nonexistence is a lawful answer only where the record genuinely does not exist. Where the underlying information exists and can be assembled, the question becomes one of form and cost rather than existence.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(2) requires a public body to respond within five business days, either by granting, denying, or granting in part and denying in part. MCL 15.235(4) permits a ten-business-day extension by written notice specifying the new date. The office received the request November 3, 2025, noticed an extension November 6, and responded November 20 — inside the extended window. On timing, the response complies.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(1) permits a public body to charge for the cost of searching for, locating and examining records, for review and separation of exempt from nonexempt information, and for copying. MCL 15.234(3) permits a deposit of up to one-half the projected fee where the estimate exceeds fifty dollars. The $19,840.00 estimate and the $9,920.00 deposit fall within those provisions on their face. The statute also requires that a public body not charge more than the actual cost of responding; a fee built on a manual method where a cheaper method exists is the point at which that requirement becomes arguable.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(4) permits a public body to charge for the cost of reviewing records where failing to do so would result in unreasonably high costs beyond those typically incurred. This is the provision that authorizes charging for redaction time, and the office invoked it. Its use here is not obviously improper given the volume asserted. The defect is not the provision. It is that the volume is asserted from a manual file count rather than demonstrated from a query of the system the office runs.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(7) permits a public body to waive or reduce a fee where the request is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the requester’s commercial interest. The request asked for a waiver on this basis. The county’s own form contains a section for recording the decision. That section is blank. A blank section is not a denial with reasons; it is the absence of a decision, and it leaves the full fee standing without any reviewable rationale.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.243(1)(a) exempts information of a personal nature where disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy. MCL 15.243(1)(b)(xiii) exempts certain law-enforcement information. MCL 15.243(d) incorporates the Crime Victims Rights Act. These are the authorities the response cites for redacting victim names and information, and they are ordinary and defensible grounds for redaction in a disposition file. Citing them does not, however, explain why the underlying data cannot be produced with those names removed — which is precisely what the request asked for when it offered to accept initials in place of names.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.240(1) gives a requester the right to appeal a denial, in whole or in part, to the head of the public body or to the circuit court. A certificate of nonexistence is a denial for these purposes. MCL 15.240(6) allows a court to award reasonable attorney fees and costs to a requester who prevails in an action to compel disclosure, and MCL 15.240(7) allows punitive damages of $1,000 where a public body has arbitrarily and capriciously violated the act. The response reproduces both provisions. The 180-day window to sue runs from November 20, 2025.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.240a governs an appeal of a fee, including a deposit requirement. It permits a requester to appeal a fee to the head of the public body within a specified period and, if the appeal is denied, to seek judicial review. The response encloses the Fee Appeal Form and the text of the statute, so the mechanism was available. No fee appeal is recorded in this packet.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(2)(c) contemplates that a requester may narrow a request after receiving a cost estimate. Narrowing only works if the estimate is granular enough to show which part is expensive. Here the estimate is a single block covering five years and two paragraphs, with no breakdown by year. A requester who wanted to ask for 2024 alone could not tell from this itemization what 2024 alone would cost — even though the office’s own footnote references a 2024-only request it had already priced.

Authorities and sources cited on this page

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

Every factual statement above is drawn from the documents the office produced, and every legal statement is drawn from the Michigan Freedom of Information Act as cited. The sources are:

  • FOIA request 25-257, dated October 31, 2025, three numbered paragraphs, as reproduced in the packet.
  • TelNet fax portal receipt, October 31, 2025, 11:27:03 a.m.
  • Notice to Extend Response Time, filed November 6, 2025.
  • Response letter of November 20, 2025 from the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office, signed by Emily DeSalvo, FOIA Coordinator, four pages with footnotes.
  • Notice of Denial of FOIA Request form, request 25-257, date received 11/03/2025, date of notice 11/20/2025, Reason 2 (Record Does Not Exist) and Reason 3 (Redaction) both checked, contact Emily DeSalvo, 906-789-5100.
  • Detailed Cost Itemization, seven pages, dated November 20, 2025: $12,400.00 locate, $7,440.00 redact, $19,840.00 subtotal, $9,920.00 deposit, 180-day estimate, Public Interest waiver section blank.
  • Fee Appeal Form and the text of MCL 15.240a, enclosed with the response.
  • Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 through 15.246, in particular MCL 15.233, 15.234, 15.235, 15.240, 15.240a and 15.243.

The redacted copies of the response, the denial forms, the itemization, the fee-appeal and extension materials, and the original request with its fax receipt are linked under Documents below. Requester identifying information has been removed from the published copies; the substance of the response is unchanged.

What would move this forward

Three follow-ups would resolve most of what is unresolved on this page, and each is narrow enough to be answerable.

The first is a description of the search. A one-page request asking only for any record showing that a query of the case-management system was run for plea dispositions in 2020 through 2024 — the query, the parameters, the result count, or a statement that no query was run — would produce either a document or an admission. Either answer is informative. If a query was run, the office knew the count and chose not to give it. If none was run, the manual-read estimate was built without checking whether the cheap method worked.

The second is 2024 alone. The office’s own footnote references FOIA 25-177, a 2024-only version of this request, priced in August 2025. Asking for 2024 by itself, with the six fields the request already specified and initials in place of names, is small enough that a meaningful estimate could be paid and a production could actually happen. That is what narrowing under MCL 15.235(2)(c) is for, and it only works if the requester asks for the smallest slice the office will price.

The third is the waiver decision itself. A request asking only for the office’s written determination on the public-interest waiver requested in 25-257 — granted, denied, or reduced, with the reason — should produce either a document or a statement that no determination was made. If no determination was made, that is the finding. A form with a blank waiver section is not a decision, and a public body that never decides a waiver request has effectively denied it without reasons.

Until one of those produces a document, the record stands as it is: three certificates that the records do not exist, a sentence saying the data does, an itemization that adds up to $19,840.00, a deposit of $9,920.00, a waiver section left blank, and a footnote pointing back to the last time the same question was priced and abandoned.

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.

Response Letter (redacted) The November 20, 2025 cover letter, four pages with footnotes: the three certificates of nonexistence, the statement that 'the data related to the request is available,' the 1,200-files-a-year manual-review math, the $19,840.00 estimate, the $9,920.00 deposit, and the citations to 25-177. Requester identifiers removed. Notice of Denial, Appeal Form and County FOIA Policy (redacted) The Notice of Denial form with Reason 2 and Reason 3 both checked, the text of MCL 15.240, the blank FOIA appeal form, a second copy of the statute, and the county's written FOIA policies, guidelines and forms page. Requester identifiers removed. Detailed Cost Itemization (redacted) The seven-page Detailed Cost Itemization: $12,400.00 to locate, $7,440.00 to redact, $0.00 for copying and mailing, a $19,840.00 subtotal, a $9,920.00 deposit, a 180-day estimate, and a Public Interest waiver section left entirely blank. Requester identifiers removed. Fee Appeal Form, MCL 15.240a and Extension Form (redacted) The Fee Appeal Form, the text of MCL 15.240a governing fee appeals, a second copy of the county FOIA policy page, and the blank Notice to Extend Response Time form. Requester identifiers removed. Original Request and Fax Receipt (redacted) The requester's October 31, 2025 letter with its three numbered paragraphs and fee-waiver request, the Zimbra fax-received email notice, and the TelNet fax portal receipt showing transmission at 11:27:03 AM on October 31, 2025. Requester identifiers removed.