Illustration for FOIA 25-277: No annual report, but a $34,720 query
FOIA 25-277 · 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

On November 25, 2025, a request went to the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office asking for the office’s own annual statistics: clearance rates, backlog figures, conviction and acquittal rates, in whatever year-end or summary form the office keeps them. It was faxed at 5:52:24 that evening, clarified by a second fax at 7:59:42 the same night to fix the period at January 2020 to present, logged as received on November 26, and answered on December 18, 2025.

The answer is a single sentence repeated twice: the office has no such reports. It certified that no annual statistical report, no year-end report and no similar summary document exists, and it cited a 1994 Michigan Supreme Court case for the proposition that a public body need not create a new record to answer a request. Then, in the same letter, it granted “the underlying information” that would allow the statistics to be compiled — and priced that at $34,720.00, with a $17,360.00 deposit and a 180-day estimate.

What makes this response worth a page is not the size of the number. It is that the arithmetic behind the number is correct. Six thousand files at ten minutes each is 4,000 quarter-hour increments, and six thousand files at four minutes each is 1,600. Both lines compute. That is a departure from FOIA 25-254, where the same form inflated a demand by a factor of fifteen. Here the multiplication works, and the challenge moves upstream, to a premise the office has never measured: “approximately 1,000 cases per year.”

How to read this page

This page separates five things. First, what was asked and how the office answered it. Second, the two certificates of nonexistence and the grant sentence that sits between them — because a certificate and a grant cannot both be the operative answer to the same request. Third, the arithmetic, which on this itemization is internally consistent and which this page therefore does not attack. Fourth, the premise underneath the arithmetic, which is a volume figure that has now appeared in five separate responses in this archive without ever being derived from a count. Fifth, the definitions the office volunteered, which are the most useful thing in the packet and which quietly contradict the premise.

Where the record supports criticism, the criticism is made and the document is cited. Where the record is silent, this page says so. The office’s letter is quoted at length because its own words carry the argument better than a summary would. Redacted copies of the response letter, the denial and appeal forms, the request with both fax receipts, and the seven-page cost itemization are linked under Documents below.

Summary

The request asked for two categories of record. The first was “all annual statistical reports, year-end reports, and similar summary documents that contain prosecutorial data” covering clearance rates and backlog statistics. The second was the same class of document as it relates to conviction and acquittal rates. The period, after the evening clarification, was January 2020 to the present — roughly six years.

The office’s disposition on both categories was “GRANTED IN PART.” That label is doing a lot of work. Read with the body of the letter, it means: the summary documents do not exist, and the underlying data does, and the office will sell the underlying data at a price computed from a case count.

Three sentences carry the response. The first is the certificate:

“A review of the records maintained by the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office reveals that no ‘annual statistical report,’ ‘year-end report,’ or similar summary document containing prosecutorial data as described in your request exists within the records of the public body. The undersigned hereby certifies that, after a search for records and to the best of the undersigned’s knowledge and belief, the public records requested do not exist within the records of the public body under the name nor any other name reasonably known to the public body.”

The second is the grant:

“Your request is GRANTED as to the underlying information that would allow for the compilation of the statistics requested. However, given the breadth of your request and the number of records which must be searched and reviewed to respond to such a request, the public body has determined that failing to charge for the costs of the search, examination, review, and deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information would result in unreasonably high costs to the County beyond those typically incurred in responding to FOIA requests.”

The third is the volume premise, and it appears in handwriting on the itemization rather than in the letter:

“Reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested) to locating files/cases meeting criteria described. Approximately 10 minutes per file.”

Those three sentences cannot all be the answer at once. If no summary document exists, the request for summary documents is denied, and the certificate says so. If the underlying information exists and will be compiled, the request is granted, and the grant sentence says so. The office issued both. What a requester is left holding is a certificate that closes the door, a sentence that opens it, and an invoice that closes it again — the same three-part structure that appears in FOIA 25-254 and FOIA 25-257, in the same order, from the same office, within eight weeks.

What was asked, and how the office answered

The request is dated November 24, 2025. The TelNet fax portal receipt in the packet records the first transmission at 5:52:24 p.m. on November 25, 2025, two pages, to 906-789-5197. A second receipt records a one-page transmission at 7:59:42 p.m. the same evening — the clarification that fixed the period. The office’s Notice of Denial records the request as received on 11/26/2025. The response letter is dated December 18, 2025, on Delta County Prosecutor’s Office letterhead naming Lauren M. Wickman as Prosecuting Attorney and Civil Counsel, Beth Wickwhite as Chief Assistant Prosecutor and Deputy Civil Counsel, and Lauren Mattson as Assistant Prosecutor. It is signed by Emily DeSalvo as FOIA Coordinator, contact number 906-789-5100.

The letter states that a notice to extend was “filed December 3, 2025.” That notice is not in the packet. This page therefore records the assertion and does not treat the extension as documented. On the face of the packet, the only evidence of an extension is the letter’s own sentence about it.

The two requested categories, as the request framed them:

FOIA 25-277 — the two categories requested and the disposition on each
CategoryWhat was requestedDisposition
1All annual statistical reports, year-end reports, and similar summary documents containing prosecutorial data on clearance rates and backlog statistics, January 2020 to present.Granted in part. No summary document exists; the underlying information is granted for a fee.
2The same class of document as it relates to conviction and acquittal rates, January 2020 to present.Granted in part. Same certificate; same grant of underlying information; same fee.

One detail about the request itself matters for what follows. The request was not a fishing expedition. It asked for reports the office might plausibly already produce — annual reports, year-end summaries — and it named the two measures a prosecutor’s office is most often asked about. It also included a written public-interest justification and a non-commercial certification, and it requested a fee waiver under MCL 15.234. The office’s itemization contains a section for recording the waiver decision. That section is blank.

The paper trail

The packet is 24 pages. It contains the response letter, the Notice of Denial, two excerpts of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, the county’s written FOIA policies and forms notice, both TelNet fax receipts, the original two-page request, the one-page clarification, and a seven-page Detailed Cost Itemization. It does not contain the notice to extend that the letter says was filed, and it does not contain the Fee Appeal Form or the text of MCL 15.240a — both of which were included in the 25-254 packet eight weeks earlier. A requester who wanted to appeal the fee had to find the form somewhere else.

FOIA 25-277 — documents and dates as they appear in the packet
DateDocumentWhat it establishes
Nov 24, 2025Request letter, two categoriesScope: annual and year-end statistical reports on clearance rates, backlog, conviction and acquittal rates. Fee waiver requested under MCL 15.234; public-interest justification and non-commercial certification attached.
Nov 25, 2025, 5:52:24 p.m.TelNet fax portal receipt, two pagesTransmission time to the second; to 906-789-5197.
Nov 25, 2025, 7:59:42 p.m.TelNet fax portal receipt, one pageThe clarification fax, fixing the period at January 2020 to present.
Nov 25, 2025“UPDATE” clarification pageNarrows the request period to January 2020 to present, converting an open-ended request into a six-year one.
Nov 26, 2025Office receipt dateThe operative receipt date, stated on the Notice of Denial.
Dec 3, 2025 (asserted)Notice to Extend Response TimeAsserted in the letter. Not included in the packet.
Dec 18, 2025Response letter and Notice of DenialBoth categories granted in part; certificate of nonexistence; grant of underlying information; the $34,720.00 estimate.
Dec 18, 2025Detailed Cost Itemization, seven pages$24,800.00 locate, $9,920.00 redact, $34,720.00 subtotal, $17,360.00 deposit, 180-day estimate. Waiver section blank.
UndatedMCL 15.240 excerpts (twice), blank FOIA Appeal Form, written FOIA policiesAppeal rights and the county’s general FOIA procedure. No Fee Appeal Form and no MCL 15.240a text.

The two fax receipts are worth noting for a small reason that has nothing to do with the merits. They show a requester who sent a request at 5:52 in the evening and then, two hours later, sent a one-page correction to make the request narrower and easier to answer. That is the conduct the statute is designed to encourage. The response it produced was a $34,720.00 invoice.

The certificate, the grant, and why both cannot be operative

A certificate of nonexistence is a complete answer. Under MCL 15.233(4) and (5), a public body that has searched and found nothing may say so, and the requester’s remedy is to challenge the adequacy of the search rather than to demand a document that does not exist. The office cites Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994), for the related and correct proposition that FOIA does not require a public body to create a new record. Both propositions are sound. Neither is the problem.

The problem is that the office applied the certificate to one thing and the grant to another, and then priced the second as though the first had never been written. The certificate covers “annual statistical report,” “year-end report,” and “similar summary document.” The grant covers “the underlying information that would allow for the compilation of the statistics requested.” The office is telling the requester: the summary you asked for does not exist, but the data from which a summary could be built does exist, and we will build it for a price.

That is a coherent position in the abstract. It is also a position that requires the office to answer a question it never answers: if the underlying data exists in a form that can be compiled, why is there no annual report? An office that can produce clearance rates on request, at a price, from data it already holds, is an office that could produce them on a schedule at almost no marginal cost. The absence of the report is therefore not a fact about the data. It is a choice about whether to publish.

There is a second inconsistency, smaller and sharper. The Notice of Denial checks Reason 2, Record Does Not Exist, and Reason 3, Redaction. Reason 3 on the county’s form describes a redaction to be conducted “after payment of the fee estimate.” So the form certifies, in the same document, that the record does not exist and that a redaction of it will be performed once the deposit clears. One of those boxes describes something that has already happened and the other describes something that has not. The office checked both.

This page does not argue that the certificate is false. It argues that the certificate and the grant are alternative answers, that the office issued both without reconciling them, and that the invoice is the only part of the response that behaves as though the grant were the real answer. A requester cannot tell from this packet whether the office has no statistics, or has statistics it will not release without payment. The office’s own documents support both readings.

Three prior productions, and four years they do not cover

The letter invokes three earlier requests as prior production. Each is real and each is in this archive. Together they account for part of the six-year period and leave most of it unaddressed.

Prior productions the response relies on, and the period each covers
RequestWhat the office says it producedPeriod covered
25-215Delta County Court backlog informationNot stated in this letter; the 25-215 packet addressed a defined snapshot rather than a six-year series.
25-94A Screening Decision table for January 1 to December 31, 2024, plus a document provided July 7, 2025 covering January 1 to July 3, 20252024 and part of 2025.
25-195Statistical information provided to the Board of CommissionersNot stated in this letter.

Set the three against the six-year window. The request asked for January 2020 through November 2025. FOIA 25-94 covers 2024 and the first half of 2025. Nothing in this letter describes a production covering 2020, 2021, 2022 or 2023. Those four years are the bulk of the request, and they are the years in which the office’s case-management practices changed — including the arrival of ProsecutorByKarpel, which the office has said went live in June 2024. The prior-production argument, whatever its force for 2024 and 2025, does not reach the period that matters most.

There is also a category mismatch. FOIA 25-94 produced a Screening Decision table, which records charging decisions. The current request asks for clearance rates, backlog statistics, conviction rates and acquittal rates. A screening table is an input to those measures, not the measures themselves. The office is treating “we gave you a table of decisions” as equivalent to “we gave you the statistics,” and those are not the same record.

The arithmetic, which this time is correct

This page has criticized the office’s fee arithmetic before, and in FOIA 25-254 the criticism was that the office treated minutes as quarter hours and inflated its demand by a factor of fifteen. That criticism does not apply here. On this itemization the multiplication is right, and saying so is part of keeping an honest record.

Detailed Cost Itemization, FOIA 25-277 — line by line
LineItemIncrementsRateAmount
1Search, locate and examine4,000$6.20$24,800.00
2Review for separation (exempt from nonexempt)——$0.00
3aRedaction — personal information, MCL 15.243(1)(a)1,600$6.20$9,920.00
3bRedaction — other exemptions——$0.00
4Copying——$0.00
5Other——$0.00
Subtotal$34,720.00
Deposit required (50%)$17,360.00
Estimated time to complete180 days

The hourly rate is $24.82, described as the wage with fringe benefits, and the charge per quarter hour is $6.20. That is a clean conversion: $24.82 divided by four is $6.205, rounded to $6.20. Whatever else is wrong with this form, the rate is internally consistent and it is disclosed.

Now check the two lines against the handwritten method. Line 1 says approximately 1,000 cases per year over six years, at approximately 10 minutes per file. Six thousand files at ten minutes is 60,000 minutes. Sixty thousand minutes divided by fifteen is 4,000 quarter-hour increments. Line 1 charges 4,000 increments. The line computes.

Line 3a says the same six thousand files, at approximately 4 minutes per file, for personal information under MCL 15.243(1)(a). Six thousand files at four minutes is 24,000 minutes. Twenty-four thousand divided by fifteen is 1,600 increments. Line 3a charges 1,600 increments. That line computes too.

Recomputing the itemization from its own stated method
StepLine 1 — locateLine 3a — redact
Files asserted6,000 (1,000 per year × 6 years)6,000
Minutes per file104
Total minutes60,00024,000
Quarter-hour increments4,0001,600
Rate$6.20$6.20
Amount$24,800.00$9,920.00
Matches the form?YesYes

Total labor: 84,000 minutes, which is 1,400 hours, which at $24.82 an hour is $34,748.00 — within $28 of the $34,720.00 subtotal, the difference being the rounding of $6.205 down to $6.20 across 5,600 increments. The form is coherent with itself. That is not a small thing, and it is the reason this page’s criticism lands somewhere else.

The 180-day estimate and the 1,400 hours

Here is where the coherent arithmetic meets an incoherent schedule. The itemization estimates 180 days to complete. The work it describes is 1,400 hours. Put those two numbers together and something has to give.

1,400 hours against a 180-day estimate
AssumptionHours per day requiredWhat that implies
180 calendar days, seven days a week7.8 hours per dayOne person working every single day for six months with no weekends, no holidays, no sick leave and no other FOIA work.
180 calendar days, five-day weeks (~128 business days)10.9 hours per dayOne person working nearly eleven-hour days, five days a week, for six months, on this request alone.
180 business days, five-day weeks7.8 hours per dayOne person, full-time, exclusively on this request for about eight and a half months — which is longer than the estimate allows.

None of these is impossible. A dedicated clerk could do it. But the estimate is presented as the time to complete the request, and the office has not said who would do the work, whether that person has other duties, or how the 1,400 hours fit inside 180 days. In FOIA 25-254 the letter said 90 days and the itemization said 180; here the letter and the itemization agree on 180, which is an improvement, and the number still does not reconcile with the labor it prices.

The more useful observation is about what the estimate is for. A 180-day estimate is not a promise to deliver in 180 days. It is a statement that the office will not be held to the statute’s ordinary response window while the fee is outstanding. Under MCL 15.235(6), the response period is tolled while a deposit is pending. So the practical effect of a $17,360.00 deposit and a 180-day estimate is that a request faxed in November 2025 would not produce records until roughly mid-2026, if the deposit were paid in December.

The form, the boxes, and what the packet leaves out

The Notice of Denial is the county’s standard form. On this response it checks Reason 2, Record Does Not Exist, and Reason 3, Redaction. It does not check Reason 1, which on the county’s form covers records previously disclosed or exempt under a specific provision. That omission is notable because the letter relies heavily on prior production — 25-215, 25-94 and 25-195 — and prior production is a Reason 1 argument. The form and the letter are making different arguments.

Reason 3, as printed on the form, describes a redaction “to be conducted after payment of the fee estimate.” That is a prospective statement. Nothing has been redacted yet. So the form certifies two things in the same document: that the record does not exist, and that a redaction of it will be performed later. A reader is entitled to ask which one the office means.

The packet also omits two things that were present in the 25-254 packet eight weeks earlier: the Fee Appeal Form and the text of MCL 15.240a. The response includes MCL 15.240 — twice, on pages 7 and 9 — and a blank FOIA Appeal Form, so the general appeal mechanism is documented. The fee appeal mechanism, which is the one that matters when the dispute is about $34,720.00, is not. Whether that omission was deliberate or clerical, this page does not say. It records that the form a requester would need to challenge this invoice was not in the envelope.

The waiver that was requested and never decided

The request asked for a fee waiver under MCL 15.234. It did not ask casually. It included a written public-interest justification, arguing that the records would contribute to public understanding of the operations of the prosecutor’s office, that the requester has the ability and intention to disseminate the information, and that the request is not primarily commercial. It included a certification of non-commercial purpose. That is the showing the statute contemplates, made in writing, in advance.

The county’s itemization has a section for the public-interest waiver determination. On this form that section is blank. Not denied with reasons. Not reduced. Blank.

A blank section is not a decision. It leaves the full $34,720.00 standing without any reviewable rationale, and it deprives the requester of the finding they would need to appeal. Under MCL 15.234(7) a public body may waive or reduce a fee where the request is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of government operations and is not primarily commercial. The statute says “may,” so a denial is permissible. What the statute’s structure assumes, and what the county’s own form provides for, is that the decision gets written down. Here it did not.

This is now the fourth consecutive response in this archive in which a waiver was requested in writing and the waiver section came back blank. The pattern is consistent enough that it is no longer plausible to describe it as an oversight in a single packet.

The definitions the office volunteered

The most useful thing in this packet is not the invoice. It is that the office, in explaining why it could not simply hand over a report, defined its own terms. Those definitions are worth preserving because they describe a countable dataset — and a countable dataset is exactly what the certificate says does not exist.

The office’s own definitions, as stated in the response
TermThe office’s definition
Clearance rate“The number of cases charged vs the number of cases resolved with a conviction.”
BacklogCases with no movement, in five categories: authorized and pending court; pending in court; sent for further information or investigation; denied; in review.
Backlog — category 1Authorized and pending court
Backlog — category 2Pending in court
Backlog — category 3Sent for further information or investigation
Backlog — category 4Denied
Backlog — category 5In review

Read those definitions against the certificate. A clearance rate, as the office defines it, is a ratio of two counts: cases charged and cases resolved with a conviction. A backlog, as the office defines it, is a partition of open cases into five mutually exclusive buckets. Both are the output of a query. Both require the office to know, for every case in a period, whether it was charged, whether it resolved in a conviction, and which of five statuses it currently occupies.

If the office knows those things — and it must, in order to define the categories this precisely — then the statistics exist in the only sense that matters: they can be generated from data the office holds. The certificate says no summary document exists. That may be literally true. It is also true that the office has just described, in its own words, the schema of a report it could produce. The gap between “no report exists” and “the report is a query away” is the whole of this response.

The five backlog categories are also the strongest argument against the manual-review premise. If backlog is a status field on a case, then counting cases in each status is a database operation, not a matter of reading 6,000 files at ten minutes apiece. The office’s own taxonomy implies a system that can answer the question. The itemization prices an answer as though no such system existed.

The opinion: a number that has never been counted

Here is the finding this page exists to record. Across five separate responses in this archive, the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office has priced FOIA requests using a volume figure of approximately 1,000 cases or files per year. It appears in 25-215. It appears in 25-244. It appears in 25-254, where it was paired with a units error that inflated the demand fifteenfold. It appears in 26-22. And it appears here, in handwriting, as the sole basis for a $34,720.00 invoice.

In none of those five responses does the office show where the figure comes from. There is no count, no query output, no docket total, no annual report — which is the very thing this request asked for. The number is asserted, and then multiplied, and then billed. The multiplication is arithmetic and the arithmetic is correct. The number being multiplied is a premise, and the premise has never been measured.

That is a different and in some ways more serious problem than the one in 25-254. An arithmetic error is a mistake; it can be corrected, and a fee appeal can correct it. An unmeasured premise cannot be corrected by appeal, because there is nothing on the face of the document to check it against. A requester who believes the office handles 600 cases a year rather than 1,000 has no way to prove it from this packet, and the office has no obligation to show its work. The invoice is unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable invoice is a very effective way to make a request go away.

Consider what the premise does to the request. The request asked for six years of statistics. The office answered that the statistics do not exist, that the data does, and that extracting the data requires reading 6,000 files. But the request did not ask the office to read 6,000 files. It asked for a report. If the office has a case-management system — and the office has said it does, and has described its backlog taxonomy in five statuses that are plainly fields in that system — then the report is a query, and the query does not cost $34,720.00. It costs whatever it costs to run a query and format the output.

The office’s response converts a request for a report into a request for a manual file review, and then bills the manual review. That conversion is the move. It is the same move as in 25-254, where a request for a log became a request to read case files; and in 25-257, where a request for data became a request to compile data; and in 25-244, where the invoice was prepared before the request arrived. The office does not refuse. It recharacterizes the request as something vastly more expensive, prices the recharacterized version, and lets the deposit requirement do the refusing.

None of this requires imputing bad faith. It requires only noting that the office controls both the characterization of the work and the estimate of its cost, that it has never documented the volume figure on which the cost depends, and that it has declined four times running to write down a waiver decision. A process in which one party sets the scope, sets the price, and records no reasons is a process that cannot be reviewed. That is the transparency problem this archive documents, and 25-277 is its clearest instance yet, precisely because the arithmetic is right.

What the office got right

A record that only counts failures is not a record, and this response does several things properly.

The response was timely on the face of the packet. Received November 26, 2025; answered December 18, 2025. Five business days from November 26 runs to December 4. A ten-business-day extension, if properly noticed, would run to December 19. The letter says a notice to extend was filed December 3. If that notice exists and was timely, the December 18 response is inside the extended window. This page records that the notice is not in the packet and does not treat the extension as established, but it also does not accuse the office of missing a deadline it may well have met.

The rate is disclosed and it is correct. $24.82 an hour with fringe, $6.20 per quarter hour, with the conversion shown. In an archive where fee forms often omit the rate entirely, that is a real improvement, and it is what made the arithmetic checkable at all.

The arithmetic is right. This page says so plainly because it said the opposite about 25-254, and consistency requires saying it here. Six thousand files at ten minutes is 4,000 increments. Six thousand at four minutes is 1,600. Both lines compute from the stated method.

The office defined its terms. Clearance rate, backlog, and five backlog categories, in words a reader can use. That is more than most responses in this archive offer, and it is the reason this page can make the argument it makes. The definitions are the office’s own, and they are the strongest evidence that the data is countable.

The office disclosed the prior productions rather than concealing them. Naming 25-215, 25-94 and 25-195 lets a requester see what ground has been covered. The problem is that the ground covered is 2024 and part of 2025, not the six years requested, but the disclosure itself is to the office’s credit.

The criticism on this page is therefore narrow. It is not that the office refused to produce statistics. It is that the office certified the absence of a report while describing the schema of one, priced the alternative from a volume figure it has never counted, left the waiver blank, and omitted the fee appeal form from the envelope.

How this compares to the rest of the archive

At $34,720.00, this is the third-largest fee demand in the archive. It sits behind FOIA 25-254 and FOIA 25-244, which are both $74,520.00, and behind FOIA 25-194 at $63,028.80. It is well ahead of 25-257 at $19,840.00, 25-215 at $13,248.00, 26-22 at $9,548.00 and 25-133 at $2,815.20.

What distinguishes it is not the size but the soundness of the multiplication. Of the large estimates in this archive, three are internally consistent and one is not. The 25-257 estimate computes. The 25-244 estimate computes, and its “6 YEARS requested” line was true for that request. This one computes. FOIA 25-254 does not: 800 cases at ten minutes is 533 increments, not 8,000, and the same form was issued for a different request the day before.

So the archive now contains a cleaner comparison than it had before. Two requests, eight weeks apart, from the same office, on the same form, with the same handwriting: one with arithmetic that fails by a factor of fifteen, and one with arithmetic that holds. What both share is the premise. Both multiply a volume figure the office has never documented. In 25-254 the premise was masked by the arithmetic error; here the arithmetic is clean and the premise is exposed. Taken together, the two responses show that the office’s fee estimates rest on an assumption, and that when the assumption is multiplied correctly the resulting invoice is still unfalsifiable.

On the substance, this is the first request in the archive that asked the office directly for its own performance statistics. Earlier requests asked for screening tables, backlog information, and statistical material provided to the Board of Commissioners. This one asked for clearance rates, conviction rates, acquittal rates and backlog counts — the measures by which a prosecutor’s office is ordinarily evaluated. The answer was that no such report exists, that the data does, and that the data costs $34,720.00. That is a finding about the office’s record-keeping, and it is a finding the office made about itself.

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 attaches to records the public body keeps, and it is not conditioned on the requester’s purpose. This is the provision that makes the definitions in this response significant: if the office keeps case records with charge, disposition and status fields, then records responsive to a statistical request exist in the form of those case records, whatever the office chooses to call them.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.233(4) and (5) address the situation in which a requested record does not exist. A public body may certify that it has searched and found nothing, and it must do so in writing. The certification is a denial for purposes of appeal, and the requester’s remedy is to challenge the adequacy of the search. The certificate in this response is formally proper. The question it raises is not formal: it is whether a search that produces “no annual report” from an office that can define its own clearance rate in one sentence was a search for the record or a search for the label.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994), as the office cites it, stands for the proposition that FOIA does not require a public body to create a new record. That is correct and it is well settled. It does not follow that a public body may decline to extract information from records it already keeps. Where the data exists and the only step remaining is compilation, the request is for the information in the records, and the cost of compilation is a fee question under MCL 15.234 rather than an existence question under MCL 15.233(4). The office’s grant of “the underlying information” implicitly concedes this.

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 letter asserts that a notice was filed December 3, 2025. That notice is not in the packet, so this page cannot verify that the extension was noticed in writing or that it specified a date. The response date of December 18 is consistent with a properly noticed extension and also consistent with a response one day past the unextended deadline. The record does not resolve which.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.235(6) provides that the response period is tolled while a required deposit is outstanding. This is the provision that gives a 180-day estimate its practical effect. A deposit of $17,360.00, if unpaid, suspends the clock indefinitely; if paid in December 2025, it converts a six-week response into a six-month one. The statute permits the tolling. It does not require an estimate of 180 days, and it does not relieve the office of the obligation to explain how the estimate was derived.

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 statute also requires that a public body not charge more than the actual cost of responding. On this itemization the computation from the stated method is correct, and the rate is disclosed. What the statute’s “actual cost” language reaches is the premise: a cost estimate built on an assumed volume is not a computation of actual cost, it is an extrapolation from an assumption, and the office has not shown the assumption.

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 for line 3a. Its use is not improper on its face. The difficulty is that line 3a asserts that personal information under MCL 15.243(1)(a) “will appear in all documents located” — a categorical assertion about 6,000 files that the office has not examined, since the redaction is to be performed after payment. An exemption determination made before the review it depends on is not a determination; it is an assumption about what the review will find.

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, in writing, with a public-interest justification and a non-commercial certification. 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. This is an ordinary and defensible ground for redacting victim and witness identifiers from case files. It is a less obvious ground for redacting aggregate statistics. A clearance rate is a ratio of counts. A backlog figure is a count of cases in five statuses. Neither discloses a name, an address or an identifier. If the office intends to redact personal information from a statistical compilation, it should say which personal information would appear in a document that consists of numbers.

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, and a partial denial is appealable as to the part denied. 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, on pages 7 and 9. The 180-day window to sue runs from December 18, 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 and, if the appeal is denied, to seek judicial review. The 25-254 packet included the Fee Appeal Form and the text of MCL 15.240a. This packet does not. The mechanism therefore existed but was not documented in the envelope, which matters because a fee appeal is the natural vehicle for the defects described on this page — the unmeasured volume premise and the categorical redaction assertion are both visible on the face of the itemization.

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 25-277, dated November 24, 2025, two categories: annual and year-end statistical reports on clearance rates and backlog statistics, and on conviction and acquittal rates.
  • “UPDATE” clarification page, faxed November 25, 2025, fixing the request period at January 2020 to present.
  • TelNet fax portal receipt, November 25, 2025, 5:52:24 p.m., two pages, to 906-789-5197.
  • TelNet fax portal receipt, November 25, 2025, 7:59:42 p.m., one page, to 906-789-5197.
  • Response letter of December 18, 2025 from the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office, signed by Emily DeSalvo, FOIA Coordinator, naming Lauren M. Wickman as Prosecuting Attorney and Civil Counsel, Beth Wickwhite as Chief Assistant Prosecutor and Deputy Civil Counsel, and Lauren Mattson as Assistant Prosecutor.
  • Notice of Denial of FOIA Request form, request 25-277, date received 11/26/2025, date of notice 12/18/2025, Reason 2 (Record Does Not Exist) and Reason 3 (Redaction) checked; contact Emily DeSalvo, 906-789-5100.
  • Detailed Cost Itemization, seven pages, dated December 18, 2025: 4,000 increments locate at $6.20 for $24,800.00; 1,600 increments redact at $6.20 for $9,920.00; $34,720.00 subtotal; $17,360.00 deposit; 180-day estimate; hourly rate $24.82 with fringe; Public Interest waiver section blank. Handwritten justification reads “reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested) to locating files/cases meeting criteria described. Approximately 10 minutes per file” and, for redaction, “information of a personal nature that could clearly constitute a violation of an individual’s privacy (MCL 15.243(1)(a)). Will appear in all documents located. Approximately 4 minutes per file.”
  • MCL 15.240 excerpts reproduced at pages 7 and 9 of the packet; blank FOIA Appeal Form at page 8; county written FOIA policies and forms notice at page 10.
  • FOIA 25-215, Delta County Court backlog information, invoked in the response as prior production.
  • FOIA 25-94, Screening Decision table for January 1 to December 31, 2024, and a document provided July 7, 2025 covering January 1 to July 3, 2025, invoked as prior production.
  • FOIA 25-195, statistical information provided to the Board of Commissioners, invoked as prior production.
  • FOIA 25-254, response of November 20, 2025, and its Detailed Cost Itemization, for the comparison of fee arithmetic across the two packets.
  • 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.
  • Densmore v Department of Corrections, 203 Mich 363 (1994), as cited in the response.

The redacted copies of the response letter, the denial and appeal forms, the request with both fax receipts and the clarification, and the seven-page itemization 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

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

The first is the count. A one-page request asking only for the number of cases the office handled in each of the six years 2020 through 2025 — a single number per year, no names, no case numbers, no documents — would either produce six figures or a certificate. If it produces figures, the “approximately 1,000 cases per year” premise can be checked, and every fee estimate in this archive that rests on it becomes reviewable. If it produces a certificate, then the office has certified that it does not know how many cases it handles, which is itself a finding of consequence.

The second is the query. A request asking whether the office’s case-management system can produce a count of cases by the five backlog statuses the office defined, and if so for a sample month’s output — not six years, one month — would test whether the 6,000-file manual review is necessary or is a choice. One month of output is a small ask. If the system can produce it, the premise that extraction requires reading every file collapses.

The third is the waiver. A request asking the office to record its public-interest waiver determination on the 25-277 itemization, with reasons, under MCL 15.234(7) — not to grant the waiver, just to decide it in writing — requires no new records and no new search. It asks the office to fill in a blank section on a form it has already issued. That is the smallest possible request in this archive, and its answer would establish whether the blank is an oversight or a practice.

The fourth is the fee appeal. An appeal under MCL 15.240a asking the head of the public body to require the office to document the volume figure underlying the 25-277 estimate — because the estimate multiplies an assumed 6,000 files by a per-file time without showing either the count or the sample — is available on the face of the itemization and requires no new records to frame. The arithmetic is correct; the premise is undocumented; that is precisely the kind of defect a fee appeal exists to surface.

Until one of those produces a document, the record stands as it is: a certificate that no annual statistical report exists, a grant of the underlying information, a $34,720.00 itemization whose multiplication is correct and whose premise has never been counted, a $17,360.00 deposit, a 180-day estimate that does not reconcile with the 1,400 hours it prices, a waiver section left blank, a fee appeal form missing from the envelope, and the office’s own five-category definition of a backlog — which is the clearest evidence in the packet that the numbers exist and are simply not being published.

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 December 18, 2025 cover letter, five pages: the certificate of nonexistence for both categories, the citation to MCL 15.233(4) and (5) and Densmore, the grant of 'the underlying information that would allow for the compilation of the statistics requested,' the assertion that a notice to extend was filed December 3, 2025, the office's definitions of clearance rate and backlog, the three prior productions invoked, and the $34,720.00 estimate with a $17,360.00 deposit and a 180-day timeframe. Requester identifiers removed. Notice of Denial, Appeal Form and County FOIA Policy (redacted) The Notice of Denial form recording the request as received 11/26/2025 and the notice date as 12/18/2025, with Reason 2 (Record Does Not Exist) and Reason 3 (Redaction) checked; the text of MCL 15.240; the blank FOIA Appeal Form; a second copy of MCL 15.240; and the county's written FOIA policies and forms notice. No Fee Appeal Form and no MCL 15.240a text. Requester identifiers removed. Request, Clarification and Fax Receipts (redacted) The two-page request dated November 24, 2025, the TelNet fax portal receipt for the 5:52:24 p.m. transmission on November 25, 2025, the one-page 'UPDATE' clarification fixing the period at January 2020 to present, and the second receipt for the 7:59:42 p.m. transmission that evening. Requester identifiers removed. Detailed Cost Itemization (redacted) The seven-page Detailed Cost Itemization dated December 18, 2025: $24,800.00 to locate at 4,000 increments, $9,920.00 to redact at 1,600 increments, a $34,720.00 subtotal, a $17,360.00 deposit, a 180-day estimate, and a disclosed rate of $24.82 an hour with fringe billed at $6.20 per quarter hour. The handwritten justification reads 'reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested)' at ten minutes per file to locate and four minutes per file to redact. The Public Interest waiver section is blank. Requester identifiers removed.