Illustration for FOIA 25-279: Granted on paper, billed in three parts
FOIA 25-279 · Granted in part on paper — dozens of records listed as enclosed and none enclosed; three cost itemizations totaling $34,673.79

On November 25, 2025, a request went to the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office asking for the paperwork of a small public law office: who works there, what they are paid, how the three attorneys divide the caseload, what training they take, what the office spends, and what grants pay for. It was faxed at 8:16:12 that evening, four pages, logged as received on November 26, and answered on December 18, 2025.

The answer is the most generous-looking document in this archive. It is forty-eight pages long and it says GRANTED, or GRANTED IN PART, on nearly every line. It lists organizational history, position classifications, oaths of office, job descriptions, training records, travel authorizations, conference attendance, seven years of county budgets, three grant programs, and a headcount. It says, over and over, “please find the following documents.”

None of the documents are there. The 74-page packet contains the letter, a Notice of Denial, two copies of a statute, a blank appeal form, a policy notice, and three separate cost itemizations — Attachment A at $176.96, Attachment B at $34,432.00 and Attachment C at $64.83. Together they come to $34,673.79, with $17,336.89 in deposits demanded before the granted records are produced. The grant, as delivered, is a table of contents.

How to read this page

This page separates six things. First, what was asked. Second, what the letter says was granted, and what actually arrived. Third, the office’s own description of its size — eight employees, three of them attorneys — because that number is the measure against which the rest of the packet should be read. Fourth, the three invoices, which are the only substantive thing in the envelope. Fifth, the arithmetic, which does not reconcile on any of the three attachments. Sixth, the opinion, which is that a forty-eight-page grant that encloses three bills and no records is not a grant, and that the office’s own numbers are the reason the request was reasonable in the first place.

Where the record supports criticism, the criticism is made and the document is cited. Where the record is silent, this page says so. The 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 three itemizations, the request with its fax receipt, and the extension notice are linked under Documents below.

Summary

The request had five numbered categories and a list of specific data points under each. Category 1 asked for staffing data: organizational charts, staffing reports, position classification lists, vacancy and time-to-fill statistics, part-time versus full-time breakdowns, and contract staff. Category 2 asked for attorney caseload data: assignment reports showing average cases per attorney, case distribution by type and complexity, workload balance, productivity metrics, specialization reports, and non-confidential performance evaluation summaries. Category 3 asked for training and professional development: course records with dates and costs, professional development budgets, CLE records, conference attendance with expenses, certification training, and internal training programs with rosters and effectiveness metrics. Category 4 asked for budget and expenditure data: annual budgets with line-item allocations, quarterly and monthly expenditure reports, operating expense breakdowns, capital expenditures, overtime records, and audit reports. Category 5 asked for grant funding data: applications, awards, expenditure reports, compliance reports, performance metrics and administration costs. The period was fiscal years 2020 through 2024, plus current year-to-date and, if available, the prior fiscal year as a baseline.

The office’s disposition is unusually favorable on its face. Category 1 was granted in part and denied in part. Category 2 was granted in part and denied in part. Category 3 was granted in part and denied in part. Category 4 was granted in part and denied in part. Category 5 was granted in part and denied in part. Within those categories, dozens of individual sub-items are marked GRANTED outright: the position classification lists, the staffing report, the part-time and full-time breakdown, the contract staff records, the training records, the conference attendance, the annual budgets, the grant applications, the grant awards, the grant expenditure reports, the grant compliance reports, the grant-funded job descriptions, the salary ranges, the turnover records, the headcount, the attorney-to-support-staff ratio.

Four sentences carry the response, and none of them is the sentence the office intended to be the headline.

The first is about the organizational chart. The office denied it, then supplied it:

“The office has never maintained or created an ‘organizational chart’. As such, your request for any document under that name is DENIED as a review of the records reveals they do not exist.”

What follows that denial is six years of hierarchy, year by year, with the names and titles of every attorney who held each post. The office does not have a chart. It has the information the chart would contain, and it wrote it out in prose.

The second is about the office’s size, and it is the most useful number in the packet:

“There are currently 8 employees employed by the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office” — “currently 3 attorneys, 4 clerks/support staff, and 1 victim advocate.”

The third is about specialization, and it is the sentence that makes the caseload invoice strange:

“The Delta County Prosecutor’s Office is too small to provide for ‘specializations’” — and, later, “due to the size of the Prosecutor’s Office there is no ability for one attorney to specialize in one area. All attorneys are cross-trained.”

The fourth is about the audit, and it is the sentence no one asked for:

“A review of records reveals the audits from Fiscal Year 2024 and 2025 have not been completed yet and, therefore, do not exist.”

Read together, those four sentences describe a three-attorney office that is cross-trained because it is too small to specialize, that keeps no organizational chart but can recite its own hierarchy from memory, and that is two fiscal years behind on audit. That is a coherent picture of a small, busy, thinly staffed public office. It is also the picture that makes a $34,432.00 estimate for a 6,000-file manual review hard to reconcile with the request that produced it.

What was asked, and how the office answered

The request is dated November 25, 2025. The TelNet fax portal notice in the packet records the transmission at 8:16:12 p.m. on November 25, 2025, four pages received, to 906-789-5197. 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 Wickwire 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 office took its extension and, this time, documented it. The letter states that “An extension was filed on December 3, 2025 by the Public Body,” and the packet contains the county’s Notice to Extend Response Time, dated 12-4-2025, with Reason 1 checked: “The County needs to search for, collect, or appropriately examine or review a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records pursuant to your request.” The form notes that “Only one extension may be taken per FOIA request.” The office used it. The response then arrived inside the extended window.

That is worth recording plainly, because this page has recorded the opposite before. On FOIA 25-277 the letter said an extension had been filed and the notice was missing from the envelope. Here the notice is present, dated, signed and reasoned. The office can document an extension when it chooses to.

The five categories, as the request framed them, and the disposition on each:

FOIA 25-279 — the five categories and the disposition on each
CategoryWhat was requestedDisposition
1Staffing level data: organizational charts, staffing reports, position classification lists, vacancy and time-to-fill statistics, part-time versus full-time breakdowns, contract staff.Granted in part, denied in part. The chart was denied as nonexistent and replaced with a six-year prose hierarchy. Staffing, classifications, part-time status, contract staff and headcount were granted. Vacancy and turnover records were granted but priced at Attachment A.
2Attorney caseload data: assignment reports, case distribution statistics, workload balance reports, productivity metrics, specialization reports, performance evaluation summaries.Granted in part, denied in part. Specialization reports and performance evaluation summaries were denied as nonexistent. The other four were denied as records but conceded to be derivable from underlying data, and priced at Attachment B.
3Training and professional development: course records with dates and costs, budgets, CLE records, conference attendance with expenses, certification training, internal programs with rosters and effectiveness metrics.Granted in part, denied in part. Training records, conference attendance, certification training and travel authorizations were granted. Internal program materials were refused as already produced under FOIA 25-203. Rosters and effectiveness metrics were denied as nonexistent.
4Budget and expenditure data: annual budgets, quarterly and monthly expenditure reports, operating expense breakdowns, capital expenditures, overtime records, audit reports.Granted in part, denied in part. Annual budgets and grant financial reports were granted. Office-wide expenditure reports were priced at Attachment C. Audit reports were refused as already produced under FOIA 25-196, and the office added that the 2024 and 2025 audits do not yet exist.
5Grant funding data: applications, awards, expenditure reports, compliance reports, performance metrics, administration costs.Granted in part, denied in part. Applications, awards, expenditure reports, compliance reports, job descriptions and matching requirements were granted, with certificates that no CVRP or VOCA records exist before 2022 and no VOCA receipts after 2022.

The grant that arrived as a list

Here is the finding that matters most on this page, and it is a finding about the envelope rather than about the law.

The letter says “please find the following documents” on dozens of lines. Under “Grant-funded positions and programs” it says: “In granting your request, please find the following documents: Job Descriptions for: Victim Witness Coordinator (approved 06-05-2018)…” and then lists fourteen job descriptions. Under “Training Records” it lists courses by employee. Under “Annual Budget Documents” it lists seven county budgets by fiscal year. Under “Conference Attendance Records” it lists six conferences with cities and dates. Under “Position Classification Lists” it lists twenty-eight approved positions with approval dates going back to 2009.

The 74 pages that follow contain none of them. Page 49 is the Notice of Denial. Pages 50 and 52 are the text of MCL 15.240. Page 51 is a blank appeal form. Page 53 is the county’s FOIA policy notice. Pages 54 through 74 are three cost itemizations. There is no budget page, no contract page, no oath of office, no job description, no travel authorization, no training certificate, no grant report, no position list. Every one of the 48 letter pages is letter text; the packet was checked page by page.

Two readings are possible and this page will not choose between them. Either the office transmitted the granted records in a separate transmittal that is not part of this packet, or it did not transmit them at all. If the records exist and are produced, WickmanWatch will publish them and update this page. If they do not exist, then the word “GRANTED” in this letter does not mean what a reader would take it to mean: it means the office has agreed that the record is public, not that the office has handed it over.

What the packet does establish is the sequence. The office granted the records and then, in the same envelope, demanded $17,336.89 before providing “the responsive documents.” The phrase appears three times, once per attachment. On the office’s own framing, the granted material is being held behind the priced material.

The office on its own scale

The most valuable thing in the packet is not a record. It is a number the office volunteered: eight employees. Three are attorneys. Four are clerks or support staff. One is a victim advocate. The office also disclosed that it is carrying “approximately 12-15 vacancies in time frame requested,” that those files are held by Delta County Administration “in the vault,” and that retrieving them would require substantial work.

Set that against the rest of the letter. The office is too small to have specializations. It is too small for one attorney to specialize in one area, so all three are cross-trained. It has no organizational chart. It has no performance evaluation summaries tied to caseload. It has no time allocation statistics. It has no cost-per-case figure, no resource utilization rate and no efficiency metric. It has no training effectiveness assessment. What it has is three attorneys, four support staff, one advocate, and between twelve and fifteen empty desks.

Figure 1 · Interactive

The office, as the office described itself: eight people

Three attorneys, four clerks and support staff, one victim advocate — and, by the office’s own account, twelve to fifteen vacancies. Select a bar to read what it means.

Total employees8
Attorneys3
Support & advocate5
Vacancies claimed12–15

Source: Response letter of December 18, 2025 to FOIA 25-279, pages 5–8 and 45–46 of the packet, read from a 300 dpi render and verified against a second 400 dpi pass. The office states: “there are currently 8 employees employed by the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office” and “currently 3 attorneys, 4 clerks/support staff, and 1 victim advocate.” The vacancy range is the office’s own estimate: “approximately 12-15 vacancies in time frame requested.”

Figure 1. Eight people, and between twelve and fifteen empty desks. Every estimate in this packet should be read against that scale.

The vacancy number is the strangest figure in the response. An office with eight employees that reports twelve to fifteen vacancies in the same period is describing a staffing crisis, a hiring freeze, or a filing cabinet full of positions that exist on paper and nowhere else. The office does not say which. It says the records are in the vault and that producing them will cost $176.96.

One request, three invoices

The only substantive thing in the envelope is the billing. The office split a single request into three priced workstreams, each with its own itemization, its own deposit and its own clock.

Figure 2 · Interactive

Three itemizations for one request, drawn to scale

Attachment B is 99.3 percent of the total. Attachments A and C are visible only as slivers. Select a bar to read the basis and the clock attached to each.

A$176.96
B$34,432.00
C$64.83
Total quoted$34,673.79
Deposits$17,336.89

Source: Three Delta County FOIA Detailed Cost Itemization forms dated 12/18/2025, at pages 54–60, 61–67 and 68–74 of the response packet, read from a 400 dpi render and cross-checked against the printed subtotals and deposits. Totals are the sum of the three printed subtotals; deposits are the sum of the three printed 50 percent figures. Bars are drawn to the printed subtotal, not to the corrected arithmetic discussed below.

Figure 2. One request, three invoices, three clocks. Attachment B is 99.3 percent of the money and carries the longest deadline.
FOIA 25-279 — the three itemizations, as printed
AttachmentWorkstreamBasis as printedSubtotalDepositClock
AVacancy, hiring and turnover records12–15 files × 20 minutes = 16 increments × $10.13 = $162.08; plus 24 redaction increments × $6.20$176.96$88.4830 days
BCaseload assignment, distribution, workload, productivity and specialization patterns1,000 cases/year × 6 years = 6,000 files × 10 minutes = 4,000 increments × $6.20 = $24,800.00; plus 1,600 redaction increments × $6.20$34,432.00$17,216.00180 days
COffice-wide quarterly and monthly expenditure reports72 months + 24 quarters = 96 records × about 1 minute, at $10.13 per quarter-hour increment$64.83$32.4130 days
Total$34,673.79$17,336.89

The three clocks are worth pausing on. Attachment A gives the office 30 days to produce twelve to fifteen files. Attachment C gives the office 30 days to produce 96 expenditure reports. Attachment B gives the office 180 days to produce a caseload analysis built from 6,000 files. The 180-day figure is the longest estimate in this archive, and it is attached to the smallest office in this archive — three attorneys, cross-trained, with no specialization and no caseload tracking system.

The arithmetic that does not reconcile

This page has criticized the office’s fee arithmetic before. In FOIA 25-254 the criticism was that the office treated minutes as quarter hours and inflated its demand fifteenfold. That is not what happened here. On all three attachments the method is stated correctly and the rates are stated correctly. What went wrong is the multiplication.

FOIA 25-279 — printed figures against the form’s own stated rates
AttachmentLineStated basisPrintedAt the stated rateDifference
A3a, redaction labor24 quarter-hour increments at $6.20$14.88$148.80−$133.92
B3a, redaction labor1,600 quarter-hour increments at $6.20$9,632.00$9,920.00−$288.00
C1, locate labor96 minutes, rounded down to 6 increments at $10.13$64.83$60.78+$4.05

On Attachment A the effect is visible in the subtotal. The form prints $162.08 for locate labor and $14.88 for redaction labor, and then a subtotal of $176.96 and a deposit of $88.48. Those two figures are internally consistent with $14.88 — and inconsistent with the stated rate. At $6.20 per quarter-hour, 24 increments is $148.80, which would make the subtotal $310.88 and the deposit $155.44. The office under-billed itself by $133.92 on this attachment, apparently by dropping a digit.

On Attachment B the same pattern appears at a larger scale. The form prints 1,600 increments at $6.20 and then $9,632.00, where the rate yields $9,920.00. The subtotal of $34,432.00 and the deposit of $17,216.00 are built on the smaller figure. At the stated rate the subtotal would be $34,720.00 and the deposit $17,360.00.

On Attachment C the error runs the other way. The form prints 96 records at about one minute each, which is 96 minutes, which is six and four-tenths quarter-hour increments. The form’s own instructions require partial increments to be “rounded down,” which yields six increments and $60.78. The form prints $64.83, which is six and four-tenths increments — the partial increment charged rather than rounded down. That is a $4.05 overcharge, and it is the only one of the three that runs against the requester.

None of the three errors is large in dollar terms. All three are worth recording, for two reasons. First, a fee estimate is a legal document under MCL 15.234, and a requester is entitled to check it. Second, the direction of the errors matters: the office is not inflating its invoices across the board. It is producing them quickly, from a template, with the arithmetic done by hand or by a spreadsheet that has not been checked. The same inattention that produced a $14.88 line is the inattention that produced a 180-day estimate and a 6,000-file premise.

The premise that drifted

Attachment B rests on a single sentence, handwritten into the justification field: “reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested) to locate files/cases meeting criteria described. Approximately 10 minutes per file.” One thousand cases a year for six years is 6,000 files. At ten minutes each that is 60,000 minutes, or 4,000 quarter-hour increments, or $24,800.00.

That premise has a history in this archive, and the history does not run in a straight line. In FOIA 25-277 — the first of these three requests from this same requester, answered by the same coordinator — the identical sentence appeared with the same figure: “approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested).” Six years produced 6,000 files and a $34,720.00 estimate. In FOIA 25-278, filed days later, the same sentence appeared with a smaller number: “approximately 1000 cases/year (4 YEARS requested).” Four years produced 4,000 files and a $23,146.66 estimate. Now, in 25-279, the number is back to six, and six years again produces 6,000 files, this time at $34,432.00.

So the figure oscillates — six, then four, then six — across three requests filed by the same person, answered on the same day, by the same coordinator, from the same template. The per-file rate never changes. The ten-minutes-per-file assumption never changes. The 1,000-cases-a-year volume never changes. Only the year count moves, and it moves to match whatever the request asked for rather than to match any count the office has taken. That is the tell: the estimate is not measuring a workload. It is restating the request back to the requester with a price attached.

That matters here because the request did not ask for six years. It asked for “Fiscal years 2020 through 2024,” plus current year-to-date, plus the prior fiscal year “if available” as a baseline. Five fiscal years, plus a partial year. The office’s own letter describes the window as “from January 1, 2020 to the present,” which at the December 18, 2025 response date is just under six calendar years. So six is defensible as a calendar count and not defensible as a fiscal-year count, and the office does not explain which it used.

What the office also does not explain is where 1,000 cases a year comes from. It is not a docket total, a case-management query, or a number the office has ever produced. It is an assumption, repeated across at least seven responses in this archive, that has never been supported by a count. On this request the office had a better option available: it had already told the requester, in FOIA 25-278, that 62 cases went to trial across four years, and it had the case-management system that could produce a filing count in a single query. It used neither. It used the sentence.

What the office would not produce

Three refusals in this response are worth naming separately, because each one is a records-access decision rather than a records-management fact.

The first is the internal ProsecutorbyKarpel training materials. The request asked for “Internal Training Programs conducted, attendance rosters, and effectiveness metrics.” The office answered:

“The only ‘Internal Training Programs conducted’ related to training for ProsecutorbyKarpel. Materials related to those trainings have previously been provided to you in response to FOIA Request 25-203. As these materials have been previously disclosed to you, and no good cause has been established on why the same documents should be produced, your request is DENIED.”

The second is the audit reports. The request asked for “Audit Reports related to financial operations and budget compliance.” The office answered:

“[P]reviously provided pursuant to FOIA Request 25-196. As no good cause has been established why the same documents should be provided a second time, the documents will not be reproduced. Moreover, a review of records reveals the audits from Fiscal Year 2024 and 2025 have not been completed yet and, therefore, do not exist.”

The third is the demographic statistics. The request asked for “Diversity and demographic statistics (aggregate, non-confidential).” The office denied that any such record exists — and then supplied the substance in prose: “the current demographics of the Prosecutor’s Office is as follows: 25 to 50 year old, Caucasian, non-Hispanic, females.”

The “no good cause” refusal deserves a note. Michigan’s FOIA does not contain a good-cause requirement for a second request, and a public body that has already produced a record is not obliged to produce it again — but the ordinary answer is to point the requester to the prior production, not to deny the request for want of justification. Here the office did both: it identified the prior request and it denied. A requester who wanted the audit reports for fiscal years 2020 through 2023, in a single envelope with the rest of the budget material, was told to go back to an earlier envelope. That is a defensible administrative convenience and a poor transparency practice, and this page records it as the latter.

The audit sentence is the more serious one. “The audits from Fiscal Year 2024 and 2025 have not been completed yet” is an admission that the county’s prosecutor’s office is two fiscal years behind on its own audit cycle. The office volunteered it inside a denial. It is not a FOIA violation. It is a budget-oversight fact, and it belongs on the record.

The offer the office did not take

The request contained a section the requester wrote specifically to make compliance easier. It is headed “If the Office Claims This Request Is ‘Burdensome,’” and it says:

“[P]lease do not deny the request. I am fully willing to re-submit these categories as separate, individual FOIA requests so long as you identify which portions you believe require separate processing. This is not a waiver of my rights under FOIA; it is simply an offer of cooperation to facilitate timely compliance.”

The office did not identify any portion as requiring separate processing. It did not deny the request as burdensome. It issued three estimates instead — which is, in effect, a fourth answer: not “this is too much to process,” but “this is too much to process for free.”

That is a legitimate statutory position. MCL 15.234 permits a public body to charge for labor, and a voluminous request can be priced. But the offer on the table was to divide the work so that each part could be answered, and the office declined to divide it. It priced the whole thing and left the requester to guess which of the three attachments corresponds to which of the five categories. Attachment A maps to Category 1. Attachment B maps to Category 2. Attachment C maps to part of Category 4. Categories 3 and 5 — training and grants — were granted without a fee, and produced nothing.

What this adds to the record

Three things, and they are durable.

The first is the office’s own size. Eight employees, three attorneys, four clerks and support staff, one victim advocate, twelve to fifteen vacancies. That is now on the record in the office’s own words, in a signed response, and it is the measure against which every future estimate from this office should be read. A three-attorney office that says it cannot specialize because it is too small, and then prices a 6,000-file manual review at $34,432.00 to describe how those three attorneys divide their work, has described a problem of its own making.

The second is the audit gap. Fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025 audits “have not been completed yet.” The office did not have to say that. It said it inside a denial, which is where the most useful sentences in this archive tend to live.

The third is the pattern of the grant that encloses a bill. FOIA 25-277 produced a $34,720.00 estimate and almost nothing else. FOIA 25-278 produced 62 trials from a calendar and a $23,146.66 estimate the office itself called moot. FOIA 25-279 produces forty-eight pages of GRANTED, no records, and three invoices totaling $34,673.79. Across three requests filed the same day and answered the same day, the office has quoted $92,540.45 in fees and produced, in total, one table of trial counts and two blank forms.

Opinion: the invoice is the answer

A FOIA response is supposed to be a delivery. The statute says a public body must either grant a request and make the record available, or deny it and say why, or grant it in part and separate the exempt from the non-exempt. It does not say a public body may grant a request in writing, list the records it has granted, and then send a bill instead of the records. That is what this packet does, and it does it at a scale — forty-eight pages — that makes the grant look substantial until you notice that nothing in the envelope is a record.

The fair reading of the office’s position is that the granted records are being held pending payment of the deposits. The letter says so three times: the deposit is required “before providing the responsive documents.” If that is the position, then the office has conditioned the release of records it has already deemed public on the payment of estimates for records it has not yet searched for. Those are different things. The budgets, the job descriptions, the oaths of office and the travel authorizations were granted without a fee. They should have been in the envelope. They were not.

The second thing the packet shows is how a small office produces a large bill. It does it by assuming a case volume rather than counting one, by multiplying that assumption across a number of years that is chosen to match the request, by adding a per-file redaction rate that has never been tested against an actual redaction, and by splitting the result across three forms so that no single number looks unreasonable. $176.96 is reasonable. $64.83 is reasonable. $34,432.00 is the one that matters, and it is the one built entirely on the sentence.

The third thing is the arithmetic. A $14.88 line where the rate yields $148.80 is a clerical error, and this page will not pretend otherwise. But it is also evidence of how the estimate was made: quickly, by hand, from a template, without a check. A document produced that way is not a considered assessment of the work required. It is a number that fills a field. And a requester who is asked to pay $17,336.89 on the strength of it is entitled to ask what, exactly, was counted.

What was counted, on this record, is eight employees and three attorneys. That is the office. It is small, it is cross-trained, it is carrying more than a dozen vacancies, and it is two years behind on audit. None of that is a scandal. All of it is a reason for the public to be able to see the budgets, the grants, the job descriptions and the training records without paying $34,673.79 for the privilege. The office granted those records. It should send them.

What would change this page

If the office produces the records the letter describes as enclosed — the seven budgets, the fourteen job descriptions, the position classification lists, the oaths of office, the thirteen travel authorizations, the training records, the CVRP, VOCA and CESF grant files — WickmanWatch will publish them, in full and unredacted except for personal information, and will say so at the top of this page. That is the outcome the request was designed to produce, and it remains available.

If the office corrects the three itemizations, this page will record the corrected figures. If it explains the six-year premise with a case count, this page will publish the count. If it produces the fiscal year 2024 and 2025 audits when they are completed, this page will link them.

And if the office’s position is that a grant of records is satisfied by a list of records, then that position should be stated plainly, in writing, so that every requester in Delta County knows what “GRANTED” means on a Delta County form. The statute already says what it means. The office’s practice, on this packet, says something else.

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 25-279, dated November 25, 2025, four pages, headed “RE: Freedom of information Act Request for Personnel and Resource Data”: five categories (staffing level data, attorney caseload data, training and professional development data, budget and expenditure data, grant funding data), a time period of fiscal years 2020 through 2024 plus current year-to-date and a prior fiscal year baseline, a format-of-production section requesting Excel or CSV for data sets and PDF for reports, five public-interest justifications, a section headed “If the Office Claims This Request Is ‘Burdensome’” offering to divide the request into separate narrower requests, a fee waiver request under MCL 15.234, a non-commercial certification, and a certificate of service dated November 25, 2025 naming Emily DeSalvo and [email protected].
  • TelNet fax portal receipt, November 25, 2025, 8:16:12 p.m., four pages received from 17732737567, sender CSID 14154847068, to 906-789-5197.
  • Notice to Extend Response Time, dated 12-4-2025, stating that “An extension was filed on December 3, 2025,” reason 1 checked — the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records” ground — and noting that only one extension may be taken per request.
  • Response letter of December 18, 2025 from the Delta County Prosecutor’s Office, signed by Emily DeSalvo, FOIA Coordinator, 906-789-5100, on letterhead naming Lauren M. Wickman as Prosecuting Attorney and Civil Counsel, Beth Wickwire as Chief Assistant Prosecutor and Deputy Civil Counsel, and Lauren Mattson as Assistant Prosecutor. The letter marks dozens of sub-items granted in whole or in part across the five categories, states that the office is providing the documents, and points to three attachments.
  • Notice of Denial of FOIA Request form, request 25-279, date received 11/26/2025, date of this notice 12/18/2025, received via fax. The redaction reason describes “defendant names, victim or witness names, addresses, dates of births, telephone numbers, credit card information” and states that “any determination of the exact exemptions would be conducted after payment of the fee estimate.” The reason-box marks are a pre-printed form artifact and are not relied on.
  • MCL 15.240 excerpts at pages 50 and 52; blank FOIA Appeal Form at page 51; county written FOIA policies and forms notice at page 53.
  • Attachment A, Detailed Cost Itemization, pages 54–60, dated December 18, 2025: line 1, 12–15 files at 20 minutes each, $40.54 per hour with fringe, $10.13 per quarter-hour, 16 increments, $162.08; line 3a, 3 minutes per file at $24.82 per hour, $6.20 per quarter-hour, 24 increments printed as $14.88; subtotal printed $176.96; deposit $88.48; 30-day estimate; Public Interest waiver section blank.
  • Attachment B, Detailed Cost Itemization, pages 61–67, dated December 18, 2025: line 1, handwritten justification “reviewing approximately 1000 cases/year (6 YEARS requested) to locate files/cases meeting criteria described. Approximately 10 minutes per file,” $24.82 per hour, $6.20 per quarter-hour, 4,000 increments, $24,800.00; line 3a, 4 minutes per file, 1,600 increments printed as $9,632.00; subtotal printed $34,432.00; deposit $17,216.00; 180-day estimate; waiver section blank.
  • Attachment C, Detailed Cost Itemization, pages 68–74, dated December 18, 2025: line 1, “each record for the 6 years requested, for each month (72 total) and each quarter (24) would need to be located. total of 96. Approximately 1 minutes per file,” $40.54 per hour with fringe, $10.13 per quarter-hour, printed as $64.83; subtotal printed $64.83; deposit $32.41; 30-day estimate; waiver section blank.
  • FOIA 25-277 and FOIA 25-278, responses of December 18, 2025 and their itemizations, for the comparison of the year count (six, then four, then six) and the shared “approximately 1000 cases/year” volume premise.
  • 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 letter, the denial and appeal forms, the three fee itemizations, the request with its fax receipt, and the extension notice are linked under Documents below. Requester identifying information has been removed from the published copies; the substance of the response is unchanged.

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, forty-eight pages: the item-by-item disposition of all five categories and every specific data point, the six-year prose hierarchy of attorney positions, the position classification lists back to 2009, the training records by person, the thirteen travel authorizations, the conference list, the budget and grant inventories, the headcount of 8 employees and 3 attorneys, the volunteered demographic description, the admission that the fiscal year 2024 and 2025 audits do not exist, and the refusals under FOIA 25-203 and 25-196. Notice of Denial and Appeal Forms (redacted) Five pages: the Notice of Denial for request 25-279 (received 11/26/2025, notice 12/18/2025, delivered by fax), two reproductions of MCL 15.240, a blank FOIA Appeal Form, and the county's FOIA policy notice. The redaction reason states that 'any determination of the exact exemptions would be conducted after payment of the fee estimate.' Fee Itemizations A, B and C (redacted) Twenty-one pages, three complete Detailed Cost Itemizations dated 12/18/2025. Attachment A, pages 54-60: $176.96, deposit $88.48, 30 days, for vacancy and turnover files. Attachment B, pages 61-67: $34,432.00, deposit $17,216.00, 180 days, for a 6,000-file caseload review. Attachment C, pages 68-74: $64.83, deposit $32.41, 30 days, for office-wide expenditure reports. The Public Interest waiver section is blank on all three. Request and Fax Receipt (redacted) Six pages: the TelNet fax portal notice recording transmission at 8:16:12 p.m. on November 25, 2025, four pages to 906-789-5197, followed by the request itself with its five numbered categories, the time period, the specific data points, the format and organization requirements, the public-interest justifications, the offer to split the request if the office calls it burdensome, the non-commercial certification and the certificate of service. Notice to Extend Response Time (redacted) Nine pages: the county's Notice to Extend Response Time for FOIA Request, dated 12-4-2025, with Reason 1 checked — the need to search for, collect or review 'a voluminous amount of separate and distinct public records' — the statement that only one extension may be taken per request, the contact line for Emily DeSalvo, and the accompanying county forms and policy notice.