Illustration for FOIA 26-22: No conviction rate on file — $9,548 to look
FOIA 26-22 · Denied — record does not exist; $9,548 quote for the underlying files

On January 30, 2026, a requester faxed the Delta County Prosecutor's Office a one-page request asking for one thing: the office's overall conviction success rate from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025, in whatever form the office already keeps it — a report, a spreadsheet, a database output. The request anticipated the obvious answer. If no such calculation is maintained, it said, just say so. It also asked for a waiver of fees, and for an itemized estimate before any work was done if a fee was coming.

Six days later the office replied. The letter is headed “GRANTED IN PART, DENIED IN PART.” No rate was produced. Instead the office certified that no document containing the rate exists, cited the no-duty-to-create provision, and then — in the same letter — offered to sell the requester the underlying case files so he could compute the rate himself. The price was $9,548, the deposit was $4,774, and the delivery estimate was 270 days.

The denial of the rate itself may well be lawful. A conviction success rate is a calculation, not a document, and Michigan's Freedom of Information Act does not require a public body to perform calculations it has never performed. That part of the file deserves a fair reading, and this page gives it one. But the fee quote is a different matter. In it, the office priced a production the request never asked for, charged $5,456 to redact records it says do not answer the question, never ruled on the fee waiver, set a nine-month clock without explaining it, and merged its deposit with a separate request from a different file. Those are the issues this page examines.

How to read this page

Documented facts come from the released records and are dated and quoted. The agency's position is what the office asserted or did. Legal interpretation is analysis of Michigan's Freedom of Information Act, and is labeled as such. Open questions are issues the record does not resolve. Nothing on this page asserts that the denial of the rate was unlawful, that anyone acted in bad faith, or that the office was obligated to compute a statistic it does not maintain. Where the record supports only a question, only a question is stated.

Summary

FOIA 26-22 is a one-page request answered by a seventeen-page packet that produced nothing. That ratio is the story. The request asked for a single statistic or an honest statement that the statistic does not exist. The response delivered the honest statement — and then attached a bill.

Three numbers organize the file. $9,548 is the estimated fee. 3,300 is the number of case files the office says it would have to review, derived from its own figure of “approximately 1,100 files per year” across 2023, 2024 and 2025. 270 days is how long the office says it would take. Against those, a fourth number: zero pages produced, and zero dollars paid.

The most useful thing in the packet is not the denial. It is the arithmetic. For the first time in this archive, the office has put a number on its own criminal caseload: roughly 1,100 files a year, every year, for three years running. That figure appears in a document whose purpose is to explain why the office cannot report aggregate statistics. The tension between those two statements is the heart of this page.

The second most useful thing is the fee itemization's waiver section, which the office left entirely blank. The request asked for a fee waiver in so many words. The office's own form contains a box for granting one and a box for reducing one, and a line reading “After Waiver: $____.” None of them was filled in. The record therefore shows a waiver request that was received, a form designed to record a decision on it, and no decision recorded.

What was requested

The request is dated January 30, 2026 and captioned “Request for Aggregate Criminal Case Statistics.” It was transmitted by fax to the county's FOIA line at [email protected] and arrived at 12:37:35 p.m. Eastern on Friday, January 30, 2026, one page. The request record reads:

“Any existing document report, spreadsheet, or database output reflecting the overall conviction success rate of the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from the prosecutor's election date through December 31, 2025.”

And then, immediately after it, the sentence that should have framed the whole response:

“If no such calculation is maintained, please indicate that no responsive record exists. This request does not require creation of a new record.”

Four features of the request matter to how it should have been read.

It asked for a rate, not a total. A conviction success rate is a ratio. It has a numerator — convictions — and a denominator — cases disposed. It is not the same thing as a count of cases filed, and it is not the same thing as a count of charges. The request used the phrase “overall conviction success rate” three times and never asked for a raw total. This distinction becomes important later, because the office's letter repeatedly answers a request for an “aggregate numerical total” that the requester did not make.

It asked only for what already exists. The request named three places a rate might live — a document report, a spreadsheet, a database output — and then expressly disclaimed any obligation to create one. This is a requester conceding the no-creation rule before the office had to invoke it.

It asked for a fee waiver, and for an estimate before processing. The request states: “I request a waiver of all fees pursuant to MCL 15.234. If any fee is anticipated, please provide a detailed written itemization prior to processing.” That is two requests in one sentence: decide the waiver, and if you are going to charge, tell me first.

It asked for a response in five business days. The request cites MCL 15.235(2), which is the correct provision.

One drafting point deserves mention because it fixed the scope of everything that followed. The request defined the start of the period as “the prosecutor's election date,” which is imprecise — an election and a term beginning are different days. The office resolved the ambiguity in a footnote: “Please note that Prosecutor Wickman was elected in November 2022 General Election, and was sworn in for her term starting on January 1, 2023.” That footnote is the most useful sentence in the letter. It fixes the requested period at January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025 — thirty-six months, three calendar years. Every calculation on this page runs from that number, and the number comes from the office.

The paper trail

Figure 1 · The paper trail

Seven dates, three of them deadlines the office set or the statute imposed. Select any date to read what happened and which clock it started.

The dates as a list
DateEventAuthority
2026-01-30Request faxed, 12:37:35 p.m. EasternFax delivery notification
2026-02-02Deemed receivedMCL 15.235(1)
2026-02-05Denial and $9,548 itemization issuedMCL 15.235(2)
2026-03-2245-day window to challenge the fee closesMCL 15.240a(1)(b)
2026-03-2548-day deposit date — never stated in the packetMCL 15.234(14)
2026-08-04180-day window for judicial review closesMCL 15.240(1)(b)
2026-10-23This page published—
Figure 1. The request, the deemed receipt, the response, and the three clocks that started when the response issued. On timeliness the office was correct: the fax arrived Friday, January 30; the deemed receipt was Monday, February 2; the response came Thursday, February 5, the third business day, with no extension taken. The 45-day fee-appeal window closed March 22, 2026 and the 180-day judicial-review window closed August 4, 2026. Sources: the fax delivery notification, the February 5, 2026 letter and Notice of Denial, and MCL 15.235(1), 15.234(14), 15.240(1)(b) and 15.240a(1)(b).

January 30, 2026 — the fax

Documented: The IPFone delivery notification records a one-page transmission to [email protected] at 12:37:35 p.m. Eastern on Friday, January 30, 2026, with the sender's fax station identifier, which is redacted here because it is tied to the requester's fax line. The notification is generated by the fax platform rather than by the requester, and it appears twice in the packet — once in the body of the production and once as the last page, which is the request as it came off the receiving machine.

February 2, 2026 — the receipt date, correctly computed

Documented: The letter states that the request was “received by the Delta County Prosecutor's Office on February 2, 2026.” The Notice of Denial form carries a “Date Received” field reading 02/02/2026.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: That date is right, and it is right for a reason worth stating. Under MCL 15.235(1), a request delivered by fax or email “is not received by a public body's FOIA coordinator until 1 business day after the electronic transmission is made.” January 30, 2026 was a Friday. One business day later is Monday, February 2. The office applied the rule correctly and recorded the correct date on both the letter and the form. On this point the file is clean, and the record should say so.

February 5, 2026 — the response, three business days in

Documented: The letter and the Notice of Denial are both dated February 5, 2026. Counting from Monday, February 2, the fifth business day was Monday, February 9. The response issued on Thursday, February 5 — the third business day. It was timely by two business days, and no extension was taken because none was needed.

Documented: The letter is signed by Lauren M. Wickman as Chief Prosecuting Attorney and by Emily DeSalvo as FOIA Coordinator. The Notice of Denial form carries a signature in the coordinator's block.

The two clocks

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Two separate deadlines began on February 5, 2026, and both have now run.

The first is the fee-appeal clock. Under MCL 15.240a(1)(b), a person who believes a required fee exceeds what the act permits may bring a civil action for a fee reduction within 45 days after receiving notice of the fee. Forty-five days from February 5, 2026 is March 22, 2026. That date has passed. A separate route existed — a written appeal to the head of the public body under MCL 15.240a(1)(a), which must use the word “appeal” and which the head must decide within ten business days — but that route leads to a determination, not to a court, unless the determination is then challenged within the 45-day window.

The second is the disclosure clock. Under MCL 15.240(1)(b), a civil action to compel disclosure must be filed within 180 days of the final determination. One hundred eighty days from February 5, 2026 is August 4, 2026. That date has also passed.

As of the publication of this page, both windows are closed. That does not make the fee quote lawful or unlawful; it makes it unlitigated. What remains available is a new request, drafted around what this packet now establishes, and that is where the last section of this page goes.

What was produced

Nothing was produced. FOIA 26-22 is a zero-page production: no rate, no report, no spreadsheet, no export, no count. The seventeen-page packet is entirely process. Its contents can be listed in a table in a way that makes the proportions visible.

Contents of the seventeen-page response packet
PagesContentFunction
1–2Response letter, dated February 5, 2026Denial of the rate; offer to sell underlying files; $9,548 estimate; 270-day estimate
3Notice of Denial formBox 2, “Record Does Not Exist,” marked
4MCL 15.240 statutory excerptBoilerplate: appeal rights and damages
5FOIA Appeal Form (blank)Boilerplate: blank form
6MCL 15.240 statutory excerpt (duplicate)Boilerplate: identical to page 4
7County FOIA policy pageBoilerplate: website and contact information
8–14Detailed Cost Itemization FormSeven pages of fee form: $9,548 total, $4,774 deposit
15–16Fax delivery notificationsTransmission record, January 30, 2026, 12:37 p.m.
17The request as receivedOne page
Pages devoted to appeal instructions and statutes3 of 17

Three of seventeen pages are the statute and a blank appeal form, and a fourth is a page of general policy. That is four pages of boilerplate about how to challenge a decision, in a packet that produced no records. The attention went to the appeal instructions rather than to the search.

On the label. The letter's opening line is “GRANTED IN PART, DENIED IN PART.” This archive records FOIA 26-22 as denied, and the reason should be stated plainly. A partial grant means some records were released and others were withheld. Here nothing was released. What the office offered was not a record but a price: pay $9,548 and wait 270 days, and the office will produce case files from which the requester might compute the rate himself. An offer to sell a production is not a grant of a request, and a request for a rate is not satisfied by an offer to sell the underlying files. Recording this as a partial grant would inflate the site's “granted in part” count with a file that produced zero pages. It is recorded as a denial, with the fee quote tracked separately, because that is what the record shows.

The $9,548 quote

Figure 2 · How the $9,548 divides

Two labour lines, both priced at $6.20 per fifteen-minute increment. Switch the unit to see the same quote as dollars, as hours, or as cost per file.

Show as
Total quoted$9,548.00
Deposit, 50%$4,774.00
Effective hourly$24.80
Billed hours385.0

The form prints $24.82 as the hourly wage with fringe benefit, which works out to $24.80 across the 385 billed hours. It never prints the base wage or the percentage multiplier that produced it.

The numbers as a table
LineQuarter-hoursHoursRateAmountPer file
Line 1 — locate and review660165.0$6.20$4,092.00$1.24
Line 3a — separate and redact880220.0$6.20$5,456.00$1.65
Total1,540385.0—$9,548.00$2.89
Figure 2. The estimate, rebuilt from the itemization's own line items. Two labour components, $4,092 to locate and $5,456 to redact, total $9,548, with a 50% deposit of $4,774. Both components are priced at $6.20 per fifteen-minute increment. The form prints $24.82 as the hourly wage with fringe benefit, which works out to $24.80 across the 385 billed hours, but never prints the base wage or the multiplier that produced it. Source: Delta County FOIA Detailed Cost Itemization Form, dated February 5, 2026, Request No. 26-22.

The itemization is a seven-page form. Stripped to its numbers, it contains two charges.

FOIA 26-22 detailed cost itemization, as issued February 5, 2026
LineComponentIncrementsHoursRateCharge
1Labor to locate and examine — “approximately 1,100 files/year,” 3 minutes per file660165$6.20$4,092
2Labor for copying or duplication———$0
3aEmployee labor to separate exempt from nonexempt — 4 minutes per file, citing MCL 15.243(1)(a)880220$6.20$5,456
3bContracted redaction labor———$0
4Copying or duplication———$0
5Mailing———$0
Subtotal fees$9,548
Good-faith deposit required before production, 50% of the estimate$4,774
Estimated time to produce, measured from receipt of the deposit270 days
Amount paid by the requester, as documented in this packet$0

Documented: The arithmetic on the form is coherent, and it is worth saying so before criticizing it. Line 1 prices a search of approximately 1,100 files a year for each of 2023, 2024 and 2025 — 3,300 files — at three minutes per file. Three thousand three hundred files at three minutes is 9,900 minutes, or 165 hours, which is exactly 660 fifteen-minute increments. Line 3a prices the same 3,300 files at four minutes per file: 13,200 minutes, or 220 hours, which is exactly 880 increments. The two lines together come to 1,540 increments at $6.20, which is $9,548. Every figure on the form follows from the one before it. There is no arithmetic error here.

The problem is not the multiplication. It is what is being multiplied.

What the $9,548 actually buys

Documented: The letter explains the charge this way: the request “could be provided in the form of the underlying information that would allow for your own compiling of the ‘aggregate numerical total’ you have requested,” and the cost reflects “review of approximately 1,100 files per year (2023, 2024, 2025) submitted for review to locate dispositional documents.”

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Read carefully, that sentence describes a different request than the one that was filed. The requester asked for a rate. The office priced a review of 3,300 individual case files. Those are not the same production, and the difference is not small. The request said in terms that it sought no individual case files and no personally identifiable information. The office's answer is to offer precisely the thing the request disclaimed, at a price of $9,548, with a nine-month wait.

There is a second difficulty. Under MCL 15.234(1)(b), redaction labor is a component of the fee for records that are being produced. It is the cost of “separating and deleting of exempt information from nonexempt information” in a record that will be furnished. Here, $5,456 of the estimate — more than half of it — is the cost of redacting 3,300 files that the requester did not ask for and that would only be produced if he paid for a production he did not request. If he paid, he would receive redacted case files and still have to compute the rate himself. If he did not pay, no redaction would occur. Either way, the $5,456 describes work that is contingent on a transaction the request never proposed.

That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of what the estimate is an estimate of. A fee estimate is supposed to price the work needed to answer the request. This one prices the work needed to answer a request nobody made.

The blank wage line

Documented: On both line 1 and line 3a, the field labeled “Hourly Wage Charged” is blank. The only wage figure entered is on the alternative line, labeled “Hourly Wage with Fringe Benefit Cost: $24.82.” The percentage multiplier field beside it — the field that is supposed to record how much of that $24.82 is fringe benefit — is also blank. The charge per quarter hour is $6.20, which is $24.80 per hour.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: Three observations follow, and the third is the one that matters.

First, MCL 15.234(2) provides that a public body “may also add up to 50% to the applicable labor charge amount to cover or partially cover the cost of fringe benefits if it clearly notes the percentage multiplier used to account for benefits in the detailed itemization.” The multiplier is not noted. The form has a place for it and the place is empty.

Second, MCL 15.234(1)(a) and (1)(b) cap the rate at “the hourly wage of its lowest-paid employee capable of” doing the work. The form's own instructions repeat that cap. The itemization does not identify the position, the pay grade, or the base wage, and it leaves the “Hourly Wage Charged” line blank. A reader cannot verify from the face of the form that $24.82 is the lowest-paid capable employee's rate rather than someone else's.

Third, the numbers do not quite agree with their own labels. If $24.82 is the wage with fringe benefits, then the base wage must be lower and the fringe multiplier must be greater than zero. But $6.20 per quarter hour is $24.80 per hour, which is essentially $24.82 with no fringe added at all. Either the label is wrong — $24.82 is the base wage and no fringe was charged — or the per-increment rate is wrong. The difference is small in dollars and large in kind: a form that mislabels its own wage line is a form whose other lines deserve checking rather than assuming. The same defect appeared in the FOIA 25-118 estimate, where the “Hourly Wage Charged” line was also blank.

The 3,300 files

Figure 3 · The estimate, rebuilt from the office's own inputs

The office counted 3,300 files and priced them at 3 minutes to locate and 4 minutes to redact. Move either slider to test how much the total depends on those two assumptions.

3 min
4 min
Recalculated total$9,548.00
Against the quote±0
Total hours385.0 hr
Quarter-hours1,540

Every figure follows arithmetically from the 1,100-files-per-year figure printed on line 1. The math is sound. What the math cannot show is that to price the search, the office had to count the files — and the count is itself aggregate information about its caseload.

The arithmetic as a table
StepSearchRedaction
Files per year1,1001,100
Years33
Files3,3003,300
Minutes per file34
Total minutes9,90013,200
Hours165.0220.0
Quarter-hours at $6.20660880
Amount$4,092.00$5,456.00
Figure 3. The estimate rebuilt step by step from the office's own inputs. Every figure follows arithmetically from the 1,100-files-per-year figure printed on line 1 of the itemization, and at three and four minutes per file the total lands exactly on the $9,548 the office quoted. The math is sound. The observation at the foot of the figure is separate from the math: to price the search, the office had to count the files, and the count is a piece of aggregate information about its own caseload. Source: Detailed Cost Itemization Form, lines 1 and 3a.

This is the part of the packet that a reader should linger on.

Documented: Line 1 of the itemization states that the search would require locating documents “in approximately 1,100 files/year to include charging documents, dispositional documents, sentencing documents,” and that the “estimated time per file is 3 minutes.” The letter repeats the figure: “approximately 1,100 files per year (2023, 2024, 2025).”

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: A public body that can state its annual file population to the nearest hundred has counted its files. That count is aggregate information about the office's own work. It is not the conviction success rate, and it is not a count of cases — a file is not a case, and a case can span several files — but it is a statistic, and it is one the office produced without difficulty in the middle of a letter explaining why statistics about its caseload cannot be produced.

The comparison with FOIA 26-20 is unavoidable. In that file, decided the same day, the office certified that no aggregate case total existed and that producing one would require creating a new record. Here, in a different letter signed by the same coordinator on the same date, the office states its annual file volume, its per-file review time to the minute, and the total hours and dollars those imply. The two positions are not strictly contradictory — a body can know how many files it has without maintaining a document that reports a conviction rate — but they sit awkwardly together, and the office does not acknowledge the tension.

The fair question is not “why won't you count?” The office has counted. The fair question is: if the office can quantify the population of files it would have to review, what prevents it from reporting how many of those files ended in a conviction? The office may have a good answer. It has not given one. The letter asserts that no such document exists and stops there, without describing what its case management system can report, what reports it routinely runs, or why a rate is different in kind from the file count it volunteered.

There is a further point, and it cuts in the office's favor. A conviction success rate is a harder number than a file count. It requires defining what counts as a conviction, deciding whether dismissals and deferrals belong in the denominator, handling cases that are still open at the end of the period, and reconciling charging documents against dispositional documents. Reasonable prosecutors could disagree about all of it. The office is entitled to say that it does not maintain such a calculation, and a court would likely accept that answer. What the office is not entitled to do is price the work of building the calculation and present the price as the answer to a request that asked only whether the calculation already existed.

270 days

Figure 4 · Two clocks, measured against each other

The office estimated 385 hours of work and 270 days to deliver it. Adjust the hours a single position could work per business day to see how much of that capacity the quote actually uses.

8.0 hr
Calendar days stated270
Business days in window192.9
Available capacity2,160.0 hr
Capacity used17.8%
Billed per business day2.00 hr

The response clock was met comfortably: three business days against a five-day limit. The production clock is 270 calendar days against an estimated 385 hours of work. The itemization does not explain the gap between the labour estimate and the delivery estimate.

The clock as a table
MeasureValue
Calendar days stated in the letter270
Business days in that window192.9
Billed labour in the quote385.0 hr
Billed hours per business day2.00 hr
Full eight-hour days of work48.1
Capacity at 8 hours per business day2,160.0 hr
Share of that capacity the quote uses17.8%
Figure 4. Two clocks, measured against each other. The response clock was met comfortably: three business days against a five-day limit. The production clock is 270 calendar days, roughly 193 business days, against an estimated 385 hours of work — about two hours of billed labour per business day, or 48 full eight-hour days. Set against the 2,160 hours one full-time position would supply in that window, the quote bills 17.8 percent of the available capacity. The itemization does not explain the gap between the labour estimate and the delivery estimate. Sources: the February 5, 2026 letter and itemization; MCL 15.235(2) and 15.234(8).

Documented: The letter states: “The public body estimates it will take approximately 270 days from receipt of the deposit to provide you with the responsible [responsive], nonexempt public records.” The itemization's time-frame field reads simply “270 days,” with the printed note that “the time frame estimate is nonbinding upon the County, but the County is providing the estimate in good faith.”

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(8) requires a response that demands a deposit to “contain a best efforts estimate by the public body regarding the time frame it will take the public body to comply with the law in providing the public records,” and adds that the body “shall provide the estimate in good faith and strive to be reasonably accurate.” The estimate is expressly nonbinding. It is not, however, exempt from explanation.

Two hundred seventy days is nine months. The itemization's own labor figures total 385 hours. Spread across 270 calendar days — roughly 193 business days, allowing for weekends and holidays — that is about two hours of billed work per business day, or the equivalent of 48 eight-hour workdays. A nine-month delivery schedule for six weeks of estimated labor is not impossible: the work may be queued behind other obligations, and a small office may not be able to dedicate a person to it. But the letter offers no explanation at all. It does not say the work will be queued, does not identify who will do it, and does not break the 270 days into stages. It states a number and moves on.

There is also a structural problem with the 270-day clock: it starts only when the deposit is received. No deposit was received. The clock therefore never started, and the estimate has never been tested against reality. A requester who wanted to know whether the office could actually deliver in 270 days would have had to pay $4,774 to find out.

The deposit notice is missing a required date

Documented: The itemization's deposit section records “Percent of Deposit: 50%” and “Deposit Required: $4,774.” It contains a field labeled “Date Paid,” which is blank. It contains no field, and no statement, identifying the date by which the deposit had to be received.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(14) provides that a request is abandoned if a required deposit is not received within 45 days of the requester's receipt of the deposit notice, and it imposes a specific content requirement on that notice: it “must include notice of the date by which the deposit must be received, which date is 48 days after the date the notice is sent.” For a notice sent February 5, 2026, that date was March 25, 2026. The packet does not state it. The omission does not invalidate the estimate, but it means the requester was never told, on the face of the document, when his request would be deemed abandoned — a consequence the statute attaches automatically and that a requester is entitled to see coming.

The waiver that was never decided

This is the clearest documentary gap in the packet, and it requires no legal inference at all.

Documented: The request asked, in a separate paragraph under the heading “Fees”: “I request a waiver of all fees pursuant to MCL 15.234. If any fee is anticipated, please provide a detailed written itemization prior to processing.”

Documented: The response letter does not mention the waiver request. It does not grant it, deny it, or explain it. The word “waiver” does not appear in the letter.

Documented: The itemization form contains a section headed “Waiver: Public Interest,” which recites the statutory standard — that a search may be conducted or copies furnished “without charge or at a reduced charge if the County determines that a waiver or reduction of the fee is in the public interest because searching for or furnishing copies of the public record can be considered as primarily benefiting the general public.” Beneath that recital are two checkboxes, one for “All fees are waived” and one for “All fees are reduced by,” and a line reading “After Waiver: $____.” All three are blank.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: MCL 15.234(2) makes a public-interest waiver discretionary: a body “may” waive or reduce a fee on that ground. Nothing in the act compelled the office to grant this request, and this page does not argue that it should have. The criticism is narrower and, I think, unanswerable: the office never said yes or no.

The form itself is the proof. The county's own itemization template devotes a section to recording the waiver determination, with boxes for grant and reduction and a line for the post-waiver amount. The office used the form, filled in the fee lines, and left the waiver section untouched. A requester reading the packet cannot tell whether the waiver was considered and refused, overlooked entirely, or treated as moot because the underlying request was denied. Each of those is a different answer, and none of them appears.

The practical consequence is not trivial. Under MCL 15.240a, the route for challenging a fee runs through a written appeal to the head of the public body and then, if necessary, a civil action within 45 days. A requester who does not know whether his waiver was decided does not know what he is appealing. And because the 45-day window closed on March 22, 2026, the ambiguity can no longer be resolved by challenge. It is now a permanent feature of the record.

One deposit, two requests

Documented: A footnote to the response letter — marked with a double dagger and set in small type at the bottom of page 2 — reads:

“Please note that this FOIA Fee Itemization is identical to the FOIA Fee Itemization related to FOIA Request 25-21. Should a deposit be received on either the Fee Itemization for FOIA Request 25-21 or FOIA Request 25-22, it would be considered applicable to both FOIA Request 25-21 and FOIA Request 25-22.”

That footnote is doing a great deal of work in a very small space, and each of its three claims deserves separate attention.

“Identical.” The office states that the 26-22 itemization is identical to the itemization issued for 25-21. FOIA 25-21 bears a lower number, which means it was received earlier. The natural reading is that the estimate was prepared for 25-21 and carried forward to 26-22 without re-examination. If that is right, then the 3,300-file count and the 270-day estimate were not derived from this request at all. They were derived from an earlier one and reused.

“Applicable to both.” One deposit, paid against either itemization, satisfies both. That is a pooling arrangement, and it creates questions the packet does not answer. If $4,774 is the 50% deposit on a $9,548 estimate for 26-22, is it also the 50% deposit on a $9,548 estimate for 25-21? If so, the two requests together carry a $19,096 estimate and a $9,548 deposit requirement — a 25% deposit, not the 50% the form recites. Or is there a single $9,548 estimate covering both requests, in which case the two requests are being priced as one production and the second itemization is redundant? The packet does not say.

The accounting consequence. MCL 15.234(13) provides that “a deposit required by a public body under this act is a fee,” and MCL 15.240a(8) defines “fee” to include “any deposit.” A deposit is therefore not a placeholder; it is money owed and money collected, and it carries appeal rights. Pooling a single payment across two requests with two itemizations muddles which request has been paid, in what amount, and what happens if one request is later withdrawn, denied, or abandoned. If the requester pays $4,774 and then abandons 26-22, does the payment stay with 25-21? If he pays and 25-21 is denied outright, is he owed a refund on half? None of this is addressed.

Documented, and worth stating: FOIA 25-21 is not documented in this archive. This page therefore cannot say what that request asked for, when it was received, or what the office did with it. What can be said is that the office has linked the two files in writing, that the link appears in a footnote rather than in the body of either letter, and that a reader of either response would not know the other existed without reading the small print.

The certificate and the redaction box

Documented: The Notice of Denial form, page 3 of the packet, is headed “Request No.: 26-22” with a “Date Received” of 02/02/2026 and a “Date of This Notice” of 02/05/2026. Under “Reason for Denial,” item 2 — “Record Does Not Exist” — is marked. Item 3 — “Redaction” — also appears marked, with pre-printed text describing information of a personal nature and naming “names/address of defendants, witnesses, victims, etc.” No subsection number is inserted in the blank provided for it, and no description of any separated or deleted material is filled in beyond the pre-printed boilerplate.

Michigan law — the statutory framework applied here

Legal interpretation: The first mark is coherent. Item 2 corresponds to the letter's certificate under MCL 15.233(1) that the record does not exist under the name given or any other name reasonably known. The second mark is not coherent, and the reason is simple: nothing was produced, so nothing was redacted. A redaction is an act performed on a record that is being released with material removed. This production released no records. A checked redaction box on a zero-page production describes work that did not happen.

Two explanations are possible and the record does not choose between them. The form may have been completed carelessly, with a box marked by habit or by a template default. Or the office may have contemplated a redaction — the itemization certainly did, charging $5,456 for it — and marked the form in anticipation of a production that was never made. Either explanation is worth recording, because a denial form is the document a court would read first, and a form that marks a redaction it did not perform invites the question of what else on the form was marked without being meant.

The itemization compounds the ambiguity. Line 3a identifies MCL 15.243(1)(a) as the redaction basis — “Information of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy” — and lists names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, and victim and witness contact information. But the denial form inserts no subsection number at all, and the two documents therefore cite the exemption differently: one by subsection, one by pre-printed description. And MCL 15.243(1)(a) is a discretionary exemption. It says a body “may” exempt such information; it does not require it, and applying it requires a judgment that disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion, weighed against the public interest in the record. For a rate computed from case outcomes, the personal information is in the underlying files, not in the rate. The exemption, if it applies at all, applies to the production the requester did not ask for.

Procedural and substantive concerns

The rate became a total. The request asked for a “conviction success rate” three times. The letter answers a request for an “aggregate numerical total” — a phrase the requester never used — and then certifies that no document containing that total exists. A rate and a total are different records, requiring different inputs and answering different questions. The office's own itemization shows it understood the difference: it prices the review of “charging documents, dispositional documents, sentencing documents,” which are exactly the inputs a rate requires and which a bare case count does not. Having priced the right work, the letter answered the wrong question.

Subsection (5) was cited; subsection (4) was not. The letter invokes MCL 15.233(5), the no-duty-to-create provision. But a rate is not a record to be created so much as a summary to be compiled, and the provision that addresses compilations is MCL 15.233(4): the act “does not require a public body to make a compilation, summary, or report of information, except as required in section 11.” That is the on-point authority for refusing to compute a rate. The office cited the neighboring subsection instead. This is the second time in this archive the same substitution has appeared — FOIA 26-20, decided the same day, made the identical citation choice — and it suggests a template rather than a case-by-case analysis.

A request that conceded the point was answered as though it had not. The request said: “This request does not require creation of a new record.” The letter responds that “the request would require the generation or creation of a new public record” and that “such creation is not required.” That is an answer to an objection the requester had already withdrawn. The live question was whether the calculation was maintained — and on that question the office's certificate is a complete answer, if it is accurate. The letter spends its space on the conceded point and one sentence on the contested one.

The fee waiver was never decided. Discussed above. The request asked; the letter is silent; the office's own waiver section is blank. Whatever the merits, the record shows no determination.

The deposit notice omits the abandonment date. MCL 15.234(14) requires the notice to state the date by which the deposit must be received. The itemization does not. For a February 5 notice, that date was March 25, 2026.

The 270-day estimate is unexplained. It is nine months for an estimated 385 hours of work. The statute requires good faith and an effort at reasonable accuracy, not a justification, so this is a question rather than a violation: on what basis was 270 days chosen, and what is the office's actual queue?

One deposit, two files. The footnote pooling 25-21 and 26-22 has no apparent statutory basis and leaves the accounting for both requests unresolved. It also means the estimate may not have been prepared for this request at all.

The remedy recited is incomplete. The letter tells the requester that a prevailing plaintiff may recover attorney fees, costs, disbursements, actual or compensatory damages, and “punitive damages of $1,000.00.” That is accurate as far as it goes: MCL 15.240(7) provides for punitive damages of $1,000 and, in the same subsection, a civil fine of $1,000 payable to the state treasury. The letter omits the civil fine. Separately, a fee challenge under MCL 15.240a(7) carries a $500 civil fine and up to $500 in punitive damages — a different and smaller pair of figures that applies to excessive-fee cases. A requester weighing his options is entitled to the whole picture.

Four of seventeen pages are boilerplate. The MCL 15.240 excerpt appears twice, identically, on pages 4 and 6. Page 5 is a blank appeal form. Page 7 is a page of general county policy. In a packet that produced no records, nearly a quarter of the pages explain how to appeal the absence of records.

What this record does not show

The record does not show that the denial of the rate was unlawful. A conviction success rate is a computation. Michigan's act does not require a public body to perform computations it has never performed, and the request itself invited the office to say so if no calculation was maintained. The office said so, in the statutory form. A court would very likely accept that answer, and this page does not contend otherwise.

The record does not show that the office maintains a rate anywhere. It shows that the office says it does not, and that it can describe its file population and per-file review time with precision. Those two facts are in tension, but tension is not proof.

The record does not show what FOIA 25-21 asked for or produced. That file is referenced in a footnote and is not documented in this archive, so the pooling arrangement cannot be evaluated from this packet alone.

The record does not show bad faith. A coordinator working inside a five-day deadline, asked for a statistic the office does not maintain, could reasonably conclude that the honest answer is a certificate of nonexistence — and could reasonably attach an estimate for the alternative the requester might want instead. The criticism this page makes is not that the office lied. It is that the office answered a question that was not asked, priced a production that was not requested, left its own waiver determination blank, and never explained the nine months.

And the record does not show that the $9,548 figure is wrong as arithmetic. It is right as arithmetic. The question is whether it is a fee for answering this request, or a fee for declining it in an expensive way.

Correlation note — added October 23, 2026. FOIA 25-133, now in this archive, is the same kind of quote built on a different per-file assumption, and the difference is worth setting out because both forms come from the same office and the same template. This request bills 3 minutes per file to locate and 4 minutes per file to redact — seven minutes across 3,300 files, 1,540 increments at $6.20, for $9,548, or $2.89 a file. 25-133 bills 1 minute per file to locate and 3 minutes per file to redact — four minutes across 1,700 files, 453.33 increments at $6.21, for $2,815.20, or $1.66 a file. The rate is effectively identical. The time per file is not: this file assumes nearly twice as many minutes per record as 25-133 does. Neither form explains where its per-file assumption came from, and the office has now used two different ones within eight months.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-240, now in this archive, is the third priced request from this office and the one that shows how far the per-file assumption can move. This file billed 3 minutes per file to locate and 4 minutes per file to redact across roughly 3,300 files, for $9,548 and a $4,774 deposit — about $2.89 a file. 25-240 billed 10 minutes per file to locate and 5 minutes per file to redact across an estimated 300 files, for $1,863.00 and a $931.50 deposit — about $6.21 a file. The hourly rate is the same on both forms, $24.82 with fringe converted to $6.21 per quarter-hour. What differs is the time the office assumes each file will take, and 25-240 assumes more than twice as many minutes per record as this file does. Neither form shows where its per-file figure came from. The other difference is the waiver. Both requesters asked for a public-interest waiver under MCL 15.234(1); on 25-240 the county’s itemization has a “Waiver: Public Interest” section with two boxes, and both are blank.

Next steps and remedies

The clocks have run. The response issued February 5, 2026. The 45-day window for a civil action challenging the fee under MCL 15.240a(1)(b) closed March 22, 2026. The 180-day window for a civil action to compel disclosure under MCL 15.240(1)(b) closed August 4, 2026. As of publication, neither a fee challenge nor a disclosure action on this request is available.

A written appeal to the chairperson of the Delta County Board of Commissioners under MCL 15.240(1)(a) is a different matter. The statute sets no deadline for filing it; the ten-business-day limit runs from the body's receipt of the appeal. That route remains formally open, though its practical value is limited now that the court window has closed.

The better move is a new request, built around what this packet now establishes. Five targets follow directly from the office's own documents.

First, ask for the rate with a stated formula. Do not ask for a “conviction success rate” in the abstract. Ask for the number of cases disposed in each of 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the number of those that resulted in a conviction by plea, by bench trial, or by jury trial — as separate figures, from any existing report, export, or query output. A request framed as a set of counts rather than as a computed ratio removes the compilation objection, because counts are data and a ratio is arithmetic.

Second, ask for the report catalog. Request the list of standard reports the office's case management system can generate, with the fields each report includes. This archive established in FOIA 25-201 that the office runs PROSECUTORbyKarpel, implemented with a go-live date of June 10, 2024. A report catalog is a document a system of that kind normally ships with. If a disposition report is on the list, the “does not exist” answer becomes much harder to sustain. If it is not, the requester learns what the system actually does.

Third, ask for the 3,300-file count as a document. The office has now stated, in writing, that it has approximately 1,100 files per year for 2023, 2024 and 2025. Ask for the document or query output that produced that figure — the count itself, by year, with the definition of “file” the office used. The office volunteered the number; it should be able to produce its source.

Fourth, ask for the 25-21 file. Request the FOIA 25-21 request, response, itemization, and any deposit record, and ask the office to explain in writing how a single deposit is allocated between two requests with two separate itemizations. That question is answerable and has not been answered.

Fifth, ask for the waiver determination as a record. Request any record reflecting the office's determination on the MCL 15.234 public-interest waiver requested in 26-22, including any internal note, email, or completed form. If no such record exists, the office must say so — and that answer would confirm that the waiver was never decided.

On fees in any new request. Repeat the MCL 15.234 public-interest waiver request, and ask in the alternative for an itemized estimate before processing. If a fee is quoted and it appears to exceed what the act permits, MCL 15.240a supplies a separate track: a written appeal to the head of the public body that must use the word “appeal” and identify how the fee exceeds the permitted amount, a decision within ten business days, and a civil action within 45 days of the fee notice or the determination. Under MCL 15.240a(8), the definition of “fee” includes any deposit, so a deposit demand is itself appealable.

On the 270 days. Any new request should ask the office to identify who will perform the work, how the estimate was calculated, and what its current queue is. The statute does not require those answers, but asking puts the estimate on the record and makes a later unexplained delay easier to document.

Authorities consulted

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

The statutory analysis rests on the text of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act as published by the Michigan Legislature. The provisions most directly engaged are MCL 15.233(1) (the certificate that a record does not exist under the name given or another name reasonably known), MCL 15.233(4) (no duty to make a compilation, summary, or report of information), MCL 15.233(5) (no duty to create a new public record), MCL 15.234(1) (the six fee components and the lowest-paid-capable-employee cap), MCL 15.234(2) (the 50% fringe-benefit limitation, the requirement that the percentage multiplier be noted, and the discretionary public-interest waiver), MCL 15.234(3) (no search or redaction fee unless failure to charge would cause unreasonably high costs, specifically identified), MCL 15.234(8) (the $50 threshold, the 50% deposit cap, the itemization requirement, and the good-faith time-frame estimate), MCL 15.234(13) (a deposit is a fee), MCL 15.234(14) (45-day abandonment and the 48-day notice date), MCL 15.235(1) (a faxed request is not received until one business day after transmission), MCL 15.235(2) (five business days, with one extension of up to ten), MCL 15.235(5) (required contents of a denial notice), MCL 15.240 (written appeal, 180-day civil action, de novo review, attorney fees, $1,000 civil fine and $1,000 punitive damages), MCL 15.240a (fee appeals, the 45-day civil action, the $500 civil fine and $500 punitive damages), MCL 15.243(1)(a) (the personal-privacy exemption), and MCL 15.244 (segregation of exempt material and release of the remainder).

The cross-reference to the office's case management system rests on the records produced in FOIA 25-201, documented separately on this site: the Karpel Computer Systems agreement, its Appendix A cost schedule, the three Karpel invoices, and the June 10, 2024 go-live date recorded in the implementation documents.

No case law is relied on for the conclusions in this article. The questions raised here are questions about the face of the documents — what the office charged, what it counted, what it left blank, and what it did not explain — and they do not require a judicial holding to be asked.

On the arithmetic. The 3,300-file figure is the office's own: “approximately 1,100 files per year (2023, 2024, 2025)” multiplied by three years. The 165-hour and 220-hour figures are the office's own increments — 660 and 880 — multiplied by fifteen minutes. Both reconcile exactly to the per-file times printed on the form: 3,300 files at three minutes is 9,900 minutes, or 660 increments; 3,300 files at four minutes is 13,200 minutes, or 880 increments. The $9,548 total is 1,540 increments at $6.20. The 385-hour total is the sum of the two components. The “two hours per business day” comparison divides 385 hours by approximately 193 business days in a 270-day period. Every figure is derived from the face of the itemization; none is estimated by this site.

On the redactions. The requester's name, home address, telephone number, fax station identifier, and email address have been removed from every document published with this article, including the request as faxed, the response letter, the Notice of Denial form, the fee itemization, and the fax notifications. No substantive content was removed. The office itself made no redactions in this production, because it produced no records; the redaction charge discussed above was an estimate for a production that never occurred.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-180, now in this archive, is the counter-example to the fee quoted here. Filed August 2, 2025 and answered in four business days, it asked for 2024 trial counts by type and verdict, set a $50 ceiling, and asked for an itemized estimate in advance under MCL 15.234. The office quoted nothing at all — no search charge, no CMS query, no redaction, no deposit. This file, by contrast, priced a search of roughly 3,300 case files at $9,548 with a $4,774 deposit, and FOIA 25-129 priced 3,544 minutes of work across approximately 886 cases at $2,931.12 with a $1,465.56 deposit. The office clearly knows how to itemize this work. The pattern across the three files is that a request it intends to answer gets a price, and a request it intends to close gets a certificate and a zero.

Correlation note — added October 25, 2026. FOIA 25-239, now in this archive, is the counter-example to the fee quoted here. Filed October 10, 2025 and answered October 30, 2025, it produced 137 pages at no charge and quoted nothing at all — no search, no review, no redaction, no deposit. This file priced a search of roughly 3,300 case files at $9,548 with a $4,774 deposit. The difference is not the volume of records but the office’s posture toward the request: a request it chose to answer was answered without a bill, and a request it chose to price was priced. Sibling request 25-243, answered in the same October 30 letter, quoted a fee for searching roughly 800 cases a year across six years — so the office’s willingness to charge is not a fixed rule either.

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.

FOIA Request (redacted) The one-page request as faxed on January 30, 2026, including the fee-waiver and itemization language. Requester identifiers removed. Response Letter and Notice of Denial (redacted) The February 5, 2026 response letter, the certificate of nonexistence, and the Notice of Denial form. Cost Itemization and Fax Record (redacted) The seven-page fee itemization quoting $9,548.00 and a $4,774.00 deposit, plus the fax transmission record and statutory excerpt.