But within three weeks, fire chief Jamie Jent, who voiced his concerns about inadequate staffing, was placed on “administrative leave.”
On hand at the church tragedy that day was independent journalist Anna Matson.
“It should be free because they work for the taxpayers.”
“I was the first reporter on scene during that tragic Grand Blanc LDS fire and shooting,” she said. “So I was there to witness that, and the first responders just did incredible, and they deserve our respect and our support. It was insane for me to see that just three weeks later that fire chief was put on administrative leave. And I have questions, and I want answers just like the rest of Grand Blanc.”
So Ms. Matson did what people do who want information in a democracy: She filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all communications between Grand Blanc Township Superintendent Dennis Liimatta and Jent, as well as all public records related to Jent’s administrative leave. She also filed a second request seeking communication between several township employees regarding the operations of the fire department.
The response the reporter got was not information but a bill—$100,000 for the first request, $64,000 for the second, for a total of $164,000—a sum reflecting, according to township attorney Anthony Chubb, the labor costs for review of more than 8,200 pages by an attorney, an IT person and the FOIA coordinator.
Anna Matson disagreed. “When a government body issues six-figure fees to access public records, that is not being transparent, that is not being accountable. That is obstruction, it is intimidation, and it goes directly against the intent of the law,” she said.
Township Supervisor Scott Bennett protested that his is a transparent municipality. He said that Grand Blanc has honored most of the 1,137 FOIA requests it has received this year, with the highest charge to date being $75.
Not the most comforting response to a person who’s just been charged $164,000 for information. Ms. Matson has chosen to appeal the fees.
Accessing public records, complying with the specifics requested, and culling emails, texts, phone records and sundry correspondence from Date X to Date Y does take man-hours, and the labor isn’t free.
Still, a sudden leap from $75 to nearly one-fifth of a million is not normal, especially given the nature of the questions being asked and the timing of the fire chief’s sudden administrative leave after his remarks criticizing his higher-ups.
Besides, as Matson argues, “It should be free because they work for the taxpayers and the taxpayers are demanding that transparency happen.”
Anna Matson is not alone in FOIA’s high-rent district. In 2017, Texas journalist Nathanael King received a $1.13 million price tag for his FOIA request asking for sexual assault case files from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Ultimately, King got a better deal with the Prison Rape Elimination Act office: $551.39.
“Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”
At the federal level, there are clear guidelines that govern consistent, predictable FOIA fees. Not so when you get down to the states. The wild variance from a few pennies to hundreds of thousands of dollars to access what should be accessible to every citizen is subject to the whims, apparently, of whatever state you’re requesting information from. A request fulfilled for free in one state may not prove the same in another state with different fee rules. So Matson’s case isn’t an isolated fluke—it fits a troubling national pattern.
According to MuckRock, of the more than 50,000 FOIA requests filed through them, 48,000 cost exactly zero. So if the overwhelming majority of FOIA requests are affordable and thus accessible to most of us, why the rest?
Must they really cost that much? Reclaim the Records, a nonprofit group of genealogists, historians and open government advocates, was hit with a $1.4 million bill for a birth and death list of all individuals in the state of Missouri from 1910–2016. After doing some research on what was really needed (e.g., digital records, not hard copy), making some corrections and nudging the state, the price was reduced to under $5,000.
So is it stonewalling? Sloppy management? A combination of the two?
To test the waters, Michigan local station ABC12 filed an identical FOIA request as Anna Matson’s to see what their fees might be—higher, lower or the same. All things being equal, consistent and transparent, it should be the same. But as of this writing, ABC12 has heard nothing from the township.
Bottom line, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”
Facts are what it’s about for Anna Matson. “I want to see the facts, the hard concrete data on what happened,” she said. “I’ve never had a government that was transparent charge me for a FOIA before. So they are intentionally trying to hide this information.”
When the public must pay a fortune just to learn what its government is up to, transparency is no longer a right but instead a privilege of the privileged.
