Commissioner Melinda Lautner failed to gain a second to her motion to waive the $1,000 cost on her Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request at the county board’s regular meeting Tuesday night, with no other county commissioner willing to support her efforts to see personnel committee correspondence leading up to a recent organizational culture survey.
Now that her attempt to appeal the request through the board of commissioners has failed, Lautner said she’s “unsure” of her next move. Prior to the meeting, she explained she had consulted with Bonnie Toskey of the county’s legal counsel, Cohl, Stoker, & Toskey, P.C., who told her that she could take the appeal to court for judgment.
However, in Lautner’s words, “a lot (of the information in the request) is going to be moot at this point” and she needs to “decide whether it’s still worth pursuing.” Lautner felt that Ross was providing information that could influence a survey by the Michigan Leadership Institute, and the survey concluded late last year, and its results were presented a month and a half ago on Jan. 3.
Lautner’s request initially asked for all communications between fellow commissioner Kama Ross and other elected officials, department heads, employees, and County Administrator Deb Allen, from September to mid-November.
After filing her FOIA request on Nov. 13, Lautner subsequently narrowed the scope of the request to exclude county employees. At a Jan. 9 executive board session, Lautner explained that she was changing her request over “concern about confidentiality” for the employees and the high cost of completing the request as determined by the prosecutor’s office.
According to County Prosecutor Joe Hubbell, Lautner’s request would have covered over 1,250 emails, and it would have taken about 100 hours to review them to determine whether disclosing each email would violate legal exemptions protecting an individual’s right to privacy and frank communication.
Using this estimate and the hourly rate of the lowest paid public employee capable of fulfi lling the request – in his opinion, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Tristan Chamberlain – Hubbell told Lautner that she would need to pay $5,000 for his office to complete her request.
By reducing the scope of her request to communications between higher-ranking officials and employees, Lautner greatly reduced the number of emails that the county prosecutor would need to review, lowering the cost of the request to $1,000. However, she maintained that she should not have to pay any fee and appealed to her fellow commissioners to have the cost waived altogether.
“Per the attorney, it doesn’t have to cost that much. It should just be a quick search engine (sic), so it wouldn’t have to cost that much, is what she said,” Lautner said Tuesday night.
Since no county commissioner supported Lautner’s request to waive the fees, the county board proceeded to the next agenda item without putting her motion to a vote.
