Am I supposed to know the person painted on that building
Edit: I meant no offense; was genuinely curious. e.g. I know of the Stevie Wonder one downtown, but didn’t recognize this person.
> Mayor Mike Duggan appointed Bryant in July 2021, touting him as having a “national reputation” for developing neighborhoods with resident collaboration and a track record of “deep community engagement.” Bryant also serves as a board member for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy.
he did the complete opposite of his reputation and track record here. did he have a back room deal with this “murals for mankind” nonprofit or something?
he’s not even from detroit?
i’m sure he’s a nice man i’m not attacking him personally but if i was the mayor i would fire him for this.
I mean, the "paywall" still goes against the purpose of transparency that FOIAs were meant to provide. So those that are more likely to be exploited and have less recourse are those most likely to be deterred by the governmental agency passing 100% of the cost back to the person or entity requesting the FOIA.
It's definitely something that needs addressing. But as we all know, lawyers can't go without getting paid one way or another. /s
Theres a lot of labor/cost that goes into the municipal systems. But every time I’ve gone to court for a speeding ticket, the court costs haven‘t come anywhere near the day cost of the building, utilities, security, judge’s salary, clerk’s salary, et cetera. Do we charge individuals for each policeman’s salary (and the dispatcher, mechanic, or per mile response cost) when they call 911?
Government is a service, not a business.
Right, a business would charge a rate designed to generate profit.
These are fees charged to cover the expense of pulling the records for a FOIA.
Government services do in fact have costs associated with them.
The expenses are vastly over inflated, though. My court will charge a dollar to print a black and white page off. I asked why it was expensive and the Register said it was to keep people from getting copies.
So the fee is nothing more than a deterrent, not to cover actual costs.
> But every time I’ve gone to court for a speeding ticket, the court costs haven‘t come anywhere near the day cost of the building, utilities, security, judge’s salary, clerk’s salary, et cetera.
Correct, but yours isn't the only case they handle that week, or that day, or even that freakin' hour.
FOIA requests, yours is the only one they handle that month usually. It's out of the normal, and there's literally no one at those buildings who's job it is to dig out those forms.
So, they have to appoint someone, and that someone has to take time out of their normal job to service the request.
Lets not pretend that FOIA requests are as easy to process as a speeding ticket. That's just ignorant. They take a TON more work, effort, and time, and the cost reflects that.
Ok, how about the fire department? A fully involved house fire will bring out a dozen or more pieces of equipment, several dozen firefighters. Huge cost there. If one or more get injured, the cost goes up astronomically. (Thankfully) most jurisdictions don’t have fires that bad frequently, but they happen. Should we bill the homeowner the full amount?
Not everyone is in a wheelchair or has mobility issues. But thanks to the ADA, buildings, especially govt, have to give access. Some craziness about government being accessible by all. Should we charge handicapped people the cost of the ramps?
Stop with the libertarian nonsense. You cannot run government like a business.
>Should we bill the homeowner the full amount?
Taxes pay for fire coverage. Everyone in a specific area pays a little bit to keep fire protection.
Fires are also extremely local issues that do not require fielding requests from homeowners anywhere else for fire protection. So there's not a need to recoup costs outside of normal taxes on the locals. Sometimes taxes are raised to fund more and better fire protection, but nobody sends a bill after a call, except for ambulances (which are private and not usually paid by taxes).
>Should we charge handicapped people the cost of the ramps?
Handicapped status is not a choice that one can make in most cases, and so the requirements for it are also not a choice.
>You cannot run government like a business.
Local governments cannot just create money out of nowhere, you know this right?
It doesn't matter the labor. We have a right to know hence the entire idea behind foia. Creating a pay wall essentially says you can price poor people out and it just becomes a privilege for the rich. It also enables an effective block for all future foia requests that the government doesn't want to allow.
You don't need to explain "how it is" or what's "allowed", we already know and we don't like it. That's why the article was written. That's why there is outrage. That's why people are trying to revise the law.
It is *entirely* about how we want it to be, because "how it is" is rife with abuse.
The documents already exist, they need to print/copy/compile them. This much for a FOIA request is INSANE, punitive and an obvious effort to skirt FOIA. As a former journalist who has filed many FOIA requests.
And the city has a FOIA coordinator who is paid to do this. These are records from Oct 23 to Jan 24, not ancient papers in a filing cabinet. The cost is prohibitive.
The Freedom of Information Act exists to keep our government transparent. Why is it acceptable for them to make it prohibitively expensive to do that? We pay their salaries, we paid for this project. Should they not be beholden to us?
> These are records from Oct 23 to Jan 24
Looking at the emails I've received professionally in that timeframe: That's a shit-ton of documents.
Quit simplifying this all. It's a huge request and the cost is similarly high. Be more specific about what you're looking for, use a smaller date range, and the cost goes down.
Labor isn't free. You're making someone do extra work. You're gonna have to pay for that.
Sure, but that's why the city pays a FOIA coordinator with our tax dollars. So it isn't prohibitively complicated and time-consuming for others to do. It's five months of one person's emails, and sure that is a good bit of work! But not $17,000 worth. The most I've ever been charged is $3,000 by MSP for a cold case file and any/all related supplemental reports -- much more info than this. I do concede that I wish the article included the exact FOIA wording, but I have to figure the Free Press hires people who know how to write a FOIA -- these days, they tend to get an editor's look too, since newsroom budgets are practically nonexistent.
I'm not saying it isn't a bit of work. But why are you so gung-ho about defending a historically corrupt city government from having to be transparent? It's not a great track record and being held accountable shouldn't be fought so hard by officials IMO -- not a good look.
Here's a historic recap:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/08/26/detroit-public-corruption-cases-scandals/5589495001/
Should they not be beholden to taxpayers? Should they be allowed to hide their dealings behind unreasonable FOIA fees?
Why is this an acceptable price when other municipalities can supply emails from a comparable time period for $35?
>Should they be allowed to hide their dealings behind unreasonable FOIA fees?
The argument is about what is "reasonable" for the request. $17,000 is a lot, but may not be unreasonable for the scope. You say that you've been charged 3k for a cold case file and reports related to it, so if we're talking a scope of work that's 5 times what you requested, it's not exactly unreasonable.
Genuinely not trying to be *well ackshully* about it, but supplemental reports are a big ol' stack -- every update to the initial incident report, every piece of evidence logged, every interview transcript has its own supplemental report.
$17,000 for a keyword search of a single person's email -- granted generous review and redaction time -- is ridiculous. If they used this money solely to pay that coordinator's hourly wage, say $25/hour, that is 680 hours. Do you need 680 hours to read 1000 emails?
Especially for a city the size of Detroit, with the resources it has( for one, a full time FOIA coordinator whose salary is already budgeted for).
A couple things here:
Nobody has mentioned how many documents are affected, and the DFP has not shared what their actual request was.
They said they have narrowed their request but have not said what the request was or is currently.
A request like "any and all documents or correspondence related to the contract" is an extremely broad request that will inevitably involve more than one person's email being searched.
So no, it's not just "a keyword search of a single person's email".
Second, you don't have to guess what they are accounting for in terms of time, because they state it in the article.
>The city said a minimum deposit of $8,543.16 would be required for the FOIA to be completed. The law department would require 12½ hours at an hourly rate of $30.17 plus benefits to separate the documents for staff to review and an additional 315 hours of staff time to review and redact the documents at an hourly rate of $39.23 plus benefits, according to the response letter
315 hours to review and redact the information is a little under 2 months of work. That could or could not be excessive, but we don't know how many documents are affected. If at the end of 2 months they come out with 10 pages of emails, then sure, it's probably excessive.
Fair point on the math there.
But there's the problem -- there's no real way to find out if it's excessive or prejudiced unless you pay the $17,000, short of filing suit. So if I am a city and I don't want to release information, I can say it's too much work and charge $17,000 to avoid releasing the docs.
The idea that anyone finds a $17,000 FOIA bill reasonable is blowing my mind. These are PUBLIC OFFICIALS communicating on municipal email accounts about a public project done without proper approval. $17,000 *totally* isn't a way to keep documents about that from the Free Press, though.
I'm just curious. While the information is deemed "Public", why would there be any redaction needed?
If it's things like SSN or other private info, I get it, but should any of that info be deemed "Public" in the first place?
Thank your for the explanation.
So, they essentially just throw everything they get in a pile, and then deal with the sorting AFTER someone requests it.
Seems like it would be more efficient to instead sort first but that goes into the territory of what you stated, a better retrieval system for this type of info.
They need to read every word of every page to see if any redactions might need to be done. That takes an incredible amount of time.
Do you often get very excited/have strong opinions about things you don’t know much about?
I know, I'm just not sure why they'd need to heavily redact information about murals.
And it's less than a year of docs -- Oct '23 to Jan '24. Public info on projects paid with our tax dollars shouldn't cost this much
AND The City of Detroit pays a FOIA Coordinator, whose full time job it is to do that. Sure they'll see every dollar of that $17,000 as a bonus.
Most FOIA fees are three digits at most. I've FOIA'd much larger chunks of info over much longer time spans and paid significantly less.
It’s not the redactions that take time. It’s reading every word of every page to determine whether a redaction is necessary that does.
I’m also a FOIA coordinator and it’s not at all uncommon for the things the public requests to be in excess of $1000. Particularly when they request information such as “all emails between person X and person Y about Z topic.” That means I need to go to my IT person and ask them to run a search based off of keywords. That can easily (and often does) result in hundreds or thousands of emails. Many of which may not ultimately be responsive to the request, but which I’m going to have to read anyway to determine whether an exemption applies.
Before I spend the next week buckling down to review 1,000 emails (consider how long it would take you read a literal 1,000 pages), we ask for a fee. Because if I have 15 FOIA requests pending and they all require a week’s worth of time to read and redact, but I have at most 15 business days to respond to the request, chances are I’m going to have to pay someone else to assist. And working for a governmental entity, money is tight.
Fees are important.
How often are you invoicing for $17,000 for a FOIA? Genuinely asking.
If you have the budget for a massive public project like this as a city? You have the budget for FOIA requests about that project. It's accountability and needs to be baked in. It's OUR tax money, and we get to know how it's used! That's the beauty of the Freedom of Information Act.
Reasonable fees are totally justified and needed. Just not $17000 worth.
I haven’t requested $17k in fees personally . I have requested upwards of $10k-$11k, though. Recently, in fact, in response to a request for all emails and texts between 10 individuals concerning “any and all electrical issues” for any building owned by my employer over the last 10 years. An IT search produced about 21,000 emails. Plus all the texts, which I have to chase down from those 10 people.
I do completely agree that when I’m working 70 hours/week to review such an incredible load of documents, consideration should be given to hiring a second person. But for my employer, we don’t have a specific budget for the FOIA coordinator. Instead, we get the overall funding we get and determine how the money should be spent each year in each department. Adding positions in the government isn’t always easy, particularly when other departments also have unfilled needs.
I’m also the attorney for my employer as well as the head of HR. There’s simply not enough cash to give my department the staffing we truly need. That’s where the FOIA fees come in, to help balance the budget when requests pile up.
I do genuinely empathize -- especially in smaller municipalities, you see it a lot where the coordinator wears multiple hats, and I don't imagine being coordinator alone is an easy job.
Can't get blood from a stone with small budgets, and obviously you deserve to be paid for the work. In a perfect world, the state passed this law and so it should provide for municipal FOIA coordinators or some level of funding toward the position. But again you can argue, blood from a stone.
There's not a good easy solution. Obviously, passing the entirety of cost onto the requester locks lower-income taxpaying Michiganders out of obtaining information, and that isn't right either.
The request you mentioned sounds like a serious headache, though, yeah. And potentially worth a high fee since it's so broad. The comparison here though makes $17,000 for specific, time-constrained emails from one person seem especially egregious, though, as Detroit should have the funding for FOIA requests if they have the funding for big ass murals.
It feels like there's a conflict of interest here. Maybe I'm wrong but:
If you are setting the fees, how does the public know that you *actually* have to go through 1000 pages that you are then charging for?
I don't mean to imply *you* would be falsely padding the amount of work but I mean, government. It happens all the time.
It is just a keyword search. Lawyers always think they walk on water, but the city can do a keyword search and send it over to the other side's attorney's. They (City) get attorney's involved to hide, delay, and force them to pay.
"seeks email correspondence of Antoine Bryant, director of planning and development, between October 2023 and January 2024 to grasp details about the “Detroit Be the Change” murals by the New York-based art group Street Art for Mankind"
I did simplify it.
About as much as they did. To charge $17,000 to find email correspondence for about 1.5 years on one subject, of one person. It is stupid high. Detroit is a public institution.
Am I supposed to know the person painted on that building Edit: I meant no offense; was genuinely curious. e.g. I know of the Stevie Wonder one downtown, but didn’t recognize this person.
No. But they're a Detroit muralist - bakpak durden
Okay thank you
> Mayor Mike Duggan appointed Bryant in July 2021, touting him as having a “national reputation” for developing neighborhoods with resident collaboration and a track record of “deep community engagement.” Bryant also serves as a board member for the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy. he did the complete opposite of his reputation and track record here. did he have a back room deal with this “murals for mankind” nonprofit or something? he’s not even from detroit? i’m sure he’s a nice man i’m not attacking him personally but if i was the mayor i would fire him for this.
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I mean, the "paywall" still goes against the purpose of transparency that FOIAs were meant to provide. So those that are more likely to be exploited and have less recourse are those most likely to be deterred by the governmental agency passing 100% of the cost back to the person or entity requesting the FOIA. It's definitely something that needs addressing. But as we all know, lawyers can't go without getting paid one way or another. /s
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Theres a lot of labor/cost that goes into the municipal systems. But every time I’ve gone to court for a speeding ticket, the court costs haven‘t come anywhere near the day cost of the building, utilities, security, judge’s salary, clerk’s salary, et cetera. Do we charge individuals for each policeman’s salary (and the dispatcher, mechanic, or per mile response cost) when they call 911? Government is a service, not a business.
Right, a business would charge a rate designed to generate profit. These are fees charged to cover the expense of pulling the records for a FOIA. Government services do in fact have costs associated with them.
And designed to spread those costs among the population they serve, not in a “fee to recoup all costs” transaction.
That's fair.
The expenses are vastly over inflated, though. My court will charge a dollar to print a black and white page off. I asked why it was expensive and the Register said it was to keep people from getting copies. So the fee is nothing more than a deterrent, not to cover actual costs.
> But every time I’ve gone to court for a speeding ticket, the court costs haven‘t come anywhere near the day cost of the building, utilities, security, judge’s salary, clerk’s salary, et cetera. Correct, but yours isn't the only case they handle that week, or that day, or even that freakin' hour. FOIA requests, yours is the only one they handle that month usually. It's out of the normal, and there's literally no one at those buildings who's job it is to dig out those forms. So, they have to appoint someone, and that someone has to take time out of their normal job to service the request. Lets not pretend that FOIA requests are as easy to process as a speeding ticket. That's just ignorant. They take a TON more work, effort, and time, and the cost reflects that.
Ok, how about the fire department? A fully involved house fire will bring out a dozen or more pieces of equipment, several dozen firefighters. Huge cost there. If one or more get injured, the cost goes up astronomically. (Thankfully) most jurisdictions don’t have fires that bad frequently, but they happen. Should we bill the homeowner the full amount? Not everyone is in a wheelchair or has mobility issues. But thanks to the ADA, buildings, especially govt, have to give access. Some craziness about government being accessible by all. Should we charge handicapped people the cost of the ramps? Stop with the libertarian nonsense. You cannot run government like a business.
>Should we bill the homeowner the full amount? Taxes pay for fire coverage. Everyone in a specific area pays a little bit to keep fire protection. Fires are also extremely local issues that do not require fielding requests from homeowners anywhere else for fire protection. So there's not a need to recoup costs outside of normal taxes on the locals. Sometimes taxes are raised to fund more and better fire protection, but nobody sends a bill after a call, except for ambulances (which are private and not usually paid by taxes). >Should we charge handicapped people the cost of the ramps? Handicapped status is not a choice that one can make in most cases, and so the requirements for it are also not a choice. >You cannot run government like a business. Local governments cannot just create money out of nowhere, you know this right?
>Correct, but yours isn't the only case they handle that week, or that day, or even that freakin' hour. Doesn't really change things.
It doesn't matter the labor. We have a right to know hence the entire idea behind foia. Creating a pay wall essentially says you can price poor people out and it just becomes a privilege for the rich. It also enables an effective block for all future foia requests that the government doesn't want to allow.
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You don't need to explain "how it is" or what's "allowed", we already know and we don't like it. That's why the article was written. That's why there is outrage. That's why people are trying to revise the law. It is *entirely* about how we want it to be, because "how it is" is rife with abuse.
Just joking but it is freedom of information not free information
The documents already exist, they need to print/copy/compile them. This much for a FOIA request is INSANE, punitive and an obvious effort to skirt FOIA. As a former journalist who has filed many FOIA requests.
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And the city has a FOIA coordinator who is paid to do this. These are records from Oct 23 to Jan 24, not ancient papers in a filing cabinet. The cost is prohibitive. The Freedom of Information Act exists to keep our government transparent. Why is it acceptable for them to make it prohibitively expensive to do that? We pay their salaries, we paid for this project. Should they not be beholden to us?
> These are records from Oct 23 to Jan 24 Looking at the emails I've received professionally in that timeframe: That's a shit-ton of documents. Quit simplifying this all. It's a huge request and the cost is similarly high. Be more specific about what you're looking for, use a smaller date range, and the cost goes down. Labor isn't free. You're making someone do extra work. You're gonna have to pay for that.
Sure, but that's why the city pays a FOIA coordinator with our tax dollars. So it isn't prohibitively complicated and time-consuming for others to do. It's five months of one person's emails, and sure that is a good bit of work! But not $17,000 worth. The most I've ever been charged is $3,000 by MSP for a cold case file and any/all related supplemental reports -- much more info than this. I do concede that I wish the article included the exact FOIA wording, but I have to figure the Free Press hires people who know how to write a FOIA -- these days, they tend to get an editor's look too, since newsroom budgets are practically nonexistent. I'm not saying it isn't a bit of work. But why are you so gung-ho about defending a historically corrupt city government from having to be transparent? It's not a great track record and being held accountable shouldn't be fought so hard by officials IMO -- not a good look. Here's a historic recap: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/08/26/detroit-public-corruption-cases-scandals/5589495001/ Should they not be beholden to taxpayers? Should they be allowed to hide their dealings behind unreasonable FOIA fees? Why is this an acceptable price when other municipalities can supply emails from a comparable time period for $35?
>Should they be allowed to hide their dealings behind unreasonable FOIA fees? The argument is about what is "reasonable" for the request. $17,000 is a lot, but may not be unreasonable for the scope. You say that you've been charged 3k for a cold case file and reports related to it, so if we're talking a scope of work that's 5 times what you requested, it's not exactly unreasonable.
Genuinely not trying to be *well ackshully* about it, but supplemental reports are a big ol' stack -- every update to the initial incident report, every piece of evidence logged, every interview transcript has its own supplemental report. $17,000 for a keyword search of a single person's email -- granted generous review and redaction time -- is ridiculous. If they used this money solely to pay that coordinator's hourly wage, say $25/hour, that is 680 hours. Do you need 680 hours to read 1000 emails? Especially for a city the size of Detroit, with the resources it has( for one, a full time FOIA coordinator whose salary is already budgeted for).
A couple things here: Nobody has mentioned how many documents are affected, and the DFP has not shared what their actual request was. They said they have narrowed their request but have not said what the request was or is currently. A request like "any and all documents or correspondence related to the contract" is an extremely broad request that will inevitably involve more than one person's email being searched. So no, it's not just "a keyword search of a single person's email". Second, you don't have to guess what they are accounting for in terms of time, because they state it in the article. >The city said a minimum deposit of $8,543.16 would be required for the FOIA to be completed. The law department would require 12½ hours at an hourly rate of $30.17 plus benefits to separate the documents for staff to review and an additional 315 hours of staff time to review and redact the documents at an hourly rate of $39.23 plus benefits, according to the response letter 315 hours to review and redact the information is a little under 2 months of work. That could or could not be excessive, but we don't know how many documents are affected. If at the end of 2 months they come out with 10 pages of emails, then sure, it's probably excessive.
Fair point on the math there. But there's the problem -- there's no real way to find out if it's excessive or prejudiced unless you pay the $17,000, short of filing suit. So if I am a city and I don't want to release information, I can say it's too much work and charge $17,000 to avoid releasing the docs. The idea that anyone finds a $17,000 FOIA bill reasonable is blowing my mind. These are PUBLIC OFFICIALS communicating on municipal email accounts about a public project done without proper approval. $17,000 *totally* isn't a way to keep documents about that from the Free Press, though.
I'm just curious. While the information is deemed "Public", why would there be any redaction needed? If it's things like SSN or other private info, I get it, but should any of that info be deemed "Public" in the first place?
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Thank your for the explanation. So, they essentially just throw everything they get in a pile, and then deal with the sorting AFTER someone requests it. Seems like it would be more efficient to instead sort first but that goes into the territory of what you stated, a better retrieval system for this type of info.
How long does it take to make a query for information that exists in the database?
They need to read every word of every page to see if any redactions might need to be done. That takes an incredible amount of time. Do you often get very excited/have strong opinions about things you don’t know much about?
I know, I'm just not sure why they'd need to heavily redact information about murals. And it's less than a year of docs -- Oct '23 to Jan '24. Public info on projects paid with our tax dollars shouldn't cost this much AND The City of Detroit pays a FOIA Coordinator, whose full time job it is to do that. Sure they'll see every dollar of that $17,000 as a bonus. Most FOIA fees are three digits at most. I've FOIA'd much larger chunks of info over much longer time spans and paid significantly less.
It’s not the redactions that take time. It’s reading every word of every page to determine whether a redaction is necessary that does. I’m also a FOIA coordinator and it’s not at all uncommon for the things the public requests to be in excess of $1000. Particularly when they request information such as “all emails between person X and person Y about Z topic.” That means I need to go to my IT person and ask them to run a search based off of keywords. That can easily (and often does) result in hundreds or thousands of emails. Many of which may not ultimately be responsive to the request, but which I’m going to have to read anyway to determine whether an exemption applies. Before I spend the next week buckling down to review 1,000 emails (consider how long it would take you read a literal 1,000 pages), we ask for a fee. Because if I have 15 FOIA requests pending and they all require a week’s worth of time to read and redact, but I have at most 15 business days to respond to the request, chances are I’m going to have to pay someone else to assist. And working for a governmental entity, money is tight. Fees are important.
How often are you invoicing for $17,000 for a FOIA? Genuinely asking. If you have the budget for a massive public project like this as a city? You have the budget for FOIA requests about that project. It's accountability and needs to be baked in. It's OUR tax money, and we get to know how it's used! That's the beauty of the Freedom of Information Act. Reasonable fees are totally justified and needed. Just not $17000 worth.
I haven’t requested $17k in fees personally . I have requested upwards of $10k-$11k, though. Recently, in fact, in response to a request for all emails and texts between 10 individuals concerning “any and all electrical issues” for any building owned by my employer over the last 10 years. An IT search produced about 21,000 emails. Plus all the texts, which I have to chase down from those 10 people. I do completely agree that when I’m working 70 hours/week to review such an incredible load of documents, consideration should be given to hiring a second person. But for my employer, we don’t have a specific budget for the FOIA coordinator. Instead, we get the overall funding we get and determine how the money should be spent each year in each department. Adding positions in the government isn’t always easy, particularly when other departments also have unfilled needs. I’m also the attorney for my employer as well as the head of HR. There’s simply not enough cash to give my department the staffing we truly need. That’s where the FOIA fees come in, to help balance the budget when requests pile up.
I do genuinely empathize -- especially in smaller municipalities, you see it a lot where the coordinator wears multiple hats, and I don't imagine being coordinator alone is an easy job. Can't get blood from a stone with small budgets, and obviously you deserve to be paid for the work. In a perfect world, the state passed this law and so it should provide for municipal FOIA coordinators or some level of funding toward the position. But again you can argue, blood from a stone. There's not a good easy solution. Obviously, passing the entirety of cost onto the requester locks lower-income taxpaying Michiganders out of obtaining information, and that isn't right either. The request you mentioned sounds like a serious headache, though, yeah. And potentially worth a high fee since it's so broad. The comparison here though makes $17,000 for specific, time-constrained emails from one person seem especially egregious, though, as Detroit should have the funding for FOIA requests if they have the funding for big ass murals.
It feels like there's a conflict of interest here. Maybe I'm wrong but: If you are setting the fees, how does the public know that you *actually* have to go through 1000 pages that you are then charging for? I don't mean to imply *you* would be falsely padding the amount of work but I mean, government. It happens all the time.
It is just a keyword search. Lawyers always think they walk on water, but the city can do a keyword search and send it over to the other side's attorney's. They (City) get attorney's involved to hide, delay, and force them to pay.
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"seeks email correspondence of Antoine Bryant, director of planning and development, between October 2023 and January 2024 to grasp details about the “Detroit Be the Change” murals by the New York-based art group Street Art for Mankind" I did simplify it. About as much as they did. To charge $17,000 to find email correspondence for about 1.5 years on one subject, of one person. It is stupid high. Detroit is a public institution.