Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act is structurally broken at both the state and local level. At the state level, Michigan and Massachusetts are the only two states in the country where citizens cannot FOIA the executive or legislative branches. At the local level, the same agencies that hold the records decide whether to release them, hear their own appeals, and face no independent oversight body when they ignore requests entirely. The conflict of interest is not incidental to Michigan’s FOIA system. It is the system. The fix requires a dedicated independent FOIA office, a unified statewide request-and-appeals database, and the data infrastructure to identify and hold accountable the agencies that use the process as a shield.
The Structural Conflict of Interest at the Heart of Michigan FOIA
Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq., was designed with a fundamental assumption built into it: that the body holding records can be trusted to fairly assess whether those records should be disclosed. That assumption is wrong, and the consequences of it being wrong are visible in every county, township, and municipality in the state where accountability journalism has tried and failed to obtain public records about the very bodies those records document.
The conflict of interest in Michigan’s FOIA system is not subtle. When a requester asks a local government body for records, that body’s own FOIA coordinator receives and processes the request. If the request is denied, the appeal goes to the head of that same body — the supervisor, the board, or in some cases the same clerk who denied it in the first place. There is no independent reviewer. There is no neutral arbiter. There is no state agency empowered to compel compliance. The only enforcement mechanism available to a denied requester is a civil lawsuit in the local circuit court — at the requester’s expense, against the body that denied the request, before judges who may have relationships with the officials whose records are at issue.
A system in which the agency that holds the records also decides whether to release them, hears its own appeals, and faces no independent oversight body is not a transparency system. It is a disclosure system with an opt-out for the disclosing party. Michigan has built that opt-out into every level of local government, and the results are documented in courthouses and newsrooms across the state.
This conflict manifests in two distinct but related ways. The first is institutional self-interest: agencies deny requests about their own conduct because releasing the records would be damaging, inconvenient, or embarrassing. The second is structural indifference: agencies ignore requests, miss statutory deadlines, and fail to process appeals not out of bad faith but because there is no enforcement mechanism with teeth, and the path to compliance requires the requester to sue. Most requesters do not sue. Most agencies know this.
Barry County: When the Prosecutor Reviews Its Own FOIA Requests
The Barry County Prosecutor’s Office is a concrete illustration of the structural problem. Like every local prosecutorial office in Michigan, it serves as both the subject of potential FOIA requests about its own conduct and the decision-making body that processes those requests. A person seeking records about a prosecution, a charging decision, a declination, or the office’s internal communications submits that request to the office whose conduct is the subject of the inquiry.
The FOIA coordinator designated by the office reviews the request. If that coordinator — an employee of the office whose records are at issue — determines the records are exempt, the request is denied. The appeal goes to the head of the office. In a prosecutorial context, that is the elected prosecutor. The elected prosecutor reviews the denial of a request about the elected prosecutor’s office and determines whether the elected prosecutor’s office was right to deny it.
This is not a hypothetical ethics problem. It is the daily operating reality of every local FOIA process in Michigan. The body being scrutinized controls the scrutiny. The entity being asked to account for itself decides whether it will account for itself. And when it decides it will not, the only path forward costs the requester money, time, and access to a lawyer — resources that most members of the public do not have and that institutional actors have in abundance.
The problem is compounded in prosecutorial contexts by the breadth of available exemptions. Michigan’s FOIA statute includes exemptions for law enforcement records that could interfere with an ongoing investigation, records that would identify a confidential informant, and records that could endanger individuals. These are legitimate exemptions with legitimate purposes. They are also broad enough to cover nearly any record a prosecutor’s office might want to withhold, and the decision about whether a given exemption applies is made by the office invoking it. The circuit court is the only check on that determination — after the requester pays to get there.
Scio Township: Ten Appeals. Zero Addressed.
Scio Township, in Washtenaw County, has provided some of the most extensively documented recent examples of local FOIA dysfunction in Michigan. Scio News, an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Scio Township, has reported in detail on a pattern of non-compliance that illustrates exactly what happens when the conflict of interest built into Michigan’s FOIA system is paired with an official unwilling to follow the law.
Scio News reported that the Township accumulated ten outstanding FOIA appeals that went entirely unaddressed by the Board, eventually leading Scio News to retain Warner Norcross + Judd to demand compliance with Michigan’s FOIA, with the Township given until May 7 to produce all records or face legal action.
Township Clerk Jessica Flintoft, who serves as Scio Township’s designated FOIA coordinator, approved at least one FOIA request and then failed to provide the requested public record. When residents appealed, Township Supervisor Jillian Kerry approved the appeal and ordered the record released. Flintoft failed to do so — a violation of the FOIA statute.
The problem extended beyond individual requests. In May 2025, a resident submitted a FOIA request for the Township’s FOIA log — a public record documenting all FOIA requests received, from whom, and how they were handled. That request was ignored by Clerk Flintoft. The resident then appealed to Supervisor Kerry, who again ordered the release. Flintoft again failed to comply.
A clerk who approves requests and then does not fulfill them. A supervisor who orders compliance and is ignored. A Board that removed the supervisor from the appeal process entirely and routed all appeals back to the clerk’s office and outside counsel. Ten appeals left unaddressed. A news organization forced to hire a law firm to demand production of records the statute required to be released. One resident with nineteen unfulfilled requests dating back to May 2025. This is what Michigan’s FOIA system produces when the conflict of interest is exercised without restraint and the only enforcement mechanism is a lawsuit most requesters cannot afford.
The Board’s handling of the appeal process is particularly instructive. The Board removed the Supervisor’s FOIA appeal duties — a move a resident characterized as unlawful — and restructured the process so that appeals are now handled by “the Office Coordinator and the Township Attorney.” Not one member of the Board is involved in determining the outcome of any appeal. The result is that the Township’s attorney — paid by the Township — determines whether the Township must release records about the Township. The conflict has been formalized and outsourced.
Scio News also asked how much the Township was paying outside counsel to handle FOIA requests. The Clerk’s response was so deficient that Scio News’s attorney had to intervene. The Township is spending public money on attorneys to process and resist public records requests, while residents with nineteen outstanding unfulfilled requests have no recourse short of litigation.
The Legislative Ceiling: Michigan Can’t Even FOIA Its Own Government
The local-level dysfunction documented in Barry County and Scio Township exists within a broader state-level framework that is, if anything, more structurally deficient. Michigan and Massachusetts are the only states where citizens cannot submit a Freedom of Information Act request to collect records from the executive and legislative branches of state government.
This is not a gap that has gone unnoticed. The Michigan Senate made FOIA reform its first priority for the 2025 legislative session, introducing Senate Bills 1 and 2 to extend FOIA coverage to the governor and legislature. The bills passed the Senate with a 33-2 vote. They have sat in the House Governmental Operations Committee ever since.
House Speaker Matt Hall stated that he was not interested in putting the bills on the agenda. “We’re just not going to do FOIA,” Hall told reporters during a November 2025 press conference.
Senator Jeremy Moss, co-author of the bills, said: “If this were put up for a vote in the House, it would pass. There’s no doubt. It has the votes. The question is, why won’t the speaker put it up for a vote?”
Michigan Press Association Public Policy Manager Lisa McGraw has been working to expand FOIA since 2015. “I think until the governor and the legislature in the state are subject to FOIA, we really have no transparency at the state level,” she said.
In 2018, Governor Whitmer released an eight-page document titled “Get it Done: Michigan Sunshine Plan,” stating: “If the legislature won’t act, I will use the governor’s authority under the Michigan State Constitution to extend FOIA to the Lieutenant Governor and Governor’s Offices.” As of 2026, that promise has not been kept. The executive branch remains exempt from FOIA. The sunshine plan remains a campaign document.
While five of Speaker Hall’s six-component Ethics, Accountability and Transparency plan components have passed through the Michigan House, some with bipartisan support, the Senate’s FOIA reform bills — which would extend transparency to the branches of government that currently exempt themselves from it — remain blocked. Hall has argued his HEAT plan provides equivalent transparency. The Michigan Press Association’s McGraw characterized the comparison as “apples to oranges,” stating: “To me, the fundamental is subject yourself to FOIA.”
What the Conflict of Interest Actually Costs
The costs of Michigan’s FOIA dysfunction are not abstract. They are paid by journalists who cannot obtain records about public institutions. By residents who cannot find out whether their local government followed the law. By advocates who cannot document the patterns they are trying to report. By researchers who cannot build the data sets that would make accountability journalism possible at scale.
They are also paid in money — specifically, in the litigation costs that represent the only enforcement path available when a Michigan agency ignores a FOIA request or an appeal. Michigan law gives a requester whose appeal is ignored one option: petition the local trial court to compel the entity to release the requested records. Michigan law allows the requester to seek punitive damages for an entity’s arbitrary and capricious violation of FOIA. But getting there requires filing a lawsuit, which requires time, money, and often legal representation. The asymmetry is structural: a municipality can ignore requests indefinitely at no cost, while a requester must spend money to compel compliance with a law that requires no expenditure to violate.
Michigan’s FOIA statute provides for punitive damages and attorney fee recovery when a court finds a violation was arbitrary and capricious. But reaching that finding requires getting to court first. The filing costs, the time, and the legal complexity of FOIA litigation create a barrier that most requesters — individual citizens, community journalists, small nonprofits — cannot clear. Institutional actors know this. The calculation is not difficult: ignore the request, ignore the appeal, wait for the requester to give up. Most do. The statute’s enforcement mechanism is only as strong as the requester’s resources, which means it effectively does not function against well-resourced institutional actors.
The Fix: A Dedicated Michigan FOIA Office
The structural conflict of interest in Michigan’s FOIA system cannot be resolved by better compliance from the agencies that benefit from non-compliance. It requires an institutional solution: a dedicated, independent Michigan FOIA office empowered to receive appeals, review denials, compel production, and maintain a public record of every request, denial, and outcome in the state.
This is not a novel concept. Numerous states and countries have implemented independent information commissioners or ombudsman offices that handle FOIA appeals outside the agency whose records are at issue. The result is a decision-making body with no institutional stake in the outcome — no budget interest in withholding, no political relationship with the official whose records are requested, no career incentive to protect the agency being scrutinized.
Receive all appeals from local and state agencies statewide. Review denials without deference to the withholding body. Issue binding decisions on whether records must be released. Maintain a unified statewide database of all requests, denials, appeals, and outcomes. Publish denial rate and response time data by agency, disaggregated and searchable. Refer systemic violators for enforcement. Provide compliance guidance to agencies that lack the capacity or knowledge to process requests correctly. And do all of this without requiring the requester to file a lawsuit first.
The office would not require eliminating the existing FOIA coordinator structure at the agency level. Agencies would still receive and process initial requests. The change is at the appeal stage: instead of routing appeals back to the same agency, appeals would go to an independent body with binding authority. The conflict of interest is removed not by trusting agencies more but by ensuring that disputed decisions are made by someone other than the agency whose conduct is disputed.
The Unified System: Data Infrastructure for Transparency
An independent FOIA office without a unified data system is a body that can hear appeals but cannot see patterns. Michigan needs both. A statewide unified FOIA request system would transform the current opaque, fragmented, agency-by-agency process into a transparent, data-rich infrastructure that enables pattern analysis, identifies systemic non-compliers, and makes the performance of the FOIA system itself subject to public accountability.
What a unified system looks like in practice: a single standardized portal through which requests to any Michigan public body can be submitted, tracked, and appealed. Every request receives a timestamp. Every response deadline is automatically calculated and flagged when it approaches. Every denial triggers an automatic notification of appeal rights. Every appeal goes to the independent FOIA office. Every outcome is recorded in a public database.
Denial rates by agency, by exemption category, and by requester type. Response time distributions — how long agencies actually take versus the statutory five-day response deadline. Appeal rates and appeal outcomes. Patterns of exemption overuse. Agencies that consistently invoke exemptions that are later overturned on appeal. Agencies that ignore requests at a rate that suggests deliberate non-compliance. Agencies that use outside counsel to handle requests — at public expense — while denying those same requests. None of this is visible in the current system because the current system produces no data. It produces paper, scattered across thousands of individual agency files, with no mechanism for aggregation, analysis, or accountability.
AI and Automated Business Rules: Changing the Equation
The unified data system creates the infrastructure for the next layer: AI-assisted review and automated business rules that can reduce processing time, flag likely violations before they occur, and pre-clear routine disclosures without requiring human review of every request.
The majority of FOIA requests in any given jurisdiction are routine. Meeting minutes. Budget documents. Personnel records that do not implicate privacy exemptions. Contracts. Bid documents. These are records that agencies release regularly, that are not subject to any legitimate exemption, and that currently require the same processing workflow as contested, sensitive, or complex requests. Automated business rules can identify record types that have been consistently disclosed without exemption and pre-approve them for release, reducing the processing burden on FOIA coordinators and accelerating disclosure for requesters.
Automated intake timestamps every request the moment it is received — eliminating disputes about when the five-day clock started. Automated deadline tracking flags requests approaching their response deadline, triggering internal escalation before a violation occurs rather than after. AI-assisted exemption review flags denials that invoke exemptions inconsistently with prior disclosures of the same record type, surfacing potential bad-faith denials for independent review. Pattern analysis identifies agencies whose exemption usage diverges significantly from comparable agencies, directing oversight resources where they are most needed. The cumulative effect is a system that generates accountability from data rather than requiring accountability to be litigated one request at a time.
The argument against automation in this context — that it would miss nuance, apply rules mechanically, or fail to account for the complexity of individual requests — mistakes the function of automation for the function of judgment. Automation handles the routine. Human review at the independent FOIA office handles the contested. The combination reduces cost, reduces delay, and concentrates human judgment where it actually matters: on the decisions that are genuinely difficult, genuinely contested, and genuinely consequential.
Why Michigan Specifically Needs This
Every state with a FOIA system has some version of the compliance problem. Michigan’s version is distinctive in its severity, its legislative resistance to reform, and the breadth of the exemption from accountability that its most powerful institutions have claimed for themselves.
Michigan is one of two states where the governor and legislature cannot be FOIA’d. The House Speaker has said publicly he will not bring reform to a floor vote. The governor’s office promised transparency and delivered a campaign document. At the local level, townships can ignore ten consecutive appeals and the only recourse is a lawsuit. Prosecutors can review their own FOIA requests. Clerks can ignore supervisor orders to release records. Boards can route all appeals to the attorneys they pay to resist those same requests.
This is not a system with gaps. It is a system designed, at every level, to make non-compliance easier than compliance and to make enforcement more expensive than obstruction. The fix requires not just legislation but infrastructure — the data systems, the independent bodies, and the automated enforcement mechanisms that make transparency the path of least resistance rather than the path of most litigation.
Michigan’s FOIA system does not need to be patched. It needs to be rebuilt around the principle that transparency is the default and that the decision about whether to withhold public records should never be made by the body whose conduct those records document. A dedicated independent FOIA office, a unified statewide database, and AI-assisted automated enforcement would make that principle structural rather than aspirational. Until then, requesters will keep suing. Agencies will keep ignoring. And the public will keep not knowing what its government is doing in its name.
Sources
Rita Williams, Michigan’s FOIA System Has a Conflict of Interest Problem. A Dedicated Office and Unified Data System Would Fix It., Clutch Justice (June 22, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/22/michigan-foia-conflicts-of-interest/.
Williams, R. (2026, June 22). Michigan’s FOIA system has a conflict of interest problem. A dedicated office and unified data system would fix it. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/22/michigan-foia-conflicts-of-interest/
Williams, Rita. “Michigan’s FOIA System Has a Conflict of Interest Problem. A Dedicated Office and Unified Data System Would Fix It.” Clutch Justice, 22 Jun 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/06/22/michigan-foia-conflicts-of-interest/.
Williams, Rita. “Michigan’s FOIA System Has a Conflict of Interest Problem. A Dedicated Office and Unified Data System Would Fix It.” Clutch Justice, June 22, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/06/22/michigan-foia-conflicts-of-interest/.
