Lansing FOIA group takes steps toward public transparency

LANSING — Members of the Lansing city attorney’s Freedom of Information Act policy working group left a 45-minute closed-door meeting on Friday promising a renewed spirit of openness going forward.

Although City Attorney Brigham Smith had said the group that would rework the city’s guidelines for public information disclosure behind closed doors, members of the panel left last week’s meeting indicating future meetings would be open to the public.

“We’ve decided moving forward that anyone who wants to come, can,” said Lansing Police Chief Mark Alley, a member of Smith’s working group.

Others at the meeting included Penny Gardner, president of the Lansing Association for Human Rights; Lansing City Clerk Chris Swope, Bernadette Brown, policy director at the Triangle Foundation; Dennis Hall, a past president of LAHR.

To show the group’s openness, the members announced the group’s next meeting, Dec. 10 at 11 a.m., would be open to the public.

Facing criticism for keeping the public out of the process to rework the city’s transparency guidelines, the city attorney justified his decision.

“I didn’t feel comfortable making a unilateral decision to invite cameras in,” Smith said.

The working group discussed opening the meeting and two members, Swope and Alley, said they strongly supported keeping the meeting closed; one member, Gardner, said she strongly supported opening the meeting to the public; and one member, Brown, said she supported which ever process the group chose so long as the final product was presented to the public for input before being finalized. Hall said he saw merits for keeping the meeting closed and opening it up to public scrutiny.

Swope said he did not think the group constituted a public body as defined by the state’s Open Meetings Act.

“It did not need to be open,” Swope said. “There’s no legal requirement.”

Attorney Robin Herman, from Butzel Long law firm, which is contracted by the Michigan Press Association to provide legal services for media outlets, said the working group was likely not a “legal” violation.

“It’s absolutely a violation of the spirit of this law,” she said, however. “They are making policy about sunshine laws behind closed doors.”

Swope disagreed with Herman’s assessment, saying that if the working group were a public body, then that would mean his staff meetings for the clerk’s office would also be required to be open to the public. Alley echoed that concern.

While the media was barred from Friday’s initial meeting in the city’s law library, at-large Lansing City Council member Carol Wood did stop in and was allowed into the meeting. She declined to stay in the meeting because “it wasn’t an open process, it was a closed meeting.”

Following the meeting, Wood praised the group for opening the next meeting to the public.

“I’m pleased that everyone feels that way, that it needs to be open. But again, why didn’t it start out that way? This is government,” Wood said.

Wood, as well as council members Sandy Allen and Eric Hewitt, who all serve on the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, has been pushing for the policy.

The working group was formed to develop new policy following two incidents from earlier this year where private information was released in police reports through the Freedom of Information Act. The law allows the public to review or receive copies of documents created by the body. Such documents include e-mails, memos, reports and voice mails.

After a controversial undercover sex sting in Lansing’s Fenner Nature Center in May, Smith’s office released police reports where a man’s HIV-positive status was left unredacted. Advocates said the release violated a stringent, but untested public health code law, which makes it a misdemeanor to release a person’s HIV-status. That lead to Lansing Mayor Virgil Bernero asking Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox to review the incident and determine if any laws were broken. In August, Cox’s office ruled that no laws had been broken.

A second incident occurred shortly after the Cox ruling. City officials released private medical information as well as identified people falsely accused of a crime. All that information was improperly redacted from a police report about a fake gay-bashing.