How much would you pay for information? A student at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Michigan is facing an $84,000 bill for records he requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to an ongoing school investigation against him.
Carrie Uthe, the student's mother, told local news station WZZM 13 earlier this year that the bill was surprising. "They did give us a documentation to show that breakdown, but that still made no sense," said Uthe. "It's been very stressful for him. It has really played on him hard. He just wants to go to school. He wants to do well. He wants to get an education."
It's not uncommon for FOIA requests to come with a fee, meant to compensate for employee time spent on complying with the request and redacting ineligible information. However, WZZM13 spoke with Mike Walsh, an attorney and adjunct professor at GVSU, who said that he's never seen a FIOA bill this hefty.
"Government agencies have a right to charge for their time and service to provide records, but the whole spirit of the law is to open things up, to share records with the true owners, which is you and me," Walsh said. "So obviously that's daunting for anybody to get a bill for $84,000 and it prevents people from going on to the next step of litigating or whatever they're going to do to get things worked out. So that's, that's why I find it troubling."
According to a statement from GVSU administrators, the bill was so large because the student made an overly broad request. "Grand Valley used its normal process in calculating the fee for this request. The request is very broad would [sic] involve more than 59000 emails over a specified period," their statement reads. "Fulfilling the request would require a qualified employee to sort through each individual email and attachment to search for and redact protected and personal information. Our FOIA officer has offered potential strategies that could narrow the inquiring party's search to help reduce costs."
Hefty fees aren't the only barrier to receiving public records under FOIA. Long wait times also often prevent requesters from getting documents. "FOIA requests can take years to fulfill, unless you can afford to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit," Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote in the magazine's December 2024 issue. "Agency FOIA officers routinely abuse exemptions to hide records. The process is difficult even for experienced reporters to use for newsgathering."
"FOIA is simply no longer up to the task of handling the volume and diversity of records being created by the government, the number of requests for those records, or the disputes between requesters and agencies withholding records in bad faith," Ciaramella adds.
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