In states like Michigan that permit public sector workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining, some government employees also become officers in those unions. Michigan permits these union officer/public employees to use a specified amount of their hours on the job to do union work, rather than the job they were hired to do. This practice is called “union release time.”

For example, city of Flint employees who are also officers in the firefighters union (352 Local IAFF) are allowed to spend 16 hours a week doing union business. The city does not track the number of hours they use for this. Instead, it automatically assigns 16 hours of those employee’s weekly time on the job to the category of union work.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the city of Flint, asking for specifics on the work arrangements of city employees who use union release time.

The city of Flint responded that it does not track those details.

Whitney Brewton, human resource and labor relations manager for Flint, wrote in the FOIA response, “We do not track how much time people use union business, so these are numbers based on their contract, not what they use.”

It is not clear how much union release time costs state and local governments across the country or in Michigan. But federal government employees collect pay for around 3 million hours of union release time, costing taxpayers more than $170 million, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

CEI also says that unions see release time as helping offset financial losses they incurred after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus ruling that bars requirements that public sector employees pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.

Charley McClendon, director of labor relations for Flint, and Melissa Brown, the city spokesperson, did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2021, a group of parents filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Forest Hills Public School District in Kent County, seeking materials associated with specific terms, such as "critical race theory" and “CRT.”

District officials informed the parents they could have the documents when they turned over payment, estimated at $409,899.

The parents’ request may have been short on specifics. But the district’s response revealed the extent to which school districts and other units of government have made the law’s promise of government transparency increasingly a dead letter — at least for regular people who lack deep pockets.

Local governments have become creative about prohibitively inflating the costs they charge to provide open records to the public. The stunning $409,899 demand to provide records included $244,540 to pay for a qualified employee who would separate out items that may fall into categories state law exempts from disclosure.

The state FOIA law states, “The public body shall separate the exempt and nonexempt material and make the nonexempt material available for examination and copying.”

The law describes examples of what may be considered exempt, with details subject to interpretation. They include:

1. Information of a personal nature, if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.

2. Information that would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.

3. Business trade secrets, under certain circumstances.

But in some municipalities, officials are requiring that attorneys review all requested records for such exemptions, and they are charging high rates for the lawyers’ reviews.

In another example, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy requested emails between the state health department and a contractor about state government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials demanded $12,420, of which more than $10,000 was to pay legal staff to review them.

The state FOIA law also allows municipalities to include 50% of the fringe benefit costs incurred by the employees who collect and review requested records. In the case of that demand for $12,420 to fill a Mackinac Center records request, $4,140 went to cover the cost of those government employees' benefits.