In October, patient advocate and licensed social worker Marianne Huff submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Kent County’s community mental health authority asking for documents about cuts in payments to private mental health service providers.

Officials at the authority responded that it would cost $241,000 to locate and provide the requested documents. They also said the work would not be complete until April 23 - in the year 2029.

Michigan Capitol Confidential is not aware of any other open records request in the state of Michigan in which a government entity claimed it would take 10 years to provide the records sought.

The county mental health authority is called Network 180, and it contracts with dozens of private mental health professionals to deliver services to county residents.

Huff requested “all memoranda, directives, policies, emails, presentations and/or meeting minutes” from the eight-month time period of Feb. 1 through Sept. 30. She was was looking into “the implementation of utilization management and the reduction of network provider rates.”

Network 180 estimated that it had to go through 98,567 messages and it would take 6,574 hours to complete the work, with an average of 12 hours per week dedicated to the effort. That came out to 548 weeks to complete.

"Once those emails are determined, every one of them must be individually read and reviewed for information exempt from disclosure, and information redacted if needed," Network 180 told Huff in an email.

Network 180 is Kent County’s community mental health authority, with a $154.3 million annual budget. County authorities such as Network 180 are the means through which most government-funded mental health services are allocated and delivered in Michigan. They are funded by a combination of federal, state and local dollars.

Network 180 didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Huff said Tuesday the issue still has not been resolved.

The pop star Madonna recently made a $100,000 matching-grant challenge for Detroit Prep charter school, which is authorized through Grand Valley State University.

Detroit Prep has shown encouraging test results in a city whose conventional school district has been tarnished as among the worst in the country. For example, the 25 kindergarten students at Detroit Prep ranked in the top 1 percent of an assessment test used by 23,000 U.S. schools. For first grade math, 80 percent of students are progressing at or above a grade-level rate, and 73 percent are doing that in reading. The numbers come from testing done by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

Detroit Prep opened in 2014, so it has not yet appeared on one of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s school report cards, which adjust test scores to reflect students’ rate of progress regardless of their socioeconomic status.

The school has been operating out of a church basement, which stifled growth and forced the school to turn away many prospective students. But its search for a new building was almost shut down by the Detroit Public Schools Community School District. When the school district sold a closed school building to a developer in 2014, its officials included a deed restriction that prevented the charter from purchasing the building. At one point, the Detroit district considered selling the property to a developer who wanted to build a prison.

At the time, the school district stated, “As a district, we defended the right of Detroit taxpayers and voters to determine the use of their community’s assets. We will continue to focus on rebuilding the district to improve performance while serving all children in the city.”

Eventually, the Legislature passed a bill that essentially invalidated the deed restrictions the city had obtained, allowing Detroit Prep to buy the building. The charter is now trying to raise money to renovate the abandoned school building.

The Detroit school district isn’t the only government entity that has tried to block charter schools.

In 2014, Detroit Mayor Michael Duggan signed off on a resolution adopted by the city council to not sell city-owned property to any charter school located within one mile of an existing conventional school district building.