Michigan ranks dead last for government transparency. It's time to fix that.
Before he was a state Senator, Jeremy Moss, a Southfield Democrat, was studying journalism at Michigan State University when his class was given a simple, straightforward assignment. Each student was to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to a different Michigan county for the budget for salting the roads, but when it came time to share the findings, his classmates’ results were all over the place. Some counties were compliant, while others charged a fee, denied the request outright, or even declined to respond at all.
“From that moment, as a journalism student, I really realized the lack of seriousness that some entities in the state of Michigan treat FOIA [with],” he tells Metro Times.
Like other states, Michigan’s FOIA laws were enacted in the aftermath of Watergate, which opened up government records for public scrutiny. But from the outset, Michigan’s so-called “sunshine laws” fell well short of others — we’re one of two states that exempts the governor’s office from Freedom of Information Act requests (the other is Massachusetts) and one of eight states that exempt elected legislators.
Moss was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2014. During his first year, Michigan earned a big fat F in a report card from the Center for Public Integrity, ranking dead last for ethics, accountability, and transparency. Since then, high-profile scandals including the Flint water crisis and the cover-up of an extramarital affair between former state representatives Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat only strengthened Moss’s belief that it was time to do something about it.
Read more: https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/michigan-dead-last-transparency/Content?oid=26725963
(Detroit Metro Times)