Steve Neavling
Steve Neavling of the website Motor City Muckraker is frustrated, and in article, rails against the city of Detroit in his battle to obtain records for each ambulance run in the past three months.
Neaving feels it's an important issue, and writes that "people are dying because Detroit doesn’t have enough medics on the ground," which results in slow responses, and sometimes death.
Neavling writes:
Under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, we requested records that show basic information about each ambulance run over the past three months. The city took more than twice the amount of time required by state law to respond, and then demanded between $26,332 and $42,272 to produce the records.
Even if we forked over the money, the city law department maintained, “neither the Fire Department nor the Law Department has the human resources to process your request, as written, without disrupting the regular business of either department,” wrote Ellen Ha, the law department’s chief of staff.
The request would be such a burden, Ha maintains, that it would disable emergency communications.
In other words, not even money will get these records.
Neavling writes that he requested electronic documents. But he says the the city has insisted it is necessary to print out all 31,092 computer-aided dispatch (CAD) records. And that would be too big of a burden on the city, the city says.
Neaving, who's known to be quite tenacious, isn't giving up.
He writes:
We plan to appeal the costs and urge Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration to work with us to gain access to the records, which will paint a clearer picture of the EMS crisis.
The city is notorious for charging excessive costs to obtain records, and it has been forced to pay back six-figure attorney fees for unlawfully withholdin
