Dear Reader,

You know how you can order something on Amazon from your couch one day, pay through a linked credit card, and have the package on your doorstep the next day?

Yeah – government transparency doesn’t work that way.

Sara Scott, editor for MLive’s statewide team of reporters, found that out recently when she spent the better part of a day driving around southeast Michigan to pick up hard copies of documents from government agencies for a reporting project we’re working on.

“It was nice to get out of the office,” Scott said, half-joking. “But it’s shocking that in this day and age that we can't pay with a credit card or Venmo, and then have them digitally sent to us. These are not easy locations necessarily for us to get to.”

Scott is heading up a reporting project into police responses to crimes, injuries and deaths at the Faster Horses music festival, which is held each July at Michigan International Speedway near Jackson. The 2021 festival was marred by four deaths – three from carbon monoxide poisoning, and one involving a young woman in which no cause of death has been announced.

After MLive covered the deaths, Reporter Gus Burns took the lead on follow-up investigative reporting. When the investigation remained open after many weeks, he turned to Freedom of Information Act, commonly known as FOIA, requests to try to unearth more information.

“Originally, the police said they were looking for a suspect, and that this woman had died for unknown reasons, and obviously that raises more questions than answers,” he said. “They said it was still an open investigation, so we can't give you anything. So, we expanded to look further into the festival more broadly.”

That’s where the hurdles inherent in the archaic and inefficient public right-to-know process popped up. It goes like this, as captured in this week’s Behind the Headlines podcast with Scott and Burns:

Scott: “They say, ‘We'll start pulling it together if you pay us half,’ so we say sure, here's our credit card. They're like, ‘No, We only take personal checks.’”

Burns: “I didn't have a check.”

Scott: “Apparently, I'm the only one on our team that's over 50. So, I started writing a series of personal checks, mailing it to these small police departments. When the reports finally came in, (we said) digitize them and send it to them in an email. ‘Oh, no, no – we can't do that.’”

Burns: “‘They're all collated,’ they say, ‘so that's going to be all kinds of extra money because I’ve got to take out the staples.’”

That may seem comical, but it’s not funny. Government documents are your documents, and obstacles to transparency are obstacles to accountability from the agencies you expect to work on your behalf.

“It is probably our most important tool in terms of telling our readers and the public how local government spends its tax dollars,” Scott said. But, she adds, “The (FOIA) system, especially in Michigan, is set up to make things difficult.”

Which is evidenced by her day spent driving through two counties, dropping into government offices and writing checks for hard copies of police reports. It also shows that MLive will do what it takes to get access to the public information we need to tell a complete story.

MLive is still waiting for information from other sources, but Scott’s day trip produced a trove of information that Burns and other reporters are poring over to deepen our understanding of years of police responses at Faster Horses.

“There are several instances I think that the public will find very, very disconcerting and very shocking,” Scott said, adding that the information in the reports will guide reporters to new sources for interviews and perhaps more information requests.

“That’s the next step now that we know exactly some of the things that have been happening out of this festival.”

The journey to open information in Michigan often follows a long and bumpy road. As Sara Scott showed this summer, MLive will go that extra mile to get the whole story for you.

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Do you have a personal story to share about an experience at the Faster Horses Festival? If so, send MLive an email at projects@mlive.com.

🎧 To hear the entire conversation with Sara Scott and Gus Burns about the foibles of FOIA, as well as their ideas on improving the law and public access to records, tune into this episode of the Behind the Headlines podcast.

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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.