Join A2 Oops

The majority of Council voted against the Anglin - Briere resolution to publish the Council meeting emails. The Council majority have said that if this is important to the citizens of Ann Arbor let them pay for it and do the work the Council claims is so expensive.

We ask your help in obtaining the information. There will be some minor expense but if shared by many it should not be prohibitive. The typical charge so far has been less than $3.00 per meeting for the requests.

because many sites will host material without charge, we believe our group can make the information publicly available at very little cost. In any case we can have some fun and a learning experience.

THE PROCESS

We have a small group of volunteer coordinators. Their first role is to coordinate the requests to avoid having people making duplicate requests for the same date. The second is to collect the information, assemble it and make it available to the public.

The structure is that blocks of dates are allocated to the coordinators. The coordinators assign specific meeting dates to the requesters, the people willing to make the requests. The coordinators verify when a request was made for a specific council meeting, the date the request was made and then distribute the material when it is received.

This is more fun than the orderly process proposed by the Anglin resolution. Of course it is less efficient for city staff than proceeding in the consistent chronological order of the Anglin/Briere resolution. But if Council insists it must be done the hard way for everyone we can still do it.

This can be a learning experience. Many have told us "I'd like to FOIA that but I have never done it and I'm not sure what to do." Here is an opportunity to join make a guided request. Once you enjoy your first FOIA surely you will make many requests in the future.

Do you want to know what Council members were emailing when you spoke or when a project important to you was being discussed? Send an email to a2oopsCoordinator@gmail.com asking for a specific meeting date or several meeting dates.

We will tell you if these dates are open or have already been requested. If they are open simply follow the the instructions snd the sample FOIA request in the Make a FOIA Request link in the left side bar.

We have approximately:

6 Coordinators

3 years of Council meetings allocated to the Coordinators

Requests have been made for about 2 years of Council meetings