How ‘the public is priced out of public records’ by Michigan universities

How ‘the public is priced out of public records’ by Michigan universities - Columbia Journalism Review
"In Michigan, transparency comes at a cost—and a seemingly arbitrary one at that.
The Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Central Michigan University recently conducted a FOIA audit of the state’s 15 public universities.
It asked for a year’s worth of information on expenses from the university presidents and governing boards, and also police reports on campus sexual assaults.
The goal: to compare how universities respond to requests for public information, and how much they charge.
No university denied the requests.
But the price to fulfill all of them totaled more than $20,000.
That ranged from Eastern Michigan University and two other schools that offered records for free, to the University of Michigan, where it would cost $2,774 just for presidential spending records.

UM attributed that cost to its estimate that it would take 46.5 staff hours to search for records, and many more to review and duplicate documents.
In total, presidential expenses were the most costly records; it would take $10,750.93 to fulfill them all.
Arielle Hines, president of CMU-SPJ and a senior journalism major, questioned the hours it would take to fulfill the requests. 
“What archaic system are you using?” she said.
“You have to think they’d have some kind of auditing process for the president, and if not, that’s a bigger story.”
(Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that Hines, the editor of CMU Insider, has pushed for more and better transparency at public universities.)
...In the wake of the Flint water crisis, there has been a renewed push for open records reform in Michigan, a state with a notoriously poor reputation for transparency. 
The CMU-SPJ report raises a new point of needed change.
Not only is the plain cost of information eyebrow-raising, but so are the scattershot rates and response times—even for identical information requests..."