A missed FOIA deadline
isn’t late. It’s a denial.
Michigan gives a public body five business days to respond. Miss that window and the request becomes a constructive denial: the agency forfeits the right to charge a fee, its exemption claims are weakened, and the requester can pursue costs and punitive damages in court. Civic231 runs your FOIA program and proves, to your board and even a court, that you met the statute.
Built for Michigan counties, cities, townships & school districts.
Every request carries a real-time status measured against the statute, so coordinators fix a slipping request before it becomes a reportable violation.
A spreadsheet can't carry this risk.
Statutory exposure
Five business days, one ten-day extension, measured against your holiday calendar and receipt rule. Miss it and the penalty is a 5%/day fee reduction (to 50%), a constructive denial, and liability for attorney fees and punitive damages.
The taxpayer subsidy
Search time, review hours, copies, media. If you don't capture and recover actual cost, the general fund quietly absorbs it, and you can't bill what you can't measure.
When ownership slips
A request sits in a department's queue. The delegation lapses, the clock keeps running, and the coordinator answers for it. Accountability has to stay with the department.
"How are we doing on FOIA?"
When the board, the press, or counsel asks, you need a defensible answer in minutes, not a week of digging. Right now, that answer is an estimate.
Run it. Measure it. Prove it.
The portal and workflow exist to collect the data. The reports are the product.
Run the program
- Public intake portal: no account required, large responsive-record uploads.
- Statutory deadline engine with your holiday calendar, extensions & escalations.
- Michigan fee engine: estimates, deposits, invoices, receipts, waivers.
- Defensible redaction & release: true content removal, cited exemptions, retention.
Measure the program
- Program cost recovery & the taxpayer-subsidy funnel.
- Department cost analysis & responsiveness accountability scores.
- Staffing analysis, requester cycle-time & program-health scorecards.
- The FOIA Compliance Report: board-ready and court-defensible.
The FOIA Compliance Report
One report that answers the question leadership actually asks, measured against the statute, not anecdote. It turns three years of requests into an overall compliance score, a per-dimension breakdown, a year-over-year trend, a by-department ranking, a drill-down list of every violation, and a dollar figure for your estimated penalty exposure, whether or not you actually apply penalties.
Procedural compliance vs. MCL 15.231 et seq., computed with your holiday calendar and receipt rule. A management tool, not a legal opinion, and a defensible record either way.
Grand River County (demo)
From request to boardroom.
A citizen submits
No account needed. A tracking number and statutory due date are issued automatically, and an acknowledgement goes out.
Your team runs it
Assign, set department targets, log time, issue a fee estimate, redact and release, with every action timestamped on one audit trail.
Leadership sees the full picture
An executive dashboard and a board packet that reconcile to the penny: compliance, cost recovery, accountability, and exposure.
One platform, no add-ons, no surprise tiers.
Every agency gets the full system. These are the capabilities that ship on day one.
Run the program
- Public requester portal, no account required
- Statutory deadline engine on your holiday calendar
- Single ten-day extension, tracked and validated
- Real-time compliance badge on every request
- Automatic constructive-denial flagging
- Michigan fee engine: estimates, deposits, invoices, waivers
- Gated payments, offline and Square
- Defensible redaction with compare-and-verify
- Cited exemptions and a per-request delivery portal
Measure and prove it
- The FOIA Compliance Report, board and court ready
- Estimated penalty exposure in dollars
- Cost recovery and taxpayer-subsidy funnel
- Department cost analysis
- Responsiveness accountability scores
- Staffing and workload analysis
- Requester cycle-time tracking
- Program-health scorecard
- Executive dashboard, board packet, CSV and PDF export
Platform and security
- Each agency's records isolated
- Multi-factor authentication (TOTP), enforced on every staff login
- Total control: role-based access control and permission groups
- Full, timestamped audit trail on every action
- ADA compliance, built to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility
- Michigan defaults out of the box, tunable per agency
- Onboarding wizard and custom request-form fields
- Appeals and lawsuit tracking
Michigan defaults out of the box, configurable to your agency.
MCL 15.243 exemptions, the statewide holiday template, lowest-paid-capable labor categories, deposit and waiver rules: all seeded and all tunable per agency. Each agency's records stay fully isolated and encrypted per tenant on dedicated, government-grade servers, never co-mingled with another agency's data, and never handed to a third-party cloud.
Beyond compliance: find out what FOIA really costs, and how much you can recover.
A 30-minute walkthrough on a fully-seeded demo county: the compliance report, the cost-recovery funnel, and the allowable fees most agencies leave uncollected.
Request a demoCivic231 · A Division 27 Company.