Four Assistant City Attorneys Assigned to Fight Former City Attorney’s Request for Public Records

by P.D. Lesko

The Ann Arbor Charter states that, like the County, Ann Arbor shall employ a single City Attorney. There are, at present, a dozen attorneys employed by the City, plus numerous contract attorneys. Four of those twelve attorneys on the City’s payroll are fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by former City Attorney R. Bruce Laidlaw. On April 26, 2022 the quartet of City attorneys, Kevin McDonald, Timothy Wilhelm, Matthew Thomas and Jennifer Richards, presented a 13-page Motion for Summary Disposition along with nine exhibits. In their Motion, they petition County Trial Court Judge Archie Brown to dismiss Laidlaw’s suit and to deny him access to the requested public records.

Laidlaw’s February 2022 FOIA request to obtain an unredacted copy of the June 2021 investigatory report written by Jennifer Salvatore, which was used as justification to force out former City Administrator Tom Crawford, was denied by City officials. A FOIA denial, according to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act statute, opens to the requester the right to petition a judge to force a governmental entity to turn over public record(s) which have been denied.

The Ann Arbor Independent submitted a series of FOIA requests to the City of Ann Arbor to obtain the names of the five city staffers whom Salvatore says she interviewed via Zoom prior between June 1 and June 18, 2021. Salvatore has said she did not record the interviews, but rather, “took notes.” The A2Indy’s FOIA requests were denied.

Laidlaw suspects Crawford may have been fired because he released public records related to a domestic violence call to the home of Council member Jen Eyer (D-Ward 4) and her husband Mitchell Irwin (father of Michigan state senator Jeff Irwin). Irwin was arrested, charged, tried and sentenced on the DV charge in March 2021. MLive and The Ann Arbor Independent sought the records and the City Attorney’s office withheld them in violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

Matthew Thomas was the Assistant City Attorney who decided to illegally withhold the Eyer/Irwin public records from the media. He argued it had been done to protect Eyer’s “privacy.” Tom Crawford subsequently released the public records, as he was required to do by Michigan law. Crawford was then sharply criticized on social media by both the Mayor and Council member Julie Grand (D-Ward 3) for releasing the public records.

Laidlaw said in an email, “If he [Crawford] had refused to release the report, a lawsuit would have forced the City to pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees. In addition, the FOIA now authorizes a court to assess fines and award punitive damages upon a finding that the public body “arbitrarily and capriciously” violated FOIA. The civil fine provided by FOIA is “not less than $2,500.00 or more than $7,500.00 for each occurrence.”

Just months after Crawford released the public records related to the Eyer/Irwin domestic violence incident, a group of unnamed city staffers allegedly approached the Mayor with complaints about Crawford’s use of insensitive language.

Assistant City Attorney Matthew Thomas appears in the City’s April 26, 2022 Motion for Summary Disposition as the signatory to an affidavit. In his affidavit, Thomas writes, “I authorized the redactions made to the City’s response to FOIA #6989 of R. Bruce Laidlaw….”

Matthew Thomas, in his affidavit, goes on to explain that he redacted the names of City employees to protect their “privacy” as set forth in the Michigan FOIA statute. Thomas further claims that revealing the names of the complainants could “make them targets for retaliation,” though he does not say by whom. Finally, Matthew Thomas claims that the “disclosure of the identities of these individuals would not aid the public in understanding the operations or activities of government.” In legal terms, the City’s lawyers are attempting to convince the judge that there is no legitimate public concern, and that the release of the information would be offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.

The City’s lawyers argue that the public records sought by Laidlaw would “disclose little or nothing about a governmental agency’s conduct.”

However, prior to his dismissal, Tom Crawford had put a number of employees on improvement plans. In May 2021, Crawford’s proposed budget passed. It eliminated positions, and limited expanding the Office of Sustainability. In 2020, Crawford imposed salary freezes as well as salary cuts. 

The conduct (or suspected misconduct) of government is at the heart of Laidlaw’s FOIA request.

• Why did the complainants go to the Mayor, as opposed to the Director of Human Resources, as City policies require?
• Were any of the complainants among those whom Crawford had disciplined, or put on improvement plans?
• Were any of the complainants City employees whose salaries Crawford had frozen and/or cut in 2020?
• Why was the HR Director, who had been hired in Jan. of 2021, left completely in the dark?

Emails released in response to a FOIA by former Ward 4 Council member Jack Eaton show that, just hours before the July 20, 2021 City Council meeting, HR Director Tom Guajardo was asked to produce an agenda memo to outline HR’s justification for Crawford’s dismissal. The emails obtained by Eaton show Assistant City Administrator John Fournier and not Guajardo had crafted the agenda memo. Moreover, when “his” signed memo was presented to Council, Guajardo was not present at the meeting and unavailable to answer questions. Then, only days after Crawford’s dismissal, Fournier authorized a substantial raise in pay for Guajardo and several other senior staff.

Despite the obvious irregularities and questions surrounding the motivations of the anonymous complainants, the City’s attorneys argue in their Motion that, “the identifying information for these individuals is irrelevant to the conclusions of the [Salvatore] report, [and] the actions of the City.”

In his court filing of March 22, 2022, Laidlaw argues that the City of Ann Arbor is required by Michigan law to provide him a copy of Salvatore’s June 2021 report unredacted. Laidlaw writes, “The public’s interest in government accountability must prevail over an individual’s, or a group of individuals’, expectations of privacy. Full disclosure of the document requested is needed for public understanding of the termination of Defendant’s chief administrative officer.”