Owosso declines Current records request on reported sewage discharge

Editor’s note (Sept. 18): State discharge records have since identified the Sept. 3 discharge as coming from the City of Durand’s wastewater plant — not Owosso. Read the full story from the state records here. The Current’s records requests are being refiled accordingly.

The city of Owosso has not turned over any records about a reported discharge of roughly 110,000 gallons of partially treated wastewater. In a letter dated Sept. 16, Owosso Public Safety told The Shiawassee Current it could not process the newsroom's Freedom of Information Act request as submitted.

The reason given was paperwork, not substance. The letter, signed by administrative assistant Danielle Braid at the department's offices at 202 S. Water Street, cites Section 3(1) of Michigan's FOIA, MCL 15.231, which requires a requester to supply a complete name, a mailing address written to U.S. Postal Service standards, and a valid telephone number or email address. When the requester is an organization rather than a person, the law also requires the name, address and contact information of an individual agent. "In order to obtain publicly available records, please re-submit your request and include the statutorily required information," the letter says.

What the letter does not do is confirm, deny or describe any discharge. It contains no date, no location, no receiving water and no volume. As of the city's response, this desk cannot tell readers whether wastewater reached the Shiawassee River, whether any drinking water source was involved, whether the release happened this month or earlier, or who reported it to the state. Those are the questions the request was filed to answer, and they are still open.

Because none of that is established, the reported discharge is exactly that — reported. The Current is not in a position to say it occurred, and readers should not treat this story as a public-health notice. We are publishing the city's response because the records are being sought on the public's behalf and the request was returned unfilled.

Owosso's sewer system has been a repeated item at the council table this year. The Current reported that the council voted 6-0 on Aug. 3 to approve a $239,160 change order at the wastewater treatment plant, part of a run of utility spending that also included $7.16 million in water main bids tentatively awarded in July and an ordinance authorizing up to $12 million in drinking water revenue bonds. Whether any of that work bears on the reported discharge is not addressed in the letter.

A denial for insufficient requester information is not a denial on the merits. It does not mean the records do not exist, and it does not mean they are exempt. It means the city is asking for the request to be filed again in the form the statute prescribes.

What happens next: The Current will resubmit the request to Owosso Public Safety with the contact information the Sept. 16 letter requires, and will publish what the records show — including the date, volume and destination of any discharge and the notice given to state regulators. Under Michigan's FOIA, a public body generally has five business days to respond to a request, with one allowed extension. We will also ask the city's wastewater treatment plant and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy directly.