Good news, Citizens. Judge Leiber of the Kent County Circuit Court today ordered the City of Grand Rapids to stop destroying documents that the Local Area Watch had asked the City to disclose under the Freedom of Information Act. The order was issued as an injunction in the matter of Local Area Watch v City of Grand Rapids.
The bad news is that the City Attorney’s office had already destroyed most of the documents that were of most interest. Another unhelpful sign is that Assistant City Attorney Daniel Ophoff told L.A.W.’s attorney Peter Steketee that he would not agree to a court order instructing the City to delete any evidence of the destroyed documents that might be on computer hard disk drives, because Ophoff resented the implication that he could not be trusted.
(Keep in mind, folks, Apparatchik Ophoff was your trusted public servant who kept asking L.A.W. for extensions on the deadline to produce the documents when he was in fact buying time to destroy them. So, yeah, he can’t be trusted.)
The destroyed documents are minutes of the closed sessions of the Grand Rapids City Commission at which Boss Logie and the Commissioners secretly discussed the dumping of contaminated soil at the historic Monroe Avenue Water Filtration Plant, that Italianate brick building across the street from the V.F.W. post, and decided against informing the public about it.
The City Attorney’s office had those minutes destroyed to stop Judge Leiber from viewing them in order to determine whether or not they should be disclosed to the public, as L.A.W. had requested in its lawsuit.
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