Shelby’s Board of Trustees Reassigns FOIA Duties As Allegations of Misuse Surface Against Clerk Terri Kowal

The freedom of information act (FOIA) gives ordinary residents access to documents and information that may otherwise be kept in the dark.  The FOIA laws have also been used by media outlets to gain information that elected officials may otherwise want to keep out of public domain.

Unfortunately, sometimes even something like FOIA gets misused and/or abused.  We are talking about residents who misuse FOIA as a fishing expedition to try and harass elected officials.  We are talking about political candidates who abuse FOIA to try and embarrass their opponents.  We are talking about some elected officials who misuse FOIA to gain access to information that they would otherwise not be privy to.

At the Tuesday, October 4th Board of Trustees meeting, Shelby Township Treasurer Paul Viar made a motion, seconded by Trustee Paula Filar, to take FOIA coordinator duties away from Clerk Terri Kowal.  Under the law, the Board has to designate somebody as the township’s FOIA coordinator.  For whatever reason, the Board (years ago) assigned these duties to the township clerk.

Since Clerk Kowal has been doing this for years, one question that came to our minds is:  “why change it now?”  So we listened and got a clear picture of why the Board wanted to make this FOIA policy change.

During the discussion over the motion, there was an exchange between Treasurer Paul Viar, Trustee Paula Filar and Clerk Terri Kowal concerning FOIA.  Below is a transcript of that conversation:

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BOARD OF TRUSTEES MEETING - 10/4/11

Treasurer Paul Viar.  Mr. Chairman, we’re not really talking about the request for FOIA.  I think we are talking about the results of the request.  What comes back in.  Now, if it is enacted, if the Board sees fit, this would take it out of the hands of elected officials.  Where I think all of us know that in the past, some of the documents that have solicited and delivered have been selectively pulled out of the information and used for different reasons.  We know this to be a fact.  So this would eliminate that type of circumstance that exists today, and that’s why I brought the motion.

Clerk Terri Kowal: I just wanted to point out that I really do appreciate the Board doing this and I appreciate Mr. Viar doing this it will be a great relief for us, especially during election season. I do appreciate it.

And I want to concur with what Mr. Viar is saying.  We had some documents underneath Cheryl’s desk in the Clerk’s department.  There was about, I think, 1,500 sheets of paper or something like that, and the box was one of those bankers boxes with thread around the end, you know string around the ends.  Somebody came into our department, went into that box, went through the 1,500 sheets of paper and redacted two sentences off of an e-mail.  Luckily we had already made a copy of it so we had a copy of it.  We copied the whole thing.  But they actually came into my office and did that.  I had to make a police report because somebody was going through our stuff.

* EDITOR’S NOTE:  Mrs. Kowal filed a police report over a printed e-mail?  Come on, really?  And the clerk complains she is “overworked”?  Could political games like this be one of the excuses why she has such a heavy workload?  People have told us, more than once, that Kowal has a flair for the melodramatic — and they are right.  We would LOVE to see that police report!

Trustee Paula Filar: The e-mail was in a big stack.  It was an e-mail that was in a big stack, and she said some information was retracted from it.  However, one of the issues that I personally have is that that e-mail that she is speaking of had to do with an exchange between Mr. Viar and myself.  It was on a business matter but then there was an exchange that Mrs. Kowal pulled out that e-mail and used it for her personal use and confronted Mr. Viar about that e-mail.  I don’t believe a FOIA coordinator should have access, obviously they have access to information, but they should not be using that information, taking information from the pile and providing it to anyone.  I do know that when asked about it she said that she received it from the resident.  However, the resident never came in and paid for the information so the resident couldn’t have had the information because the resident never paid for it.  I think that’s why…it’s really tempting to use information that you see if you’re an elected official and I think it belongs in the hands of somebody impartial.

Clerk Terri Kowal: I had said, Mr. Chairman, that I was never going to bring this up, ‘cause I really thought it was, like, pretty disgusting.  This is what happened, this is exactly what happened.  Mr. Viar called me about something, we were discussing something, and he said something about the person you ran against me in the last election wants to be on the sidewalk committee.  And I said I’ve never wanted to run anybody against you, not like you, or whatever, I didn’t have anything to do with his race.  And he said I’ve never, ever said a word about running anybody against you in the election.  And I said that’s just not true, I saw it in an e-mail when, for the FOIA.  He said well I don’t believe that’s true show it to me.  So I said okay so I went out to the file with Cheryl and my staff who knew there was nothing redacted, we went through all the sheets, found it, and that sheet had been redacted.  Fortunately that one page had been copied so I took it down, and here’s the thing, here’s why it had been copied, because as Mr. Viar said I’m going to run Stan Grot against the township clerk, he doesn’t like her for some reason and Mrs. Filar said oh that’s really good news...I’m telling what she said, she brought it up, she said well that will really give her a run for her money let’s see how that goes.  That’s exactly what, I’ve got the e-mail, so (and Kowal goes on trying to laugh the issue off as unimportant).

Treasurer Paul Viar: Mr. Chairman, tonight we have an admission that the clerk went into a stack of e-mails that I gave her and pulled out one that [Kowal interjects: “yup I did” ].  This is just as bad as what she did to Mr. Ward [Kowal interjects: “I did” and then laughs about it] or worse.  For her to go into a stack of personal e-mails — personal e-mails — and pull one out of a stack like this [Kowal interjects: “that’s right!”] is beyond comprehension [Kowal interjects: “it is”] of an elected official who has access to this information [Kowal interjects: “that’s right!”]. It shouldn’t happen and that’s exactly why I brought the issue to the Board tonight. [Kowal is heard laughing some more]

Trustee Paula Filar:  Mr. Chairman I would really like to concur.  I think that there are private conversations, they could joking they could be serious, I’m not going to say.  However, in the course of your job, if you have a responsibility to perform a task for the township, and in the course of that you see information that should be confidential, and you take it and you then confront somebody with it, to use it for your own purpose, I think that’s wrong!

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The motion made by Treasurer Viar and supported by Trustee Filar passed UNANIMOUSLY.  When you watch the meeting you will hear that Mrs. Kowal’s voice was the LOUDEST vote in support of giving FOIA responsibilities to the township’s Human Resources Director.

When you listen to the discussion, and read the transcript, Clerk Kowal admitted, more than once, that she did do exactly what Mr. Viar was accusing her of doing.  She took one specific e-mail from Mr. Viar from a stack of 1,500 sheets of paper.  She read that e-mail and didn’t like what it said.  So she removed the e-mail from the pile, made a copy of it, and then confronted Treasurer Viar about it.

Kowal complained that the e-mail discussed a potential candidate against her in 2012.  So what?  This is a still a democracy, isn’t it?  Do we have the right to open discussion on anything we want, or should we bow to government censorship?  Does Kowal believe she is entitled to her clerk’s job for as long as she wants it, and that nobody in our township has the right to talk about an opposing candidate?

Trustee Filar addressed Kowal’s comment directly, saying that there are many times when e-mails are exchanged between Board members.  Some are joking remarks, and some are serious.  Was the one about a possible candidate against Kowal a joke?  It really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Terri Kowal was so outraged by this comment that she actually pulled the e-mail out and confronted Treasurer Viar, to his face, about the remark.  Is this proper conduct for the clerk?  What do you think would happen if anyone else on the Board did this?  Do you think it would be a front page story in the Macomb Daily?

Mr. Viar’s comment above about Shelby resident Mike Ward and his complaints about Kowal’s FOIA conduct was reported in the May 18, 2011 Shelby-Utica Patch.  Kowal came under fire by Ward for allegedly leaking FOIA documents that Ward requested for his legal battle against Trustee Manzella.  As you will recall, Manzella sued Ward after he filed recall petitions against her.  Here is an excerpt from that story:

Kowal said any trustee can gather and release FOIA requests, and she would be happy to give FOIA responsibilities over to another department, citing the amount of work that goes into gathering the information needed.

Ward said he asked the board to put his complaint on the agenda because he wants the people of Shelby Township to know what’s going on behind closed doors.

“You have to be doing a better job than this. You can’t be tipping people off,” Ward said to Kowal.

So even though Kowal said she would “be happy” to give FOIA duties to someone else, now that the Board has granted her wish, she is unhappy?

The October 12, 2011 Shelby-Utica News reported on this township FOIA policy change.  When you read the article, you will note that Clerk Terri Kowal, who voted for the change, is now criticizing the decision.  Here is an excerpt from the Shelby-Utica News story:

Okay, so what’s up with Kowal?  Either the township’s new FOIA policy is good, as Kowal implied when she she said she is overworked and needs less to do, or the new FOIA policy is a “politically-motivated” attack.  If it is politically motivated, as Kowal told the Shelby-Utica News, why didn’t she mention this at the televised Board meeting?  Furthermore, if it is politically motivated, why did Kowal enthusiastically support the policy change with the loudest “aye” vote of anyone on the Board?

There is another interesting dynamic.  Mrs. Kowal was obviously happy to get rid of the FOIA duties, because as she said her department is overworked.  Yet, she also said the department is understaffed, which is government-speak for “I need to hire more people in my department.”  Since the Clerk’s department will now be doing less work since the FOIA responsibilities have been reassigned, why does Kowal want/need to hire more employees?  While other departments are being asked to do more with less — Clerk Terri Kowal wants her department to do less work with more employees?

Digging through thousands of e-mails, reading them, copying them and then using them as a political weapon to confront another person because you don’t like what is written, seems highly inappropriate.  If, as it appears, Mrs. Kowal is reading through township e-mails like this, could this possibly explain why she is, in her own words, overworked?  Is this cybersnooping taking time away from Kowal’s actual duties as clerk?

It appears, from the outside, as though the system has been misused.  If she did this once and got caught, how many other times has Terri Kowal snooped through e-mails and gotten away with it?  Taking FOIA responbilities away from the Clerk, who admitted to taking e-mails and using them for political purposes, and giving them to a non-political person who will follow the law, makes sense.  Mrs. Kowal may think she is the only person who can fulfill FOIA requests, but that claim is overstated.

What is apparent is that, once again, the Save Shelby entitlement syndrome is alive and well.  Mrs. Kowal, who has served on the Shelby Board since 1990 (21 years!), feels so entitled to her clerk’s job that she doesn’t want any talk about other candidates.  So she plays political games with personal e-mails.

Terri Kowal has served on the Shelby Township Board of Trustees for more than two decades.  She was first elected a Trustee in 1990 — a LONG time ago.  Much has changed during those two decades.  When Terri Kowal was first elected to the Board of Trustees:
    • George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the United States.
    • A gallon of regular gasoline cost $1.16.
    • The price of a first class stamp was 25¢.
    • The Dow Jones Industrials closed the year with an average 2,633.
    • Iraqi troops invade Kuwait, launching the Persian Gulf War under George H.W. Bush.
    • The average cost of a new house was $123,000.
    • The Saturn car division was launched by General Motors.
    • Seinfeld debuted on NBC and the Simpsons debuted on Fox.
    • The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space.

Actually, when you look at the list above, Kowal and the Simpsons are the only two things that have stayed the same during the past 21 years.  What do Kowal and the Simpsons have in common?

Interestingly, one week before the FOIA/e-mail policy made news, Mrs. Kowal was quoted in the Oakland Press still talking about the recent failed township recall against Treasurer Paul Viar and Supervisor Rick Stathakis.  Here we are, nearly four months after the recall was declared dead and buried, and Kowal is still ringing the recall bell.

She was quoted in the September 25, 2011 Oakland Press.  An excerpt appears below:

We understand that Mrs. Kowal supports the “Save Shelby, Status Quo, Liberal Spending Liars Society”.  We recognize that her family supported the failed recall, and that her son and daughter in-law circulated petitions.  Obviously, Kowal and her Save Shelby cohorts are still stinging from this defeat and trying and keep recall talk alive.   That may be important to this small group of people, but the overwhelming majority of Shelby Township residents rejected the recall and have moved on.  We understand what this group tried to do, who tried to do it, and why!

As to Kowal’s remark “you can’t let your votes be personal”, we wish that she would follow her own advice.  Sure, this sounds nice, but the fact remains that for Terri Kowal ALL politics is personal.  She will do anything, and everything, to fulfill HER agenda, including rummaging through another person’s e-mails to find something, anything, to complain about.  Those who have watched the Board of Trustees meetings will agree that when Terri Kowal comes out on the losing end of a issue, especially on something she really believes in, EVERY vote is personal.

Until next time...