Every Michigan public body has a FOIA coordinator, whether it ever formally chose one or not. Here is how the designation works, what the job actually involves week to week, and the first moves for anyone who just inherited it.
MCL 15.236 works in two steps. For cities, villages, townships, counties, and state departments, the body must affirmatively designate an individual as FOIA coordinator. For every other public body, a library board, an authority, a school district, the statute designates for you: the chief administrative officer is the FOIA coordinator by operation of law. There is no public body in Michigan without one; there are only public bodies that have not told the person yet.
That default matters in practice. When a request arrives at an authority whose board never thought about FOIA, the response clock starts anyway, and the administrator is the one the statute is looking at. The fix costs nothing: designate deliberately, record it, name the role in your published procedures, and tell the front desk where requests go.
The statute describes a role; the calendar describes a job. Week to week, the coordinator owns:
A Michigan township is not one public body; it is a family of them. The board, the planning commission, the zoning board of appeals, and the downtown development authority are each covered by the statutes, and records requests can implicate any of them. Most small organizations run all of it through one coordinator, usually the clerk, which works well exactly as long as the routing is explicit: the published procedures say where requests go, and whoever staffs each body knows to forward anything that smells like a request the same day, because the receipt clock does not wait for internal mail.
Most coordinators are appointed by a retirement, an election, or a Tuesday. The first week is triage: find the log, find every request with an open deadline, and confirm the published procedures and public summary exist, because without them the body may not charge any fee at all (MCL 15.234(4); template and details in the procedures guide). The full sequence, from locating the closed-session minutes to the ninety-day dry run, is laid out in the new clerk’s 90-day checklist.
Dekree is built around the coordinator’s week: every request arrives logged with its deadline computed, each public body routes to its designated coordinator, response letters are drafted with the right citations for review, and the fee worksheet enforces the statutory caps. When the role changes hands, the new coordinator inherits a running system instead of a filing cabinet.
Every public body has one. Cities, villages, townships, counties, and state departments must designate an individual as FOIA coordinator (MCL 15.236(1)). For all other public bodies, the chief administrative officer is the FOIA coordinator by operation of law (MCL 15.236(2)).
Yes. The coordinator may designate another person to act on their behalf in accepting and processing requests. The responsibility for the public body’s compliance still runs through the coordinator role.
Commonly, yes. A township clerk often coordinates requests for the township board and its commissions, though larger organizations sometimes route requests per department or per public body. What matters is that every request lands with someone who knows the clock, and that the routing is written into the published procedures.
Find the log and every open deadline, confirm the published procedures and public summary exist (without them the body may not charge any fee, MCL 15.234(4)), and learn the receipt rule: emailed requests are received one business day after transmission (MCL 15.235(1)). Our new-clerk 90-day checklist covers the full sequence.
This article is educational information for Michigan public bodies, current as of the publication date. It is not legal advice, and statutes and court decisions change. Confirm specifics with your municipal attorney. Statute text: legislature.mi.gov.