Which General Schedule actually applies to your office, what a retention period means, the only legal authority to destroy a record, and where FOIA intersects.
Here is the misconception that shows up in office after office: the belief that General Schedule #31 is the retention schedule for Michigan local government, the one document that tells a township or city what to keep and for how long. It isn’t. GS #31 is the General Schedule for Local Government Financial Records: it governs financial records, and financial records only. An office running its whole retention program off GS #31 has authority to dispose of its invoices and almost nothing else.
The General Schedules are a family, and the right one depends on what your office is and what the record is:
A single organization usually works from several of these at once. A city clerk’s office leans on GS #24 for its core records, GS #26 for personnel files, GS #30 for system logs and backups, and GS #31 for the financial side. And when a record type isn’t covered by any approved general schedule, the office needs an approved agency-specific schedule before that record can ever be destroyed. No schedule, no destruction. It is that literal.
Under the Michigan History Center Act (2016 PA 470), local government records are property of the State of Michigan and may not be disposed of, mutilated, or destroyed except as provided by law (MCL 399.811-399.812). That phrase does real work. The file cabinet sits in your building, your staff created the documents, your budget paid for the paper, and the records still are not yours to discard. The office is a custodian, not an owner.
The teeth behind the principle: unlawful destruction of public records is a crime under MCL 750.491, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 2 years and/or a $1,000 fine. In practice this rarely comes up because someone shredded files maliciously. It comes up because someone cleaned out a storage room before a move, or purged an inbox, or tossed boxes a predecessor left behind, without checking whether a schedule authorized any of it. Good intentions are not a defense the statute recognizes.
The practical takeaway for a clerk: treat “can we get rid of this?” as a legal question with a documented answer, never as a judgment call made at the recycling bin.
An approved Retention and Disposal Schedule is the only legal authority to destroy a local government record. Not the passage of time, not a full storage room, not the fact that nobody has asked for the file in a decade. Schedules are issued by Records Management Services (DTMB) together with the Archives of Michigan, and each schedule is approved by the agency, RMS, the Archives, and the State Administrative Board. That approval chain is what converts “we threw it out” from a potential crime into routine, defensible records management.
Two things about the periods themselves. First, they are minimums: the schedule tells you the earliest point at which disposal is authorized, and an office may keep records longer as a matter of policy. Second, the minimum is not a mandate. Nothing forces destruction at the retention date; what the schedule gives you is permission, plus the paper trail to prove the permission existed.
The everyday discipline this implies: every record series your office produces should map to a line on an approved schedule. Anything that maps to nothing is a gap, and the fix is an agency-specific schedule, not a quiet trip to the shredder.
Authorized destruction still needs a record of its own. An office that destroys on schedule but keeps no log of what was destroyed cannot later prove the destruction was routine, which is the entire point. The habit worth building:
The disposal log is boring right up until the day someone alleges records were destroyed improperly. Then it is the difference between a two-line answer and a months-long problem.
Even when the retention period has fully expired and the schedule authorizes disposal, four situations suspend destruction until the matter concludes:
The holds trump the schedule, always. A record whose period expired in 2019 but which is responsive to a request received yesterday must be kept. This is the piece of retention law most likely to be violated by accident, because the disposal pass and the request intake usually live in different systems, or in different people’s heads.
Dekree applies the right retention schedule to every record automatically, tracks each record’s disposition date, and blocks disposal on anything under legal hold or attached to an open request. The clerk sees what is eligible for disposal, what is held and why, and a disposition log builds itself as records move through the process.
Retention and FOIA look like separate subjects and behave like one. Two rules capture the intersection.
You cannot destroy your way out of a pending request. The moment a FOIA request arrives, every record it reasonably covers is under hold, whatever the retention schedule says. Destroying a responsive record mid-request is the worst of both worlds: a retention violation and the centerpiece of the requester’s next filing. Between intake and closure (the deadlines are covered in our FOIA deadlines guide), the shredder does not touch anything the request might reach.
A record destroyed on schedule is a clean answer. The flip side is just as important. When a request arrives for a record that was lawfully destroyed under an approved schedule before the request came in, “no records exist” is a complete and defensible response, and the disposal log proves it. That is what a working retention program buys you: not just less storage, but the ability to say “we no longer have that, and here is the authority under which it was disposed” without flinching.
The offices that get in trouble are almost never the ones that destroyed too little. They are the ones that destroyed without authority, or held everything forever with no system, and then could not say what they had, what they lacked, or why.
No. GS #31 is the General Schedule for Local Government Financial Records. It covers financial records only. A township office works primarily from GS #10 (Michigan Townships), a city or village clerk from GS #24, a city or village treasurer from GS #28, a county clerk from GS #6. HR, IT, and library records have their own schedules (GS #26, GS #30, GS #17). Records not covered by an approved general schedule need an approved agency-specific schedule before they can be destroyed.
Only if an approved Retention and Disposal Schedule authorizes it and no hold applies. Retention periods are minimums that authorize disposal, not commands to destroy. Records involved in litigation, a pending investigation, an active audit, or a pending FOIA request must be kept until the matter concludes, even if the retention period has expired.
Unlawful destruction of public records is a crime under MCL 750.491, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 2 years and/or a $1,000 fine. Local government records are property of the State of Michigan under MCL 399.811-399.812 and may not be disposed of, mutilated, or destroyed except as provided by law.
No. A pending FOIA request is one of the four holds that suspend disposal. Once a request that reasonably covers a record has arrived, that record must be preserved until the request concludes, even if its retention period expired years ago. Destroying it mid-request creates exactly the dispute a clean retention program exists to prevent.
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.