Does the Open Meetings Act Apply to the Child Support Leadership Council (CSLC) and the Friend of the Court Bureau Advisory Committee?
The Child Support Leadership Council (CSLC) and the Friend of the Court Bureau Advisory Committee (FOCBAC) do not follow the provisions of the Open Meetings Act (OMA). Unlike the Open Records from which the judiciary is excluded, the Open Meetings Act contemplates the inclusion of the judicial branch as a public body. We know for a fact from the minutes of the FOCBAC that the CASPER meetings were held in private before the quarterly FOCBAC meetings; that proposed minutes and approved minutes of FOCBAC meetings are not made available in compliance with the OMA; that some of our members have been excluded from CSLC deliberations that should have been public; and that there is a hostile and uncooperative attitude towards input from members of the public.
Lets put it to the task...
Here is the citation from the Open Meetings Act that ostensibly includes the judicial branch as a public body:
MCL 15.264
Public notice of meetings generally; contents; places of posting.
The following provisions shall apply with respect to public notice of meetings:
...
(c) If a public body is a part of a state department, part of the legislative or
judicial branch of state government,
part of an institution of higher education, or part of a political
subdivision or school district, a public notice shall also be posted in
the respective principal office of the state department, the
institution of higher education, clerk of the house of representatives,
secretary of the state senate, clerk of the supreme court, or political
subdivision or school district.
http://www.legislat ure.mi.gov/ printDocument. aspx?objectName= mcl-Act-267- of-1976&version=txt
I and others made requests for the CASPER report which would have been included under the Open Records and Freedom of Information Act request before it was finally published on the SCAO website. The report was first indicated in the June 22, 2006 "Approved Minutes" of FOCBAC.
Child Support Program Review Committee (CASPER)
Mr. Capps informed the Advisory Committee about CASPER, which is an ad hoc
committee that examines the system to determine if there are ways of finding
increases in revenues or streamlining the system to the whole child support
program to make recommendations to the Program Leadership Group (PLG). The
Committee has nine people, (two from SCAO, two from OCS, one from DIT, and
two from PAAM) and meets every two weeks at the Hall of Justice.
As many people can see the Child Support Program attempts to operate in the dark with little public input because they know there are significant numbers of people that are now against the operation of the program as a free for all welfare program that is plagued with overparticipation (over half of which are middle and upper class feuding families) in an effort to drive up collection numbers and participation numbers to drown out the failures it has with the needy population. Successful collections mostly come from income witholding orders as opposed to shifting income to means tested welfare recipients.
At some point we will have to ask the question, why lift up one population at taxpayer expense when it just creates the same problem in the contributing class? The only difference is that there is now a bunch of bureacratic parasites that benefit, not society.
