Taxable Costs – Clarkston Secrets

Interrupting your regularly scheduled programming to post two Michigan Supreme Court orders.

You may remember that I was awarded taxable costs by the Court’s clerk. The city council asked all seven members of the Michigan Supreme Court to review that award, and the Justices denied that review. This means that the Court agrees that I should receive $1146 in taxable costs.

Here is the order:

20200930 – Order denying review of costs

However, the most important ruling today was the Michigan Supreme Court’s denial of the city council’s request for a rehearing on the July 24th decision in my case.

Here is the order:

20200930 – Order denying rehearing

The court rules require the Court’s clerk to enter judgment “promptly” after denial of the motion for rehearing. Once that’s done, it means that records that are prepared, used, in the possession of, or retained by an official in the performance of an official function of a public body are public records that are subject to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.

This is great news, and a victory not just for me and other Clarkston taxpayers, but also for any Michigan taxpayer living in a municipality that was operating under the framework suggested by our city attorney, (most of) our city council, the attorneys hired by the Michigan Municipal League Liability and Property Pool, the Michigan Municipal League, the Michigan Townships Association, and the Michigan Association of Municipal Attorneys.

It’s not over, but today is a good day.

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Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic, and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man, to decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor. It is traitorous both against yourself and your country.

Let men label you as they may, if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of.

~Mark Twain

Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.

This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world –

No, you move.

~Captain America

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

~Theodore Roosevelt

Category: Taxable Costs

Breaking News! The City Lost – Again, and Again