MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week.
House Bill 4929, Ban using public school resources to deduct
union dues: Passed 55 to 53 in the House
To prohibit school districts from using taxpayer resources (including their
payroll processing systems) to deduct union dues or fees from employees’ pay,
and then sending the money to a union. This practice is the current norm, so
the bill would require unions to collect dues or fees from school employees on
their own. Under a recent Michigan Supreme Court ruling (MEA vs. Land),
districts are already prohibited from deducting employee pay and sending it to
a union political action committee.
Paul Kersey, director of labor policy, has a column today in Dome Magazine about how civil society can help reintegrate Detroit into the “local, regional and global economy.”
For an explanation of what constitutes civil society, please see this essay by Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman.
Federal government green jobs initiatives are long on promises and short on results. The Obama administration promised a federal Department of Energy $38 billion loan guarantee program and claimed it would create or save 65,000 jobs. According to a report in The Washington Post, government records indicate that the federal initiative has created only 3,545 jobs. The relatively small number of jobs created by the program comes at a high cost to taxpayers who have to foot the bill when the high-risk ventures fail.
By eliminating the cap on the number of charter public schools that can operate in
Included in the $450 billion spending plan
The city of Detroit earns a C- for online transparency from Sunshine Review, a “pedia” site that rates thousands of local governments using a transparency checklist it developed.
SR’s managers seem surprised the grade is not lower, asking on their Facebook page, “Anyone else surprised?”
The economies of the state’s large urban areas like Detroit and Flint are on life support. A bill introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, would effectively pull the plug on those cities, letting them silently die. House Bill 4901 would create an “environmental justice” regulatory regime. The concept behind environmental justice is that minorities are disproportionately affected by pollution in the areas in which they live.
Michigan Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, told public TV’s “Off the Record” program last week that he now supports a right-to-work law for public school employees: “They (unions) could still offer (school employees) their membership; it wouldn’t be a forced membership. They (unions) would have to recruit and do their work off campus.” The full text of the relevant section of the interview is posted below.
Jarrett Skorup, research associate for online engagement at the Mackinac Center, appeared recently on “The Tony Conley Show” on WILS 1320AM in Lansing and on “The Frank Beckmann Show” on WJR 760AM in Detroit to discuss an article he wrote for Michigan Capitol Confidential about how few teachers in Michigan are fired for poor performance.
Last week legislation was introduced by Republicans in the Michigan Senate to create a state Obamacare insurance "exchange" here (Senate Bill 595, sponsored by Sen. Roger Kahn, R-Saginaw, and cosponsored by Republicans John Pappageorge from Troy and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville from Monroe).
The incomprehensible attacks of 10 years ago remain fresh in the memories and heart-wrenching in the emotions of all who witnessed them. I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., at the time and vividly recall feeling what I had only experienced in nightmares — helplessness in witnessing brutality that caused the mind to rebel. People responded to what we saw with repeated denial: This can’t be happening. Fear was heightened by continuing reports of hijacked planes headed into the district. Officials did not know whether we would be safer in our building — across the street from the Capitol — or out on the streets. Rumors of a car bomb at the State Department and smoke from the Old Executive Office Building added to the confusion. If our leaders had contingencies for such an attack, no one seemed to know what they were or how to implement them.
During a taping of “Off the Record,” Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville reportedly announced a plan to pass legislation that would ensure that teachers could continue to work in public schools without paying union dues or fees. The Michigan Education Association has already voiced its objections to this “right-to-teach” law, which would put it in a position of needing to ask teachers to support the union voluntarily. Depending on how the state’s 100,000 or so public school teachers respond, this could dramatically reduce the resources available to both the MEA and the Michigan Federation of Teachers, two of the state’s most formidable lobbying groups. Both of these teachers unions have steadfastly resisted education reforms.
Under two proposals just introduced or possibly coming soon in the
Senate Bill 618, introduced by
Lou Schimmel, an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center, has been appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder as emergency manager for the city of Pontiac, according to Mlive.com.
Schimmel was appointed to a similar role by Gov. John Engler in Hamtramck in 2001. He also served as a court-appointed receiver for the city of Ecorse from 1986 to 1989, eliminating a $6 million budget overspending crisis.
Green energy subsidies and mandates invariably join corporations and government in an unholy alliance as companies seek to gain financially from government largesse. Of course, these so called public–private partnerships are designed to pick winners and losers with taxpayers footing the bills. It is necessary for government funds to keep flowing to the chosen companies so that the next generation of taxpayers can be convinced of the importance of the green cause.
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week.
Senate Bill 472, Expand "development rights
agreements": Passed 28 to 9 in the Senate
To require (rather than just allow) "development rights agreements"
to be granted to the owner of a vacant parcel 15 acres or larger who requests
this, and allow these to go into effect without legislative approval, which is
required under current law. "Development rights agreements" give a
landowner property tax breaks in return for foregoing future development.
Paul Kersey, labor policy director, told the Detroit Free Press that President Obama’s speech Thursday night left him with questions as to “why he didn’t put some ideas of his own on the table to be cut.” Kersey also said he felt the president was more “projecting an attitude than a legislative package.”
By Jack McHugh
A short new paper by Mackinac Center Adjunct Scholar John Graham explains “Why Health Exchanges Don’t Work.” It was released this week by the Pacific Research Institute.
State health insurance “exchanges” are one of the linchpins of ObamaCare. They are loosely modeled after the health insurance “Connector” in the Massachusetts “RomneyCare” system of state-subsidized health coverage. But even the leading defender of the exchange concept, the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier, has condemned the “ObamaCare” version as a corruption of the idea. In a recent report he said:
Go ahead and call me naive, but for the moment I'm willing to give the Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa the benefit of the doubt that his rant yesterday in Detroit was not a call for violence. If anyone needs more evidence that the union establishment has been hijacked by leftish ideologues though, Hoffa left a pretty clear indicator of what his real priorities are.
Many in the political class cling to an economic myth that government creates jobs. Economic reality is that the private sector creates jobs, but government policies often are extremely effective at killing jobs. Often time the best thing the government can do is to cause no more harm — case in point are job-killing air rules coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency.
A recent editorial in The Detroit News calling for expanded school choice cites this recent blog post by Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman, saying “concerns over diminished local control seem unfounded.”
Russ Harding, the Center’s senior environmental policy analyst, has been appointed to the Occupational Licensing Advisory Rules Committee by the state’s Office of Regulatory Reinvention, according to the Midland Daily News.
The committee will help the ORR identify “duplicative, obsolete, unnecessary or unduly restrictive occupational licensing rules,” among the 91 occupations the state regulates, the Daily News reported.
Here is the cumulative list of all MichiganVotes "Weekly Roll Call Report" votes for 2011. These will be updated on a regular basis, and a new version started in 2012.
Every week MichiganVotes.org sends these reports to newspapers around the state, showing how just the state representatives and senators in their service area voted during the past week. They focus on the most politically revealing votes (what they do vs. what they say), plus the most important votes on matters of policy, and some that are just interesting. A cumulative list of all these votes is a useful reference source, if not a fully comprehensive one.
Mlive recently reported that Inc. Magazine lists five of the top 500 fastest growing companies in America as Michigan-based:
On a per-capita basis, this is not a strong performance for a state of nearly 10 million people, but a company's growth relies on more than just the population of its home state. More interesting is that none of the companies listed appear to have been selected by the state’s economic development agency for special favors. None have been granted selective MEGA tax breaks or subsidies, for example.
This week's report:
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week. The House and Senate are in the midst of a summer break, so rather than votes this report instead contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
