Phil Power, president of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Michigan, said that the issues targeted in the ballot proposals aren’t what have risen to the top in gatherings the center has convened in communities throughout the state over the last year and a half, in which some 5,000 people have participated.
He said state support for higher education and for pre-kindergarten education, maintaining Michigan’s quality of life as embodied in its environmental resources and communities, and improving state finances and ensuring government “is flexible and accountable and responsive, and behaves in a way that’s consistent with the state’s need to develop a strategy to compete and to win … those have been the three main things that come up time and again.”
As for the political nature of the ballot proposals, “from the standpoint of a centrist organization, these proposals are on the left, kind of equivalent to proposals that come from the right,” Power said.
“We don’t necessarily object to them, but we consider it part of the usual political tit for tat.”
