Solutions are not difficult, but they will be unpopular with those directly impacted. However, a fair solution needs to be found that guarantees all residents are contributing toward a financially responsible government.

Governor Granholm has some serious decisions to make. I question if she can make them and when she says that cuts have been made I don't feel they have been made in the right places. I honestly think the state still has far too much fat in some sectors that needs to be cut. I also think if all the property taxes, sales taxes and income tax were delivered to the local communities to be distributed the state would run better. I think people can manage their own local sectors with county distributions better than the state is doing. Doing this would get rid of a great number of state jobs and create jobs locally. I also think it is a fairer distribution of tax money. There is plenty of money out there, it is just not being used wisely. Almost every community in this state is suffering due to poor state monetary management and it looks as though this will continue. Keeping tax money locally would determine what communities can spend on schools, roads and infrastructure. Local governments would determine how much they should raise taxes if they can't meet their budgets. I think this could work if you could get everyone to agree on it.

The obvious problem would be that communities with better employment and higher property tax values would be the winners in this scenario. But why shouldn't they be? Why should good communities have to pay the price for bad ones? What we don't know is how good could all our counties and cities become if the state were eliminated. Do we need to support all of these malfunctioning state departments at the cost of sacrificing our communities and local schools. Obviously the state has a job to do and we have a responsibility to fund it. There are taxes collected from utility companies, gasoline sales and other places that would fund a much more limited state government.

The system is broken and isn't working, that is why all these study groups are being formed and people are looking for some new solutions. It needs a dramatic change and I would like to see this taken under consideration. Put the burden on the local governments, I think they can meet the challenge if given the opportunity. But the local governments are suffering because of the poor state management and cutting of funds to them. It is truly sad that everyone has to suffer because the state can't manage properly. I think Michigan would thrive by having a small state government and larger local governments.

Maybe bumper stickers .....

A proud tax payer for Michigan

Keep Michigan fair --- pay your fair taxes

It is evident that the people of Michigan, through their elected representatives, must act to resolve this problem and reverse the ever upward cost trajectory. And there are lots of actions that can be taken. For example:

1. Encourage all employers that provide a health care ‘benefit’ (a euphemism for untaxed income) to convert this expenditure to direct compensation for their employees. This will remove the entitlement mentality that exists within both the insurance and health care provider industries. They will be required to compete for each consumer’s dollar.

And, depending on how this is handled in Lansing, it could be the revenue solution for the current general fund shortfall.

2. Insist through tax and regulatory policy that the insurance and health care industries serving Michigan move immediately to standard record formats and consumer owned electronic medical records (smart cards). Our global competitors have been at this stage in technology for some time now.

There are certainly many more and better ideas for action in the public realm. And it is going to require action by the public to correct the inability of the private sector to act.

Second, I'm all for allocating K-12 money based on performance. I'm also a big supporter of school vouchers (which I think would accomplish the same goal). Just as one example...I have a "little brother" whose father is in prison, mother is on welfare...she is never going to be able to afford to move into a district with decent schools so she is stuck in Flint, probably one of the worst districts in the state. Good luck getting any change in K-12 funding (or accountability) past the teacher unions.

Next we move on to "Consolidation and service sharing." Again a very noble and worthwhile cause (how many different fire departments are there in the state?) Like the unions, the local units are not going to give up their teet without a major battle.

"Public sector pay and benefits" See above. We have engrained the entitlement mentality which will devour us if left unchecked.

I've already taken too much of your time (if you're still actually reading this) and will (in typical conservative fashion) lump all the tax proposals together and say that invariably the government will spend what we give them. And as evidenced by your above proposals, not necessarily wisely.

Have a great day!

Accelerating the pace of consolidating local governments and school districts is also essential. Modifying Michigan's antiquated maintenance of home rule is probably the most important structural modification needed in terms of sustainability. The Center should generate more compelling data or analysis of existing data on the huge costs and future liabilities of so many local units of government. If the Next Michigan isn't inventing and pursuing leaner, meaner and more efficient institutions of public administration we'll never get our of the current morass.

Benchmarking the performance of local governments and evaluating the pay of public employees seems like a much stickier wicket. This also seems like the kind of pie-in-the sky group think idea that percolates from a cabal of elites that earn their pay as economic development consultants and lobbyists for hire. Who will pay for these studies? Who's bright enough and impartial enough to do the job? How long would it take? Holding up the interest in performance benchmarking in Kalamazoo is an impoverished argument for creating metrics to evaluate the performance of public administration across the state. In Kzoo, leaders stepped up with both an innovative idea and the resources to execute it. Providing leaders in other Michigan cities with information on the how, why and benefit of this model might be more judicious than attempting to scale its virtue across the state. Measuring accountability is great to test the effectiveness of a new resource allocation system but how do you apply this to Michigan before you've implemented significant structural modification?

Why aren't any of these big problems being fixed when we've had good information on so many for so long? The barrier is the existing power structure in Lansing. Because our state government isn't working and hasn't fixed big problems in a long time the notion that any good idea will be pursued via an act of the state legislature seems a bit optimistic if not ludicrous -there is a well-entrenched and positioned axis of power to thwart any of the good ideas for structural modification.

You've left out good ideas like repealing term limits and a constitutional convention. Who has the will to restructure Michigan? The elites that have sat secure and ineffective while the security of an ever increasing percentage of the taxpayers have been made less secure? Avoiding the promotion of a constitutional convention out of fear that extremists will participate isn't a good enough reason to exclude a broad section of the public in the restructuring process. The voice and multitude of traditional public policy actors has grown both louder and more stagnant as Michigan's big problems get bigger -good or great ideas won't in and of themselves make the existing institutions more effective. The self-interest of the emerging class of exceptional privilege in Michigan -those drawing a paycheck, pension and/or covered by public financed health care is too well served by the status quo to be depended on to institute the scope of broad reform we need.

It is critically important that to understand that meaningful measurement takes place over time. Any metric gathered shall be subject to the discipline of control charting as defined by Shewhart.

Example: In the logistics business transit time between origin/destination pairs has reigned supreme as a measure of performance. For forty years or more businesses and governments have used this metric to determine a carrier’s performance. Wrong! The three components of transit, origin, transit and destination, must be measured in terms of the amount of time a conveyance “dwells within each. The absolute value of transit time is meaningless without the breakdown into the three major components of transit and that “dwell” time is assessed through the use of control charts, not individual points of elapsed time.

“Accountability aimed at maximum efficiency” is a desired outcome that has the cart before the horse. Effective delivery of a product or service provides the efficiency. To focus exclusively on “efficiency” misleads the observer and distorts outcomes. Please note that efficiency can be at its maximum when activity is zero. (Laws of Motion).

I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to comment.