By John Bebow - April 11, 2008
This letter came our way this week from a highly paid member of the Michigan economy who wonders how long he can stay...
I am recently being recruited by several Sun Belt institutions, and it has made me think about what it would take to make Michigan a really attractive place for me to live. Some thoughts your readers might find interesting.First some background. I am a professor at a university in Michigan.
I teach genetics and computing, two "hot" fields with many exciting results emerging almost daily. I have brought several millions of dollars of Federal funding to the State and have recruited numerous students from around the world to work in my research group. By all intents and purposes, I am the kind of person that Michigan needs to recruit and retain if we are ever going to revitalize and redirect the state economy.
What makes the Sun Belt offers attractive? One thing is opportunity for growth. I am being recruited by schools that currently enroll 60,000 students with plans to grow to 90,000 students in the next five year. These plans are not idle speculation, they are projections based on current high school and junior high school enrollments. For an academic, growth means the opportunity to initiate new ideas and build new programs. In Michigan, we have a declining and aging population which inevitably means we are going to be seeing decreasing enrollments over the next decade.
A second thing that is attractive is recruiting. I have a hard time getting young people nationally or internationally to even apply to programs in Michigan. Many simply set their job search browser to ignore the midwest entirely. When I talk to young people about moving to San Diego, Phoenix, Denver or Atlanta, they say "cool."
So what would it take, in my humble opinion, to turn things around and make Michigan a cool place to live? For starters, some visionary leadership at all levels. Instead of a dysfuctional state government that shuts the state down because they can not agree to a buget and tax plan and excludes legal immigrants from obtaining drivers licenses, we need a state government that is focused on the real challenges facing Michigan.
How about a "Michigan Promise?" If you live in Michigan and your child has been in a Michigan high school for four years and is graduating with a B or better average, we will guarantee a college scholarship for them. This would make Michigan a really good place to raise a young family.
How about a "Michigan masters of science and technology" program? If you are enrolled in an approved Master program in science or technology, Michigan will give you a student loan with zero interest as long as you live and work in Michigan. If you move out of state, it will revert to the prevailing commercial interest rate. This will make Michigan a good place for young talented people to come to study and work, and their income taxes will more than pay for any interet rate subsidy.
How about universal health care in Michigan? Lots of workers are losing their union health benefits as a result of buyouts, bankruptcies and corporate reorganizations. Our hospitals are going to provide care whether or not they are paid for it so we might as well not bankrupt our
hospitals as well.
How about a Michigan economic needs declaration to assist young immigrant families with skills to move to Michigan. We have a high unemployment rate, but we still have needs for skilled workers. We need physicians in rural areas and nurses everywhere.
Is this too much to ask? If Michigan wants to recruit and retain people like me, the State needs to find a way because otherwise, the attractions elsewhere will sooner or later win out.
6 Comments
Following our round 2 session of Community Conversation in Mt. Pleasant earlier this week, I find the thoughts shared in "Packing His Bags" post, highlighting ways to make Michigan a really attractive place to live, included some particularly good ideas. Now, how to make the rubber meet the road & transform ideas into real programs? What are steps to be followed to create Michigan Promise and a Michigan masters of science and technology program?? Seems these would indeed be attractive options that ought to prompt people to choose to come or stay in Michigan.
John this writer is totally correct in everything he said.
Of course there is no way for us to be able to compete with the hot sunny climates for the vast majority of kids. - They see spring break fun and partying, and night life and warm summer enjoyment all year round in other states and Michigan can only compete by offering other programs and ideas.
And we cant stop either. No resting on laurels. Because if we get some ideas in place that work, other states will follow suit and we'll need to 1up them each time.
The competition for college kids is most easily noticeable just watching college sports recruiting. Florida, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and California - Routinely keep their own recruits, and attract from cold weather climates, and most of them have no better programs or colleges than the biggest and best in the cold like Notre Dame, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio state, Penn state, MIchigan etc.
Another thing is pay, many michigan employers refuse to up their payscales because they tell people, its cheap to live here.
Well it may still be inexpensive to find decent housing yet in comparison to the coasts, but cars, gas, utilities and food are just as expensive if not worse here than other states now. It wasnt that way 7 yrs ago but since then its gotten really tough for most families in this state to survive.
We should do some radical things. or face ghost towns.
how about some suggestions.
1) toll ways in and out of michigan.
most other states have them around us, and our roads in many places stink.
lower the gas tax, lower the mileage tax for commercial trucking or whatever it is they pay.
toll the incoming and outbound traffic.
Add michigan business rebates to tolls where if they spend $$ in michigan, they get some or all of the toll price off certain purchase amounts and higher.
2) go seriously nuts with state mandatory alternative energy sources using Windfarms and Solar cells, geothermal energy for heat and cooling.
Mandate all state university buildings, all state government buildings and all commerical buildings over a certain acreage to add solar panels to the rooflines and put power back into the grid durin the day when rates are highest.
Add property tax rebates over 3 yrs to any residential addition of solar panels over a certain wattage.
Mandate geothermal energy usage for buildings.
Mandate Vegetable diesel or biodiesel for Michigan refueling stations for commercial fleets with rebates for conversion kits.
A place selling what they call Viesel in Florida for all diesel engines cars, trucks commercial trucking sells conversion kits for 500$ and up for all vehicles and claims identical mileage as 4.10/gallon diesel gives at a cost of $2.50/gallon.
Be the first state to fully separate commercial truck traffic and passenger vehicles using a two tier highway system.
Sure thats expensive, but we're only getting more congested, running out of room for expansion, and costing billions in repairs for the same result.
Passenger vehicles on top, trucking underneath.
Vehicle insurance and medical insurance would pry love it. Less crushed cars in big accidents, or pieces flying off killing people, or deer car accidents. Imagine all the commuter congestion lifted. How many times have truckers been moving along steady trying to save gas to get stuffed behind some guy going 55 in a 70? how many times has a truck pulled out in front of 9 cars in the left lane because he wanted to go 1mph faster than the slower truck in front of them, makin a slinky effect of 9 cars going 75 slam on their brakes?
How about massive investment in public transportation? I would love to see more trains/El-trains/subways etc being used to send people around town and between towns etc.
The perfect experiment for that is a Tri-cities area of Holland/GrandRapids/Muskegon.
How about more efficient prison and rehab processes, judgements, programs, sentencing?
How about universal health care or just more efficient coverage and prevention programs?
If the Feds can give back a big cash rebate to taxpayers all on a big loan to boost our economy, Can the state sell bonds to buy up old decrepit used cars, vans, trucks that average less than 14mpg and sell them for a nominal fee to salvage yards for the scrap and recycling, and the way to buy them would be to offer consumers a rebate check on a newer vehicle purchase at a tiered price up to a top amount. The rebate could be applied to the car price to lower the loan value and payments for the consumer.
Think of the multiple benefits of a program like that -
A) would get polluting vehicles getting bad mileage off the roads and gone for good.
B) would over a shortened time frame, up the average mileage of michigan's registered vehicle population, as opposed to attrition from usable lifecycle of older cars.
C) would get rid of more vehicles without modern safety equipment such as airbags, ABS, etc.
D) would be a boon to auto insurance companies delivering new policies
E) would help offset costs with new car registrations
F) would obviously be a boon to the used and new car market, of which michigan is currently being pounded from low sales nationwide.
G) could certainly be a quantifiable lessening of gasoline and leakable fluids used statewide over the programs time frame.
That could possibly lower demand and prices.
How about marketing more efficiently our water resources?
Business and citizens live in terribly dry places experiencing once in a century drought conditions like for the last year, Georgia, northern florida, the far west.
Lets market our state as WaterWorld.
"you thirsty" you want a green lawn and hardly water it each year? you want cheap municipal water/sewage treatment plants?
theres millions of things that can be done to help our state.
I'm sorry this person feels this way. I think people who really care about Michigan will stay and work with us all to take care of our problems. We have six adult children and a growing number of grandchildren (7+) and they are all college educated or getting there and went to school in Michigan and all over the country and all chose to start and build careers in Michgan because of what is has to offer and how much better it will be in the near future. ...and some have temporary employment problems but have turned down job opportunities in sunbelt states, etc.
Water is the future...and our present!
Evidently, the writer of "Packing His Bags" endorses a package of middle-class entitlement programs. The tuition subsidies and "universal" health care proposals sound appealing, but they do not address some of the fundamental flaws in Michigan's economy. I offer some alternative proposals. First of all, make Michigan a "right-to-work" state. This will help to overcome the entitlement mentality that has afflicted the state's economy since the Big 3 made a faustian bargain with organized labor during the hayday of the automotive industry. Second, acknowledge that services will play an increasingly dominant role in Michigan's economy, while manufacturing diminishes due to globalization. Third, recognize that technology is not a panacea for all ills, because software engineering and other high tech jobs can be outsourced as easily and profitably as manufacturing jobs. Fourth, recognize that Michigan's greatest blessing is its natural resources, particularly the abundant fresh water of the Great Lakes, which implies that tourism and agriculture should continue to be major components of the state's economy. Fifth, although Michigan's climate is not superficially appealing to young professions who seek a Sunbelt lifestyle, people will migrate where good jobs exist. Jobs can and will be created in Michigan when political, business, and labor leaders overcome their psychological inertia, agree on a realistic vision of the state's future, and craft a credible strategy to move forward.
Correction: Fifth, although Michigan's climate is not superficially appealing to young professionals who seek a Sunbelt lifestyle, people will migrate where good jobs exist.
I apologize for the typo.
Post a Comment