You woke up disappointed today if you wanted a restaurant smoking ban, or corrections reform, or business tax reform, or final legislative approval to pave the way for more local scholarship programs like the Kalamazoo Promise.
If you wanted mass transit, your heart may have been lightened a bit by a package of bills that made it to passage and will now make it easier to build a 3.5 million train line up Woodward in Detroit.
In the final analysis, it was a less-than-revolutionary lame duck session in the Legislature. That’s probably a good thing. When legislators act like last-minute, short-order cooks, the results often don’t taste very good and sometimes get sent back to the kitchen. (Witness the Michigan Business Tax, the repealed tax on services, and the business tax surcharge cooked up way after hours in late 2007).
But 2009 has to be different.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Speaker of the House Andy Dillon, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop absolutely have to work together, reach compromises, and move forward a wide range of reforms that have been needed, but ignored, for years.
The state’s prison system is a great place to start.
The governor’s own emergency financial panel of experts is another great place to start. (Hint: watch for some of the influential members of this panel to reappear soon and sternly urge action on the many reform ideas they put forth two years ago.
Watch, too, for some strong ideas — big and small — out of a government efficiency panel, appointed by Dillon and Bishop, that has worked for the past year on what we predict will ultimately be a laundry list of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of state government reforms.
We’ve discussed reform in this newsletter for many months. The urgency is growing, as evidenced by the brand-new Michigan economic forecasts by the Senate Fiscal Agency…
- Unemployment will rise to more than 11 percent in the next couple of years.
- State general fund revenues will fall by $1.5 billion (about 15 percent) next year. (with a deficit in the current year of $265 million.)
- A falling overall state economy and falling wages in 2009 and 2010.
In Community Conversations across Michigan, we continue to hear state residents consistently express a few common ground priorities: improving our talent levels through education, diversifying our economy, investing in communities to assure we attract and retain high-prosperity workers, and assuring our government efficiently and effectively stretches thin resources.
It’s no time for more incrementalism like the $30 million here and $30 million there prison cuts we heard in the Lansing buzz this week.
Big change is enveloping Michigan.
Today’s legislators face the toughest capitol tasks in at least a generation. We need them to be the best and the brightest.
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Correctiond and Sentencing Reform: After spending all night in the final hours of the Lame Duck session, the CSG “Justice Renvestment” work group met and hammered out the outline of a preliminary agreement on reducing parole board discretion that will reduce prisoner length of stay without jeopardizing public safety and saving hundreds of million of dollars over the next 5 or 6 years. These changes will bring Michigan more in line with other Great Lakes states in terms of how long felons stay locked up before returning to their communities where the most effective means of rehabilitation reside. Public discussion with key stakeholder groups – including the business community – will begin on January 7th. Action is expected this spring after public hrearings this winter.Senator Alan Cropsey, Representative Alma Smith, SB director Bob Emerson, DOC director Pat Caruso and Governor Granholm’s director of Policy Regina Bell are leading the charge on these historic changes to corrections policy as a first – and important – step to reform sentencing policy in Michigan.
The Citizens Research Council of Michigan was poised to help the CSG effort by bringing together Great Lakes States to discuss what is working in their respective states. Unfortunately, our good friend Bernie Madoff decided he was going to ruin the entire financial foundation of our principle founder, the JEHT Foundation. As a result, we are looking for new support for this effort. The JEHT Foundation was very impressed with our research on Michigan’s corrections programs and the stark comparisons with other states in terms of spending, length of stay, and incarceration rate. We are hopeful that funding can be secured to help the CSG process in Michigan and ultimately to articulate policy options targeting corrections spending.