February 13, 1998

Legislative & Political Week in Review

• Mary Lannoye, the recently appointed Department of Management and Budget director, made her first executive budget presentation to the legislature this week. Gov. John Engler’s election-year proposed spending plan of $8.8 billion is one of the tightest of his tenure—it has a scant 2 percent increase in recommended general fund appropriations. Among the early big winners in the budget sweepstakes is the Department of Agriculture, slated to receive a 12 percent funding hike to combat what the governor calls a severe crisis in the state’s farming industry. Much of that increase would support pest-control, food-safety, and other agricultural research at Michigan State University.
• The state’s farm interests also are reflected in a new Senate committee. The Senate Farming, Agribusiness, and Food Systems Committee becomes the 17th standing (permanent) panel in the upper chamber. The chair and members have not been announced, nor has the new committee’s relationship to the existing Senate Committee on Hunting, Fishing, and Agriculture been delineated.
• Legislation passed by the Senate this week (SBs 555–64) would strip students convicted of drug crimes of their state financial aid for higher education.
• Michigan becomes the first state to commemorate civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Public Act 28 of 1998, just signed by the governor, designates the first Monday after February 4 as Rosa Parks Day; the new law celebrates this native daughter who often is called the mother of the nation’s civil rights movement.
• Justice Patricia Boyle surprised most court watchers with the announcement that she will retire at the end of this term. The unanticipated Michigan Supreme Court vacancy has observers buzzing with the possibility of a shift in partisan balance on the nominally nonpartisan bench. Although state supreme court justices campaign and run on a nonpartisan ballot, candidates are nominated at the party conventions. Justice Doyle is one of four Democrat-nominated incumbents on the seven-member court. Most of the names in immediate circulation as potential contenders for the open seat in the November election are of women, among them state court of appeals judges Maura Corrigan and Kathleen Jansen and Oakland circuit court judges Jessica Cooper and Deb Tyner.
• The Engler administration’s battle with federal agencies over a proposed split in the Michigan Employment Security Agency (MESA) still seems to be uphill. The feds object to the proposed split of MESA functions between the Jobs Commission and the Department of Consumer and Industry Services, specifically the reassignment of job-search and -training activities under localized work force boards within the Jobs Commission. Pending resolution of the dispute, a U.S. district judge has upheld the U.S. Department of Labor’s withholding of nearly $16 million in job-search funds for Michigan. It is the burden of the state to persuade the court that the reorganization does not violate federal guidelines.
• Perhaps spawning a literal version of road rage, The Detroit News charges that the administration’s highway improvement plans are destined to disappoint some state motorists. The News reports that most of the highway miles to be fixed under the state’s record $1 billion road budget have only minor problems, while the number of miles scheduled for major overhaul actually will decline from previous years. The paper says that only 357 miles of bad road are scheduled for rebuilding (compared with the annual average of 411 in recent years), while some 1,200 miles are slated for patching, sealing, or other "temporary measures." A bright note in this bumpy forecast was sounded by the Detroit Free Press, which notes that this year’s exceptionally mild winter means the tri-county metropolitan Detroit area has been able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on road-salt costs, freeing funds for road repairs this summer.