April 30, 1999

Legislative & Political Week in Review

• Public support for more permissive laws regarding carrying concealed weapons (CCW) remains low in Michigan, according to a poll released this week. With proposals to broaden citizen access to CCW permits pending in both legislative chambers, a Lansing-based survey firm announced that 31 percent of a 600-voter sample favored the legislation, while 53 percent were opposed. Half the respondents to the survey (which has a margin of error of 4 percent) reported believing that legislators were addressing CCW legislation in response to pressure from gun rights organizations. Legislation in the House—originally scheduled to be reported out of committee to the full chamber floor this week—was deferred in the wake of the widely reported mass shootings at a Colorado school.
• A perennial hot potato of public policy, the issue of state-funded vouchers for private school students heated up this week: A ballot committee was formed to oversee possible inclusion of enabling language on statewide ballots next year. A new coalition called Kids First! Yes brings together the political influence and deep pockets of Amway Corporation president and GOP financier Richard DeVos with several grassroots groups and religious denominations that have long backed public funding for private schools. To ensure a place on statewide ballots in 2000, organizers need to collect just under 303,000 petition signatures. The group estimates that its canvassing effort will require a budget of about $5 million. Of the myriad of details to be worked out in creating a voucher system, opponents have quickly focused on the need for private school teachers to submit to the same periodic subject matter testing as their public sector counterparts.
• Labor Day weekend grew a day longer under legislation squeaking through the Senate last week that restricts state schools from holding classes on the Friday before the September holiday for the next three years. SB 53, which passed 20-17, also sets up a task force to assess the economic and educational impact of the measure. Supporters predict big gains for the state’s tourism industry by providing parents with an additional summer weekend. Opponents decry the bill as unwarranted government incursion into local education policy. A similar proposal passed the upper chamber last year, only to languish in a House committee.
• House Democrats passed out party favors and noisemakers last week to celebrate the passage of the first Democrat-sponsored legislation of the 1999–2000 session. Much was made of the passage of HB 4128, authorizing distribution of transportation funding, because House Dems have complained since January that a GOP stranglehold on the chamber has stymied even their most routine proposed bills. According to Gongwer News Service, at this point in the 1995–96 session (when the GOP last controlled the House), 18 Democratic bills had been passed.
• The Michigan Supreme Court ended a three-year legal tiff between the governor and four members of the State Board of Education. Board members sued John Engler in 1996 after he issued executive orders that transferred administrative responsibility for the Department of Education from the board to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and shifted additional administrative authority from the board to the superintendent. Attorneys for the board members had argued that the board’s powers are constitutional and not subject to gubernatorial diminution. While that view was supported at the circuit court level, it was overturned by the state appeals court. In its ruling this week, the high bench decreed that Engler operated within legislatively delegated powers, and the reorganization thus stands.
• In a just released report, two Washington, D.C.-based environmental groups lambaste Michigan highway projects as the most wasteful in the nation. Titled "Road to Ruin," the report lists 50 projects in 26 states that allegedly waste taxpayer dollars, destroy farmland and encourage urban sprawl; five of the projects are in Michigan. Released by Taxpayers for Common Sense and Friends of the Earth, the report cites Michigan’s $640 million extension of US-23 between Standish and Alpena as an "unneeded freeway" resulting in a record loss of wetlands and representing one of the worst road projects in the nation. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Transportation dismisses the groups’ rebuke, telling the Detroit Free Press that the report authors are "environmental front groups who never met a road they liked."