I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
After cutting billions of dollars out of the state budget over the last several years, and still facing a projected deficit of a billion dollars or more next year, neither Republican Rick Snyder nor Democrat Virg Bernero has offered a serious plan to put Michigan’s budget on a stable revenue footing. Kathy Barks Hoffman of [...]
Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed the last of the budget bills passed by the legislature on Thursday, officially putting the budget to bed — until the middle of the fiscal year when they measure actual revenue vs. expected revenue and have to make adjustments, that is. Legislators closed a $484 million gap in next year’s budget [...]
The Michigan House and Senate finished up the last three budgets for FY 2011 on Wednesday and Gov. Jennifer Granholm is expected to sign them into law on Thursday, a far easier result than has been the case in two of the last three years when last minute wrangling resulted in a temporary shutdown of [...]
Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero and businessman Rick Snyder, the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor respectively, both seem to be offering up only vague and platitudinous answers on how they would fix the clearly broken budget process in the state of Michigan. The Detroit News reports on some of those answers. Bernero promises to “build [...]
With the Sept. 31 deadline for completion of the next fiscal year budget looming, the Michigan Senate passed a series of budget bills on Tuesday. The Detroit Free Press reports:
The AP reports that the Michigan Senate met briefly on Tuesday then adjourned until Sept. 7. That means there will be no serious work on the budget until after that date, leaving just over three weeks to fix the $302 million shortfall in this year’s budget and to pass multiple bills to set next year’s [...]
Gov. Jennifer Granholm held a press conference on Wednesday to propose ways to fix the budget shortfalls for the current fiscal year, 2010, and for the FY 2011, which begins on October 1. As is routinely the case, some cuts or shifts are necessary in the middle of the current year as a result of [...]
The May revenue estimating conference in Lansing on Friday gave legislators good news — and perhaps some relief from the pressure to make more steep cuts in the budgets for 2010 (which ends in September) and 2011 (which begins in October). You can read the full report here (PDF). As anticipated by the individual reports [...]
The state Senate passed a budget bill that would again cut revenue sharing for local communities, the bulk of which goes to police and fire protection. The vote was 21-17 to cut revenue sharing by 4 percent in FY 2011, which begins in October, on top of the 11 percent cut in this year’s budget. [...]
The battle lines over the FY 2011 state budget, which begins on Oct. 1, have already been drawn. And to no one’s surprise, they’re in the same place they were last year, with Gov. Granholm seeking more revenue and smaller cuts and the Republican-led Senate seeking all cuts to balance the budget. On Wednesday, the [...]
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