During the 1990s, Michigan lawmakers amended Michigan cleanup law to set clear standards for outcome-based remediation that allowed landowners and potential investors to remedy contaminated property and invest in it with certainty. This reform ended the owners' previously open-ended cleanup obligations and led to considerable private investment in restoring and developing brownfield sites.
The positive statutory changes made to this program in the 1990s have been largely undone by bureaucratic fiat, and the program has become a barrier to redevelopment. Terminating this program would allow prospective developers to deal directly with the federal government, which has adopted many of the positive changes Michigan pioneered in the 1990s.