Senate Bill 163, Revise wetland use permit details: Passed 25 to 12 in the Senate
To expand certain exemptions to a state wetland permit mandate, increase some wetland permit fees and reduce others, require permit denials to document their rationale and authority, authorize grants to local governments to create “wetland mitigation banks,” slightly reduce wetland regulatory burdens imposed on county drain commission projects, slightly increase the state's burden to justify restrictions on an owner's use of his or her property, prohibit the Department of Environmental Quality from imposing regulations that are beyond the scope those required by federal law, and make other changes to these land use restrictions.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"

House Bill 4042, Require match of welfare applicants against incarceration lists: Passed 37 to 1 in the Senate
To require the Department of Human Services to perform a monthly jail and prison “incarceration match” and Social Security “death match” to help determine eligibility for a welfare and food stamp benefit “bridge cards,” and not issue or revoke the card of a person on those lists. This would codify current practice in statute.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"

Senate Bill 335, Extend Medicaid "gamesmanship" insurance tax: Passed 65 to 44 in the House
To extend from 2014 to 2018 the sunset on a 1 percent health insurance claims tax intended to “game” the federal Medicaid system in ways that result in higher federal payments to Michigan’s medical welfare system. As introduced the bill would have eliminated the sunset and empowered the Department of Treasury to raise the tax without any further authorization by the legislature.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"

Senate Bill 165, Require disclosure of medical futility policies: Passed 108 to 0 in the House
To require a hospital, health facility or agency that maintains a written policy that encourages or allows a health care professional to withhold or discontinue treatment on the grounds of "medical futility" to provide a copy of the policy to a patient or resident upon request.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No" 

Senate Bill 58, Revise DNR and Agriculture Department “mission statements”: Passed 89 to 18 in the House
To explicitly include among the duties of the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture that they work together to jointly promote development of the state’s forest products industry.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"

Senate Bill 51, Expand forest property tax breaks: Passed 79 to 28 in the House
To expand the eligibility for certain forest property tax breaks, increase their value, increase the number of acres eligible for the tax breaks (by means of new exemptions from an existing 1.2 million acre cap), authorize a new 2 mill property tax on property in this program that would go to a proposed "Private Forestland Enhancement Fund" to subsidize private forestland management activities, and more. This and related bills are designed to facilitate use of a program granting property tax exemptions to owners of smaller "non-industrial" sized parcels of forestland, rather than one designed for owners of much larger "industrial" forests.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"

Budget Negotiations Dominate Week’s Legislative Activity

The primary focus of legislative activity this week was the budget for the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. Significantly, House and Senate conference committees came to agreement on most spending items, although some remain unresolved. One of these is whether the Department of Education budget will include language prohibiting adoption of a national “Common Core” curriculum initiative. Many grass roots activists have expressed strong opposition to this policy, which the state Board of Education has already approved.

The budget agreement does not include expanding Medicaid eligibility under the terms of the federal health care law ("Obamacare"). That issue is still in play, however; as one advocate for the expansion told the Gongwer news service, "The budget's not done until October 1st." In other words, a “supplemental” appropriation bill could still be passed later that would authorize the expansion.

Legislative leaders and the Governor did agree on where to spend a one-time, $483 million tax collection windfall (plus another $219 million expected next year), which is mostly related to taxpayers shifting income into the 2012 tax year because of federal income tax increases. Specifically, $140 million more will be spent on K-12 schools, an additional $350 million will be used for road projects, and $75 million will be deposited in the state “rainy day fund.”

It is expected that the full House and Senate will pass the complete budget next week. The weekly Roll Call Report will report key details when this happens.

SOURCE: MichiganVotes.org, a free, non-partisan website created by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, providing concise, non-partisan, plain-English descriptions of every bill and vote in the Michigan House and Senate. Please visit http://www.MichiganVotes.org.

FBI officials raided the office of the Indianapolis Land Bank on Tuesday after a months-long investigation revealed evidence its officials were receiving kickbacks for selling properties to favored nonprofit groups. The land bank's director, Reginald Walton, has been charged.

Allegedly, land bank officials were exploiting a policy that gives nonprofits preference over other would-be buyers of land bank property. The Indianapolis Land Bank would sell properties at a steep discount to nonprofit organizations, instead of using a bidding process. Michigan land banks, such as the Kent County Land Bank and the Genesee County Land Bank, also have policies that favor nonprofits.

Indianapolis Land Bank officials allegedly took bribes to exploit this policy. Officials sold land bank properties to "pass-through" nonprofits at a steep discount. The executives of those nonprofits would then transfer the properties to private investors — while collecting a fee.

In light of this, the Indianapolis mayor has suspended the land bank's operation.

The corruption of the Indianapolis Land Bank is not surprising to anyone who has tracked these government entities. The country's oldest land bank, in St. Louis, has a similar history of corruption and favoritism.

Granting government officials the power to choose who can purchase property and for how much, along with the ability to funnel subsidies to certain developers, is a recipe for corruption. And yet, that is what Michigan's land bank law allows.

The Kent County Land Bank created controversy when it blocked properties from going to auction — where they would have been bid on in a transparent process — in order to be able to pick and choose who could purchase property.

Indianapolis officials’ misdeeds should cause legislators here to revisit the wisdom of allowing such entities to exist in Michigan. While there is no evidence of bribery, land bank officials around this state have already put in place policies that favor nonprofits and government employees. 

At the very least no land bank should be allowed to block property from being sold at tax auction. Moreover, these government agencies should adopt uniform pricing policies, instead of extending preferred treatment to some. 

Michigan has 40 or so land banks, and they operate without much independent oversight. It would be best to eliminate or reform them now, instead of waiting for a scandal to occur.

Imagine a world where you could have anything you desired and could jettison those things you don’t. For example, I recently purchased a CD box set of the band 10cc, and I could do without the majority of songs recorded after Lol Crème and Kevin Godley departed the group. Likewise, I’d love it if 1964’s “Beatles for Sale” didn’t include the song “Mr. Moonlight,” which I humbly consider the nadir of the Fab Four’s entire body of work.

Now that I have those personal preferences off my chest, I should add that I can learn to live with owning yet another copy of 10cc’s “Dreadlock Holiday” that I’ll never listen to, and as well have found digital detours around the dreaded “Mr. Moonlight.” Crisis averted.

Not so for Sen. John McCain, however, who seems to feel it’s the duty of the federal government to ensure your local cable and satellite providers don’t bundle channels you watch with channels you avoid. On May 9, Sen. McCain introduced the “Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013” (S.912), which would require multichannel video programming distributors to offer individual television channels on an “a la carte” basis.

Is the current system somewhat annoying? Sure, but, as Al Capone reputedly said, “Don’t make a federal case out of it.”

Sen. McCain apparently loses sleep at night because MVPDs sometimes require customers to pay for channels they don’t want in order to receive the ones they do want. Fair enough, but there are perfectly legitimate reasons for MVPDs to bundle channels. On this, more later.

But, even if there weren’t, current technologies already provide television viewers with enough a la carte options to choke a horse. In a May 17 blog post, Randolph May, president of the Maryland-based Free State Foundation and a telecommunications policy expert, declared: “In the history of humankind, consumers never have had so many choices for watching so much diverse video programming offered by so many video providers.”

May continued:

Today, Netflix, with 29 million subscribers, is the nation’s largest subscription video service, with more subscribers than Comcast (22 million). In addition to the dominant provider Netflix, other major online video programming purveyors include Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, HBOGo, and Apple TV. Not to mention YouTube, which recently announced initiation of a subscription video service. And, of course, in addition to the traditional “television” screen, you can watch all this various video programming on laptops, notebooks, and smartphones.

We truly do live in the age of “TV Anytime, Everywhere.”

But what to make of the argument that consumers take it on the chin for MVPD channel bundling? According to John Stephenson, director of the Communications and Technology Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council, this, too, is misleading:

In 2003, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that going from bundling to an a la carte model could cost video providers advertising revenues that would result in an increase in subscriber fees. Brent Skorup at the Mercatus Center explains why bundling works: “Bundling is efficient because in a high fixed-cost industry, like cable, cable channel bundles provide cost savings that outweigh the costs of providing ‘wasted’ channels consumers don’t watch.”

Even economic thinkers on the left dispute the notion that an a la carte model is a solution. Matty Yglesias at Slate notes that a la carte “starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the delusion that if your basic package contains plenty of channels you never watch, you’re paying for many channels you don’t watch. It’s understandable that people would think in those terms, but it’s wrong.”

May concurs: “[A] government-mandated a la carte regime would not necessarily lower prices for consumers and might well diminish, even substantially, the number of channels available, especially those appealing to minority or specialized tastes,” and adds:

With the unbundling of all channels, the costs for making available certain individual channels would rise as the audience size for particular channels is reduced. Some channels almost certainly never would get off the ground because, absent the opportunity to bundle them with already-popular channels, MVPDs would not risk incurring the costs of carrying a channel with little initial expected audience demand.

In other words, Sen. McCain’s bill doesn’t acknowledge recent technologies that compete with traditional MVPDs; won’t necessarily lower costs to consumers; and may limit consumer options as well as present a barrier of entry for cable and satellite startups. It’s the Television Consumer Freedom Act, not channel bundling, that poses the real threat to ardent television viewers and the television industry at large.

On the “Craig Fahle Show,” on WDET last Thursday, Oakland Schools Superintendent Vickie Markavitch joined Tri-County Alliance Executive Director Mark Burton to talk about a range of educational issues. Unfortunately, the program was misleading in many ways.

Right off the bat, the Tri-County Alliance is mistakenly referred to as a “parent association.”* As exposed in Michigan Capitol Confidential last month, there is no mention of parents or evidence of parental involvement with the TCA according to documents obtained in a FOIA request. Instead, the documents show that the group is funded by the school districts in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, overseen by former superintendents and largely exists to lobby legislators for more money for school districts and less educational freedom for parents. The schools pay for the group to lobby but do not report lobbying expenses on their district websites. 

Nobody should be under the illusion that Markavitch and Burton are just two people who happen to share the same interest in improving public education. Oakland Schools hosts the TCA in its building, covering most of its operating costs. Before taking the executive director job at the TCA a few months ago, Burton worked for the Democratic Senate Minority Leader. He ran his own lobbying group (which had provided services to the TCA) based in the Lansing area, which documents suggest is where the organization is scheduled to be moved. This makes the insinuation that the TCA is a “parent group” in Oakland County very curious.

There are other questionable claims made in the interview:

• A lot of discussion focuses on the direct school aid districts get from the state with claims that the schools are receiving less money as a result of Proposal A. Actually, total spending by districts is much higher than it was in the 1990s and years past.
• Markavitch claims that charter schools educate “less expensive kids” (i.e. fewer low-income or special needs students) and said that the students able to “drive away” are the problem. The reality is that as a percentage of student population, charter public schools educate far more low-income students and only a slightly lower portion of students needing special education services. In an email, the district passed on some sources showing that nationwide, parents of special-needs children tend to keep them in traditional schools and that they tend to spend more on those pupils. In any case, that appears to be changing.
• A claim about the United States having the second-most children in poverty in developed countries (behind only Mexico) is made. When contacted, the district pointed me to a UNICEF report from 2012. Similar reports come out and are cited by left-wing groups every few years, but the use of such statistics is quite suspect. In this case, the study is insinuating that someone making 50 percent of the median income in the U.S. is the same as someone making 50 percent of the median income in a much poorer country, which is ludicrous. To take an extreme example, consider whether you would rather earn half the median income in America vs. North Korea. There is also something silly about the superintendent of the ISD in the richest county in the state making such a claim while criticizing charter schools that largely serve low-income students.

The 26-minute interview does include some good discussion on what an “adequate education” means and opinions on issues like testing; the necessity of ensuring that teachers pay for some of their health care is even acknowledged (prior to recent reforms, teachers paid an average of 4 percent of their own health care premiums and more than 300 plans statewide required them to pay nothing). Overall, the participants make some good points about Lansing micro-managing local schools.

But the best way to solve this problem would be to allow parents to choose which schools are the best fit for their children and to let this competition drive excellence.

Disappointingly, Burton and Markavitch advocate for the state to limit where parents can send their children to be educated and for taxpayers to simply continue sending them more and more money with no say in how the funding is spent.

School districts are made up of people, and people respond to incentives. In that way, parents taking their children out of one school and going to another is a good thing — but don’t expect those in the district they left to be happy about it.

*Editor's Note: Fahle and Markavitch clarified that the group was inadvertently identified as a "parent" group and this was later corrected during the program.

Critics of policies enabling parents to choose what type of public school their children attend often claim that these policies will increase racial segregation in public education. But support for this claim is largely based on poorly designed or flawed studies. Matt Chingos of the Brookings Institute examined this issue as it relates to charter schools, and found no evidence that allowing parents to choose charter public schools increases racial segregation.

Instead of simply comparing the racial composition of charter schools to that of conventional schools or districts (which other studies have done), Chingos tracks changes over time in racial composition in areas where charter schools actually operate. No matter which statistical methodology he employed or measure he used, Chingos found “the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.”

Since enrollment in public schools is still largely determined by ZIP code, public schools remain highly segregated. Chingos discovered that the typical racial minority student attends a school where two-thirds of the students are also racial minorities. But this recent analysis should encourage those trying to provide low-income parents through charter schools the type of school options available to other parents, as these schools do not lead to more racial segregation.

With a push from Gov. Snyder, the business community, public employee unions and most of the significant lobbying groups in the state, both branches of the Legislature have proposed budgets that significantly expand spending on early childhood education.

Unfortunately, this spending will likely not result in any significantly improved educational outcomes. There is a lot of research on the effects of preschool, and a fierce debate over whether spending more money on schools for young children will result in improved performance.

Something of a consensus has evolved around small, tightly-controlled educational environments for low-income, low-skilled students, with the studies on Ypsilanti’s Perry Preschool and North Carolina’s Abecedarian Intervention Project often cited. At the same time, even researchers on the left, who favor more spending on preschool in general, acknowledge that increasing funding for children of middle-class and wealthier families is ineffective.

The problem with the plans put forth in the Legislature is that, even if one accepts that preschool spending is worth the cost, the system still incenticizes spending the money in the wrong ways.

The House and Senate budgets call for more money for Great Start, which funds preschool for 4-year-olds in the state. But the bulk of the research on large, wide-ranging programs like Great Start and the national Head Start show that the results are dubious at best.

The best research done on Head Start, which includes several studies commissioned by the federal government, showed "little statistical effect" of the program — at best, preschool advantages wore off by fourth grade.

And as Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, noted: The states which fund universal preschool have not seen a payoff. 

[T]he latest evidence from Oklahoma and Georgia, two states that implemented universal pre-K in the 1990s, only confirms this.

Oklahoma's high-school graduation rates have dropped since it embraced UPK and Georgia's remain stagnant. The average reading score of Oklahoma's fourth graders on the NAEP — the national report card — dropped four points between 1998 and 2011.

Georgia just reached the national average. The NAEP reading gap between black and white children in Oklahoma was 22 points in 1992. In 2011? The same. Georgia had a 28-point spread in 1992. In 2011? Twenty-three points.

As my colleague, director of education policy, Michael Van Beek has noted: If the Legislature truly followed the research, they would create more Perry preschools; not more Head Starts.

And there is more than enough money already being spent on early childhood education to do that. 

Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek’s Op-Ed about recent data showing the success of Michigan’s charter public schools appeared in the “Cross Country” column of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy, is cited in the Lansing State Journal and by WZZM-TV13 in Grand Rapids about data showing state employees in Michigan having higher average compensation than their peers in other states.

“I would hope they have a conversation about this,” Hohman said. This is primarily why state government costs more every year.”

As Michigan Capitol Confidential has reported, the average total compensation for state workers in Michigan now exceeds $100,000 annually.

Taxpayers could save $5.7 billion a year if the benefits paid to government employees in Michigan were brought into balance with those paid to private-sector workers.

Senate Bill 198, Amendment to accept federal health care law Medicaid expansion: Failed 13 to 25 in the Senate
To accept $1.53 billion in federal money to expand Medicaid eligibility under the terms of the federal health care law ("Obamacare"). The amendment offered by Democratic Sen. Vincent Gregory would also shift $181 million in current state health care spending onto the federal budget, making those funds available for other purposes in the short-term, but the terms of the expansion would require more money from State of Michigan taxpayers in a few years. Republican Sen. Roger Kahn joined all Democrats in voting "yes." This vote is not necessarily the final answer on this issue.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No" 

Senate Bill 347, Expand state housing subsidy agency powers: Passed 36 to 2 in the Senate
To empower the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) to use money in reserve funds to “invest” (buy ownership interest) in companies or nonprofits whose “primary purpose is to acquire ownership interests in multifamily housing projects” (and not necessarily build new ones).

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"  

Senate Bill 345, Authorize more state government housing subsidy debt: Passed 34 to 4 in the Senate
To repeal a requirement that the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) must scale back its debt from a “temporary” maximum of $4.2 billion authorized in 2012, to $3.4 billion after Nov. 1, 2014, subject to some exceptions. The borrowed money is used to provide taxpayer-backed mortgage loan guarantees, subsidies and more.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No" 

Senate Bill 335, Extend Medicaid "gamesmanship" insurance tax: Passed 25 to 13 in the Senate
To extend from 2014 to 2018 the sunset on a 1 percent health insurance claims tax intended to “game” the federal Medicaid system in ways that result in higher federal payments to Michigan’s medical welfare system. As introduced the bill would have eliminated the sunset and empowered the Department of Treasury to raise the tax without any further authorization by the legislature.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"  

House Bill 4283, Expand allowable deer hunting guns south of “rifle line”: Passed 106 to 0 in the House
To expand the types of firearms allowed for deer hunting south of the “rifle line” in the Lower Peninsula. In addition to shotguns and muzzle-loading rifles, hunters could also use .35 caliber or larger repeating pistols, and certain .35 caliber or larger straight-walled rifle cartridges (but not modern "high-power" rifle rounds that carry for very long distances). Long-range rifles have traditionally not been allowed for deer hunting in the more densely-populated part of the state south of an uneven boundary located at roughly the same latitude as Mount Pleasant.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"  

House Bill 4705, Refund excess property tax collected by school district on retired debt: Passed 108 to 0 in the House
To require a school district (Stephenson in the Upper Peninsula) that collected a property tax millage for bonds that were already paid off (retired) to transfer the excess revenue it collected to the state. The overcharge would then be given back to local taxpayers by reducing the amount of state education property tax on their next tax bill.

 Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No" 

House Bill 4168, Repeal mandate for sheriffs to kill unlicensed dogs: Passed 106 to 0 in the House
To repeal a 1919 law that requires county sheriffs to locate and kill all unlicensed dogs, and which defines failure to do so as nonfeasance in office.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No"  

House Bill 4363, Ban local governmental body “phone-in” voting: Passed 92 to 14 in the House
To establish that if a member of a public body is allowed to cast a vote on a decision by the body without being physically present, it is a violation of the state Open Meetings Act.

Who Voted "Yes" and Who Voted "No" 

SOURCE: MichiganVotes.org, a free, non-partisan website created by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, providing concise, non-partisan, plain-English descriptions of every bill and vote in the Michigan House and Senate. Please visit http://www.MichiganVotes.org.

Michigan taxpayers will be providing corporate welfare to a production company outside the state for a film shot entirely in another country, according to an article on MLive.

The article reported that the documentary, “Original Bethlehem,” was awarded $65,270 in subsidies for $217,566 spent in Michigan. 

This illustrates one of the classic problems with the Michigan film incentive program, which awards subsidies up to 32 percent of what a company spends in the state. Film subsidy supporters always point to the benefit of money being spent in the state while ignoring the cost (the subsidy money was taken from taxpayers, who will now never get a chance to spend it). The latter point is why the Senate Fiscal Agency calculated 11 cents on the dollar return for the program.

As long as states provide subsidies, film producers will shop around for the highest amount of money they can get from a state — a classic case of economic “rent seeking.” Outside of California, the states with the most generous incentives typically land the most movies.

But centralized planners are extremely poor investors. The state should get out of this business once and for all.

(Correction: Portions of this story have been changed from its original posting. The film has no ties to Hollywood and it was not shopped around among states for post-production work.)