Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Carp in the Courtroom - 1.15.10

The U.S. Supreme Court is meeting today to consider a request to close shipping locks to try and block Asian carp from Lake Michigan. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry looks at why that’s so important…

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The U.S. Supreme Court today is meeting behind closed doors to discuss a case that could have a powerful impact on our futures.

This has to do with Asian carp, which are very close to getting into Lake Michigan. If that happens, it could effectively destroy the fishing industry in the Great Lakes. Last month, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox sued, asking the court to close the locks connecting the already contaminated Chicago River with the lakes.

That lawsuit has been joined by Cox’s counterparts in Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. But it is being opposed by Illinois, and by the Obama Administration. The President is a political native of Illinois, and shipping industry interests in Chicago say closing the locks could cost the local economy $30 million in revenue, and inconvenience the entire region.

That, however, seems a small price to pay, given that many biologists think an Asian carp infestation could wipe out much of the Great Lakes‘ $7 billion dollar commercial and sport fishing industry, and do other ecological damage as well.

It is hard to exaggerate how great a threat Asian carp represent. There are two species, the Bighead carp, which can easily get up to a hundred pounds, and the Silver carp, which top out at half that size, but have another deadly feature.

They jump. Boaters and water skiers on the Mississippi have had jaws broken, equipment damaged, and faces lacerated by these appalling fish. But the bigger problem is what both kinds of carp do to the food supply. They suck it all up, consuming as much as a fifth of their body weight in plankton every day, starving out the other fish.

This all started years ago, when some fish farmers in Arkansas imported Asian carp and were raising them in outdoor fish farms. Then along came a flood, and they got into the Mississippi River. They’ve been working their way north ever since.

Six weeks ago, I reported here that an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that was supposed to stop the car had failed, more than likely because it was never turned on full-strength. This fall, an Army Corps of Engineers study found Asian carp DNA in the water within eight miles of Lake Michigan.

Closing the locks, at least for a time, seems to be the last realistic hope of stopping them. It is anyone’s guess how the high court will rule. It seems to be the first U.S. Supreme Court case in history where one state has sued another over invasive species.

More importantly, as Attorney General Cox says on his website, “the present situation presents a unique opportunity in the long and unfortunate history of invasive species entering the Great Lakes to prevent an invasion before it starts.”

Let’s hope that happens. There’s no guarantee the carp aren’t already in Lake Michigan, or that closing the locks will halt them forever. And, we should remember this too:

We could have done more to stop them a long time ago. Yesterday, Cameron Davis, a senior advisor to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, told a group of Michigan legislators that everyone had seen the Asian carp threat coming for many years.

Yet nobody did much about it.

Americans have a habit of waiting till one minute before midnight before addressing serious problems. One of these days, that’s going to be just a little too late.

Business Leaders, For America - 1.14.10

The organization Business Leaders for Michigan has a new plan to solve the state budget crisis. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks it deserves a closer look.

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It’s hard to remember and harder to believe, but forty years ago our nation’s official policy was to pretend that the People’s Republic of China didn’t exist. The only real China, we maintained, was the deposed government of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan.

Nobody challenged this absurd policy for years, because they were afraid of being seen as soft on Communism. It took a man who had made his career as an anti-Communist crusader, one Richard Nixon to have the political cover necessary to reach out to China.

Similarly, it took a so-called liberal Democrat, one William Jefferson Clinton, to reform welfare in the 1990s.

In our political system, great revolutions sometimes have to be started by those who would you least expect to lead the charge. People who have spent their lives proving their devotion to a particular point of view, but who have the foresight to see that the world has to change.

We desperately need people like that in Michigan, right now. Our state is in deep trouble, and those running state government have been more part of the problem than the solution. Every year, the system produces massive budget deficits.

Nobody seems to have the political will to fix this. Liberals dig their heels in and oppose any cuts, even when there is no money to pay for their programs. When Speaker of the House Andy Dillon proposed putting all government employees under the same health care plan, something that would save hundreds of millions, he was immediately attacked by his fellow Democrats.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop has shown neither imagination or flexibility. His position is no tax increases, no matter what. Not even if you can show that they pay for themselves; no matter if they are vitally necessary to Michigan’s long-term survival. This stubbornness on both sides is threatening our future.

Which brings us to a group called Business Leaders for Michigan, which used to be called Detroit Renaissance until it expanded its horizon to include the entire state.

This is a group made up of the heads of Michigan’s largest job providers and universities, people who need to focus on the future. They have a new set of proposals to turn things around. Some are things conservatives have long been clamoring for.

They want to cut Michigan’s business tax in half. They want to cut the number of state workers by up to 10 percent, reduce their pay and their medical coverage to the national average, and freeze their salaries. They want to made it easier for local governments and schools to share and combine services.

But these Business Leaders for Michigan know that things have to be paid for. So they are also proposing cutting the sales tax by half a percentage point -- and then extending it to services, something that makes perfect sense in today’s service-based economy.

They wouldn‘t extend it to all services - health care, education, housing and a few others would be exempt. The idea is to leave Michigan with the same amount of money, but make us more attractive to businesses.

Doug Rothwell, the group‘s executive director, summed it up this way: “We couldn‘t pick a tougher time to do this, but it is the time to do it.” That kind of attitude is called leadership.

So, now the ball is in our lawmakers‘ court. While there’s still time, you may want to let them know how you feel.

Essay: Two Worlds - 1.13.10

Kwame Kilpatrick’s court hearing continued yesterday, the same day the annual Kids Count report gave us the latest grim statistics about Michigan and child poverty. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry looks at the contrast between these two stories...

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Just about seven years ago, I sat in the spacious Detroit mayor’s office, with its magnificent view of the riverfront and the Windsor skyline. I was there to talk to the mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, about his first year in office. He spoke feelingly about children.

He mentioned that many Detroit children lived in poverty, and had broken homes or no homes. He said helping them would be a major priority of his administration, and that he intended to push a network of after-school programs and centers, and require any contractor doing business with the city to do something to help kids.

His slogan was “working together to create a brighter future for the youth of Detroit.” That was back in the long-ago world of 2002. Economists thought Detroit and Michigan had economic problems then, but compared to now, we were swimming in wealth and opportunities. Sometimes, a few years can seem like a lifetime.

I suspect it does to Kilpatrick, though it is hard to understand how or what he thinks.

Yesterday, in a Detroit courtroom, a judge listened to an attorney for the disgraced mayor, a convicted felon, continue his argument that Kwame Kilpatrick could only afford to pay the city six dollars a month towards the million-dollar debt he owes.

That represents the amount he was ordered to pay back after it was proven that his perjury on the witness stand, and attempt to cover up a sleazy affair, cost the city nearly nine million dollars.

I’d say he got off cheap, and since he now has a job in Texas with a six-figure salary, you might think Kilpatrick could easily afford his court-ordered monthly payments of six thousand dollars.

Prosecutors say the mayor violated his probation, and want him to make a $225,000 restitution payment, now.

Incidentally, I know Kilpatrick’s attorney, Michael Alan Schwartz, who fifteen years ago was suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian’s backup lawyer. Back in the days of the Kevorkian trials I saw Schwartz make his share of exaggerated claims, but I really had to marvel that he could play his role yesterday with a straight face.

Records presented to the court show that the former mayor and his wife spent nearly $630,000 in the year ending last October. That‘s a lot of spending, especially considering Kilpatrick was behind bars for nearly four months of that time.

They spent money on steaks and massages; on maid service and airline tickets, on an art school and a mega-church in Dallas.

The Kilpatricks, who have three young sons of their own, leased a million-dollar house. But as far as I can tell, they didn’t give a penny to the poor kids the former mayor said he cared so much about. That’s ironic, because yesterday was also the day the Michigan League for Human Services released its annual “Kids Count” report, about the welfare of children in Michigan.

It makes mostly grim reading, showing that childhood poverty, abuse and neglect continue to rise. Nearly a third of all children in Kilpatrick’s own Wayne County were living in deep poverty, and these figures were complied two years ago, before the bank and auto industry meltdowns. The situation is certainly worse now.

Kids are our future. Kilpatrick, hopefully, is part of our never-to-be-repeated past. Yet today, the media is once again giving more space to this old scandal than to the plight of Michigan’s children.

And we might want to ask ourselves just why that is.

Essay: Reality Bites - 1.12.10

Due to high levels of unemployment and a shrinking auto-industry, the state is taking in less money than it used to. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at how this is affecting one small city…

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Every few months, officials from various agencies get together for something called a “revenue estimating conference” to try to figure out how much money the state is taking in. There’s a good reason for this. The federal government can run massive deficits, which it covers by borrowing and pushing up the national debt.

But by law, the state of Michigan can only spend as much as it takes in every year. So if the revenue estimating conference shows less is coming in than originally expected, they have a problem. The lawmakers could, of course, do something to raise money quickly, like raise taxes or sell off the Upper Peninsula.

Neither of those things, however, is politically possible. So instead, the governor and the legislature have to make new cuts to balance the budget. You won’t be surprised to know that over the last few years, the conference has almost always found that revenues have fallen. Yesterday, the projections were, once again, not good. Michigan has gone through ups and downs before, but nearly everyone understands that this is different. Gary Olsen, director of the Senate Fiscal Agency, put it this way:

“We’ve gone from being a relatively wealthy state to a non-wealthy state. This is the issue now and into the future. The state needs to face the reality of that economic decline.“

That reality is already there for anyone who has lost their job. By the end of next year, 895,000 Michigan jobs will have vanished since the recession started, according to University of Michigan economist George Fulton. That‘s one out of every five.

This year, however, even those who still have jobs are likely to feel the pain. The state‘s problems may seem pretty abstract if you are a bureaucrat in Lansing or a professor in Ann Arbor.

But they are concrete reality to Bob Bruner, whose own life is pretty good. He likes hanging out in downtown Ferndale, a mostly blue-collar working-class Detroit suburb of about 21,000 people, with a trendy downtown and a lot of sturdy homes built in the 1920s.

Ferndale was one of Detroit’s first bedroom communities. Bob, who is 33, both works and lives there. He has a good job, a wife and a baby daughter whom he adores, and his own home.

He can even walk to work. But what makes him different from anyone else in Ferndale is that he runs the place. Three years ago, he became one of the state’s youngest city managers.

But it’s not a happy time. His job is mostly about managing decline. Thanks to budget shortfalls, he’s trying to figure out how to eliminate a bunch of the 164 city jobs. Next year will be worse. Ferndale, like every other place, has been getting less and less discretionary revenue sharing money from the state.

This year, his town got about one and a half million. Next year, he thinks that will be zero. “I think the politicians have already decided to do this and are just trying to make themselves not feel guilty about it.” If he’s right, look for more cuts. He doubts that voters would agree to raising their taxes as an alternative.

Soon, residents may notice a decline in city services. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen,” he says. “People shouldn’t have to think about the cost of where their sewage goes.” But more and more, in the reality that is today’s Michigan, they may have to.

Essay: Remembering Yama - 1.11.10

Yamasaki Associates, once Michigan’s best-known architectural firm, is closing its world headquarters. Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry remembers its famous founder.

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There was a small business story in the papers last week that caused me a twinge of sadness, and brought back fond memories

Yamasaki Associates in Troy, once one of the world’s most famous architectural firms, has apparently closed its doors for good.

Three years ago, the firm had more than a hundred employees. But I got to know it more than a quarter of a century ago, when I came to write a profile of its founder, Minoru Yamasaki.

Today, we remember him mostly for designing two buildings which no longer exist: The twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroyed on September 11.

Those buildings were Yamasaki’s best-known accomplishment. But my sense during the hours I spent with him was that it was not the one closest to his heart. He seemed more excited about two airport complexes he was building in the Middle East. He did tell me that was that when he was asked if he wanted the World Trade Center, the letter said the commission would be $280 million dollars.

“I called them immediately and said they must have added a zero by mistake,“ he said. This was in 1962. No, no mistake, they told him. Though he was intimidated by the size of the project, he took it on. When I look today at my notes from that particular interview, it is hard to read them without getting misty-eyed.

I remember how animated he became as we sat in his office and he talked about how he helped design a revolutionary new alloy for the skin of those towers, and the challenge he faced in shrinking the elevator shafts to allow more usable space.

Today, it’s hard to think about anything other than happened to that skin and those shafts that horrible morning.

The great man was anything but arrogant or prepossessing. Everyone in his firm called him “Yama.” He was tiny and elfin, and spoke in a voice that was barely above a whisper.

Though he seemed to have an accent, one day I glanced at a new book he had just received from Japan. “What does the title say?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t read Japanese.“

He had grown up the child of immigrant parents in Seattle, came to Michigan to take a job after World War II, and ended up staying. He loved Detroit. Today his buildings, with their distinct graceful Gothic touches dot the landscape all over town.

He understood Detroiters; he’d put himself through school by working awful jobs in salmon canneries. And he’d known failure as well as success. One of his earliest projects was a development in St. Louis called the Pruitt-Igoe homes. Known as the nation’s worst failure in public housing, it was eventually dynamited.

I asked Yama how he felt about that. To my shock, he hadn’t known. “What! They blew it up!” he said. I’m afraid so.

“To the ground?” he screamed.

To the ground. Later, he mentioned that he was being bothered by stomach ulcers. It was actually cancer, which was to end his life too early, two years later. Later, I thought it was perhaps a good thing he didn’t live to see his most famous buildings leveled to the ground by terrorists. The firm he founded is now gone too. But as long as his buildings are around, I think Yama will be remembered.

Essay: Can Pontiac Be Saved? - 1.8.10

The Emergency Financial Manager of Pontiac has an interesting idea to turn around the city. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains…

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Pontiac is one of Michigan’s oldest cities. People were living here as far back as the 1820s, before Michigan became a state.

Today, it is the center of government for affluent Oakland County and home to Bloomfield Hills, tony Birmingham and Somerset Mall. Yet Pontiac itself is in trouble, as are many small, older industrial cities throughout not only Michigan, but the entire Midwest.

Last year, poor financial management and declining revenues led to what amounted to a state takeover of Pontiac.

Fred Leeb, a turnaround specialist with notable successes in both the public and private sectors, was appointed Emergency Financial Manager in March. That means he is essentially a one-man government, when it comes to money issues.

Pontiac has a mayor and city council, but they don’t have the authority to buy a pencil unless Fred Leeb says they can. I went to talk to Leeb yesterday, in his modest office in Pontiac’s cavernous old city hall. On his desk there was an immense pile of financial reports and invoices. He insists on seeing and approving each one.

His job is an intriguing one: How do you take a declining older industrial city and turn it around? That’s not an academic question, nor is Pontiac a special case. A number of Michigan cities have had emergency financial managers recently: Ecorse, Hamtramck, Flint, Highland Park. It is highly likely that more will follow.

Saving cities for the long-term is what Leeb has been thinking hard about. He knows the nuts and bolts of his craft; he has an MBA from Philadelphia’s prestigious Wharton School of Business, and had successful careers at Ford and Occidental Petroleum.

He knows how to balance a budget, bring spending in line with revenues, and divest a city of unproductive assets. He recently took heat for selling the long-vacant Pontiac Silverdome, former home of the Detroit Lions, for less than some thought it was worth.

In fact, getting rid of it saved the city $30,000 a week. But he also knows you can‘t cut your way to prosperity. “The fact is that our main sources of revenue, the income tax, the property tax, and revenue sharing, are going to continue to decline,” he said. What’s needed is new job-generating businesses. But how do you get there?

Fred Leeb has a fascinating idea. During World War II, the government invented the atom bomb by corralling the best minds in physics and bringing them together in Los Alamos.

Why not try that concept here? He’d like to see the government bring perhaps a hundred of the nation’s top experts to Pontiac and give them a ten-year assignment: Find a way to turn this city around. You would pay them, but these would be people who are far more interested in making something happen than in making money.

He thinks Pontiac would be the perfect laboratory.

Detroit is too big. But Pontiac, with twenty square miles and an ethnically diverse population of 65,000, could be perfect.

How much would this cost? Maybe $150 million, tops, about what the government spends every day in Iraq. If it worked, it could provide a model that could revitalize industrial America.

That’s a fascinating concept. If I were Gary Peters, the congressman from the region, or U.S. Senator Carl Levin or Debbie Stabenow, I would want to jump on this, right now.

That is, unless we are all ready for Michigan to give up and die.

Essay: The Least of These - 1.7.10

These are hard times for many people in the state… this has got Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinking about what happens to family pets when the economy goes south…

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Everyone knows these are hard times for many people in Michigan, most of all perhaps in Detroit. But in such times, what becomes of those who are an important part of the family, but who don’t qualify for food stamps? Namely, the family dog or cat.

I dropped by the Detroit branch of the Michigan Humane Society yesterday. It is located in a building that was once an old machine shop, and which is well over a century old. Nevertheless, it is clean and as cheery as such a place can be. Jennifer Rowell runs the shelter. She is a 32-year-old North Carolinian who a decade ago decided to move to Detroit to work with animals.

She told me she always wanted to help animals, and that she thought Detroit might be the place most in need of help. She is a normal, down-to-earth woman who thinks it would be too corny to describe the work she does as a calling.

As I suspected, more people than usual are surrendering their animals because they can’t afford to keep them. For a while, Rowell says, she tended to be judgmental about people who gave up their animals. That ended one day when she was at the front counter and someone came in to surrender their cocker spaniel, saying they were just no longer able to give it a proper home.

Rowell couldn’t understand how the man could give the dog up, till she realized he himself had no home, and was living in his car.

So in a city with too many animals and too little money, the Michigan Humane Society does what it can. The good news is that more than two thousand animals - dogs, cats, and the occasional rabbit or guinea pig, left the Detroit shelter to begin new lives in good homes. The bad news is that something like 17,000 came in.

That doesn’t mean that all the rest were put down. Many of them were transferred to the society’s shelters in Auburn Hills and Westland. Some are briefly boarded in foster homes.

What it does mean is that the society needs more of everything - food, money, toys for the animals to play with, and volunteers to help out. Yesterday, an elderly volunteer was outside in the cold, filling bags with straw. Anyone who has to keep their dog outside in this weather can get free straw to help it keep warm.

Not that any animal should be outside in a Michigan January. The Humane Society does have a cruelty hotline you can call if you think an animal is in trouble. Rowell and her small staff do what they can; setting up low-cost clinics to vaccinate against parvo, which still kills thousands of dogs in Detroit. They’ve had tremendous success adopting out “certified, pre-owned cats,” from a chain of pet stores; they know a lot of people just won’t come to an animal shelter.

“How do you cope with burnout?” I asked. Well, a sense of humor helps. At night she goes home to her battered old pug Thurston, who came into a shelter in bad shape and wasn’t expected to live. So she took him home.

That was eleven years ago. Gandhi is supposed to have said that you can measure the greatness and morality of a nation by how it treats its animals. I suspect he would rank the folks at the Michigan Humane Society in Detroit pretty high.

Essay: Political Scramble - 1.6.10

The news that Lieutenant Governor John Cherry will not run for Governor in 2010 surprised many political observers. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering how the decision will affect other candidates in the race…

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If you like following politics, one of the best things about it is that once in awhile, when everyone thinks they know what is going to happen, it doesn’t. Instead, something dramatic happens to completely change the game. A week ago, pretty much everybody in political circles thought two things were certain this year.

First, it was regarded as close to inevitable that John Cherry would be the Democratic nominee for governor. Democratic State Chairman Mark Brewer and Governor Jennifer Granholm had been trying for more than a year to lock up the nomination for Cherry without much of a fight. He was the establishment’s candidate.

They also believed - wrongly, in my opinion - that Cherry’s prospects for winning in November would improve if he didn’t have to face a major struggle to win the nomination.

Indeed, Brewer and Company were successful for a long time at keeping any other major figures from entering the race, although in recent months, it has looked more and more like Speaker of the House Andy Dillon was moving towards getting in.

But while everybody seemed certain that Cherry would be the nominee, they seemed even more certain that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance of winning in November. The polls showed this; the tremendous unpopularity of the Granholm regime underscored it.

Plus, lieutenant governors, like vice presidents, historically have had a very hard time winning the top job, even when they were part of popular administrations. Dick Posthumus lost eight years ago.

Back in the 1980s, Jim Brickley couldn’t even win his party’s nomination. The only modern lieutenant governor who managed to win the top spot, John Swainson, was actually helped by winning a tough primary battle over a candidate preferred by organized labor.

John Cherry, a decent, jovial man whose passion is breeding Springer spaniels, is not stupid, or self-delusional. He knew he couldn’t win, and so backed out gracefully.

That delightfully scrambles everything. Whatever they say, the Republicans are not happy about this. They’ve been gearing up to run against the “Cherry Granholm” administration. Now, they can’t.

Your dentist will tell you that if he pulls one of your teeth, that will cause all the other teeth to shift position as well. The shakeup in the Democratic race may well affect the Republicans as well.

Right now, the front-runners for the Republican nomination are three more or less establishment candidates -- Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox and Congressman Pete Hoekstra, from the west side of the state.

But if the Democrats field a fresh face, could that make a maverick like Ann Arbor venture capitalist Rick Snyder more appealing? We‘ll have to wait and see.

All eyes now turn to House Speaker Andy Dillon, who will become the automatic front runner if, as I suspect, he now jumps into the race for his party‘s nomination. If I had to hazard a guess today, it would be that it will come down to Dillon vs. Cox in November.

But if I were given a chance to make a second prediction, it would be that I am probably wrong. After all, it was barely two years ago when everyone, including me, knew that Hillary Clinton was the all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee.

The only thing I can tell you for sure is, stay tuned. Things are going to be more than interesting this year.

Essay: Reforming Education - 1.5.10

The education reforms that were passed by the state legislature in order to qualify for federal education money have been signed into law. But, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry isn’t so sure that the money, or the success of the reforms, are a sure thing…

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Governor Jennifer Granholm signed a package of important educational reforms yesterday designed to qualify Michigan for up to $400 million in new federal funds.

Now, you might be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no guarantee that we’ll get that much, or really, any money at all.

What we are talking about is another federal stimulus program, this one called the “Race to the Top” initiative.

During the struggle to pass these reforms, which were bundled into five separate bills, those supporting them often sounded like this was an automatic teller machine. Get the legislation; get a check. That‘s not the way it really is. The federal government will review the various applications, and, as I understand it, grant money to some states and deny it to others, or at least send them back to the drawing board. In fact, that’s exactly what Mike Flanagan, the state superintendent of schools, expects to happen.

Yesterday, he said he thinks most states are likely to be given feedback from Washington and told to reapply in April. By then, our legislature is expected to be deeply into what may be the hardest budget process ever, plus worrying about their own futures, since every one of their seats is up for election.

Will Lansing be willing to take time to tweak the race to the top legislation, if need be? That’s one of a number of crucial unanswered questions here. Now, don’t get me wrong. Virtually every one of these reforms strikes me as either necessary, or worth trying. They include a provision to make it easier for the state to take over weak schools.

In fact, the lowest-achieving five percent of public schools would automatically be placed under state supervision and required to reform. Other long overdue changes consist of an alternative process for teacher certification, meaning teachers wouldn’t necessarily have to have an education degree if they can prove they can teach and know their stuff. The minimum age when kids are allowed to drop out of school is being raised from sixteen to eighteen.

While that‘s no guarantee of success, it is certain that any kid who drops out at sixteen without a high school degree has zero chance of making it. The reforms also allow some new charter schools and require annual evaluations of teachers and administrators, based partly on how well their students are doing.

In perhaps their most intriguing experiment, these bills also establish two “cyber schools” that are supposed to provide full-time, on-line teaching from kindergarten through high school.

Lots of questions are being asked about just how well all this will work. But there are two more questions I haven’t heard being asked. First, if the government does give Michigan “Race to the Top” money, how do we know the legislature won’t further cut the inadequate amount they are giving the schools now?

And if Michigan doesn’t get the money, or at least as much as it is counting on, do these reforms consist largely of another string of unfunded mandates for schools that are already trying to do too much with too little? Yesterday, when she signed these bills, the governor said they meant that from now on, everything would be focused on the question, “Is this child learning?“

What she didn’t say is that the answer in large part depends on how much we are willing and able to pay.

Essay: New Year - 1.4.10

As the state prepares for another challenging year… Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what a difference a decade can make…

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We’re already one percent into the year, so, Happy New Decade, everybody. Let’s think for a moment about what a difference a decade can make. Hard to believe now, but ten years ago we were all congratulating ourselves on having come through what some thought would be the biggest crisis of the decade, Y2K.

If you don’t remember, that was the nickname for what was seen as a potentially catastrophic worldwide computer problem.

Early computers only used two digits to indicate the year. Then one day, the experts started worrying about what would happen when the millennium flipped over, and we reached the year double-zero.

What if all our computer-operated institutions broke down? What if the robots in our auto factories went haywire, and Lansing dated all the state tax refunds 1900? We managed to scare ourselves half to death, with a giant assist from the media. In the end, nothing much happened, apart from a few tiny glitches.

Everyone had long since forgotten about Y2K by the time the real defining moment of the decade occurred less than two years later. Nobody predicted Sept. 11, 2001. Nobody now can predict when we will finally move beyond its aftereffects.

Yet it is worthwhile going back ten years, a period of time that can seem like both the blink of an eye and an eternity, to look at what has become of the State of Michigan in the decade gone by.

Ten years ago, our unemployment rate was an astonishingly low 4.1 percent - below the national average. Today, that figure is 14.7 percent, more than three times as high. Michigan has the highest jobless rate in the nation, as it has had for months.

Ford Motor Company was rolling in dough. So much cash, in fact, that it bought Jaguar, Volvo and Land Rover for what turned out to be far more than those franchises were worth. General Motors was also swimming in profits; it had more revenues than any other company in the world. For awhile in 1999, it was viewed as the hottest stock on Wall Street.

Today, all that seems hard to believe, thanks to the near collapse of the domestic auto industry. Ten years ago, Michigan was the 18th highest state in terms of per capita income.

We’ve fallen to 37th now, meaning we are poorer than exactly two-thirds of the other states. We’re facing another grim year in Lansing, though things seem to have stabilized for the moment.

There’s general agreement that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. Our core industry has shriveled, and our state government has two major problems. First, it doesn’t seem to work very well, as last year’s year-long squabbles over the state budget show. Second, our present system doesn’t generate enough money to pay for what we want government to do.

What this means is that we need major structural reform, and we need it now. This is an election year, and we’ll be voting to fill every political job in Lansing. You’ll see a lot of campaign rhetoric, and more bickering over this year’s budget.

But what we need most is for our leaders to try to fix the deep-seated flaws in our system, if we have any hope for a prosperous future. I’ll be watching all year to see if they actually do this.

And most of all, I hope you will be watching too.