Happy Thanksgiving from the Michigan Messenger staff to all of our readers, for whom we are all very thankful. We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving in the Michigan tradition — eating way too much and falling asleep on the couch while watching the Lions lose — so expect a light schedule of [...]
On Monday, Oakland County Judge Edward Sosnick ruled that the bargain basement sale of the former home of the Detroit Lions — $583,000 for a stadium that cost $55.7 million to build 35 years ago — should proceed despite the efforts of a rival buyer to have an injunction placed [...]
In a commentary published by the Grand Rapids Press today, state Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, lays out his vision for how Michigan should go about qualifying for a potential $400 million pot of federal education funds.
Invoking the Obama administration’s new Race to the Top initiative — [...]
The area around Wolverine Power Cooperative’s planned coal plant in Rogers City features unique limestone geology with sinkholes and unpredictable groundwater flow. State officials and environmental professionals have warned that this leaky limestone geology makes landfills especially dangerous.
Glenn Puit of the Great Lakes Environmental News Service reports [...]
Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith is so incensed at the Macomb County Board of Commissioners over cuts to his office made necessary by a county budget deficit of nearly $16 million that he is considering filing a lawsuit against his own county to have those cuts overturned. The Detroit News [...]
In the latest roadblock thrown in the way of GM’s shedding of its niche brands, Swedish automaker Koenigsegg Group AB withdrew from a deal struck last year to purchase Saab from America’s largest car company. The Detroit News reports:
“We’re obviously very disappointed with the decision to pull out [...]
Since summer time, Detroit’s home values have apparently been rising — slightly — as the temperature has been dropping.
According to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price indices released earlier today, home prices in and around Michigan’s largest city rose by 1.8 percent compared with where they were in August. The same [...]
The Department of Environmental Quality says that amidst declining resources its Water Bureau is trying to meet its most critical obligations by prioritizing five goals and spelling out how to measure whether they are achieved.
The Water Bureau’s “Measures of Success” document, released this month, describes the top goals [...]
As the Michigan Department of Community Health announced that 54 Michigan deaths have been attributed to infection with the H1N1 virus, Attorney General Mike Cox released the results of a price comparison of the anti-viral medication Tamiflu, which is effective in combating the infection.
The results of the [...]
ANN ARBOR — Researchers at the University of Michigan have published two articles about how a collection of spread out peptides on the surface of sperm cells are able to assist HIV in being more effective in infecting other cells, the university says.
The peptide tangles, discovered in 2007, are [...]
Schools across the state are making headlines as they prepare to ax millions of dollars half way through their 2009-2010 budget year. The cuts are necessitated by a state budget passed in Oct. which resulted in significant cuts to the school aid funding allowance, as well as a line item [...]
As the state prepares for its first real blast of winter over the Thanksgiving holiday, Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed into law a series of bills that provides increased protection for Michigan residents against having their gas or electric shut off during the coldest months. A press release from the [...]
After nearly ten years in prison, a man convicted of murder in 2000 has been freed from prison and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office is likely to dismiss all the charges against him. Dwayne Provience was convicted on the word of a single eyewitness who has since recanted his testimony [...]
A new auto industry forecast by Fitch Ratings, an automobile market analysis firm, predicts that a slow recovery for the economy and resulting slow turnaround for the auto industry may prevent GM and Chrysler from making an initial public offering of stock in the newly restructured auto companies. The Detroit [...]
Even though Synagro Technologies has been tied to a bribery scandal that may land two company representatives, consultant Rayford Jackson and former Michigan executive James Rosendall, in prison, the Texas-based waste disposal company is in the running for a new contract with the city.
When bribery charges [...]
In case you missed this late last week, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz has waded into the debate over whether or not Guantanamo Bay detainees should be relocated to a prison facility in Standish, Michigan.
But, the mini-documentary released on Friday by Keep America Safe — slickly [...]
The latest poll from Denno-Noor on the 2010 governor’s race shows Rep. Pete Hoekstra has jumped into the lead. The poll of 950 likely voters in the state of Michigan found Hoekstra leading current Attorney General Mike Cox and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard by a fairly healthy margin. [...]
An AIDS service organization in Flint, Wellness AIDS Services, is asking Flint leaders to back a proposal which would allow them to create a needle exchange. The exchange, they argue, will reduce the incidents of intravenous drug user infections with HIV, as well as Hepatitis B and C.
But local [...]
The chair of the state agency directed to work with home owners facing default is himself in default to the tune of millions of dollars, reports the Detroit News.
Bernard Glieberman, chairman of the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, has defaulted on millions of dollars in loans [...]
Facing some of the most staggering foreclosure rates in the nation, the city of Detroit has a new program to keep people in homes after they’ve been foreclosed upon — at least temporarily. Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press has the details:
The so-called ROOF (for Retaining Occupancy [...]
Chris Christoff of the Detroit Free Press has an entirely unsurprising article about how state offices that handle unemployment, food stamps and Medicaid are being overrun with new clients as Michigan continues to lead the nation in unemployment and the Department of Human services has been cut to the [...]
The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that Meijer can be prosecuted criminally for violations of state campaign laws, overturning a lower court ruling to the contrary. This is the latest development in a complex series of court cases involving the retail giant’s illegal and secret backing of a [...]
Journalist Diane Bukowski, who was convicted in May of two felonies related to police obstruction, got one step closer to getting a her conviction overturned this morning when a judge granted her a new hearing of her case.
Wayne County Circuit Judge Michael Hathaway at first said he wasn’t [...]
Last week’s bargain basement auction of the Pontiac Silverdome is far from the end of the story.
After the 80,000-seat arena was sold for $583,000 — about 1 percent of what it cost to build the stadium in the early 1970s — a [...]
Rio Tinto, the global mining company whose subsidiary Kennecott Eagle Minerals has sought to develop a nickel sulfide mine near Marquette, has withdrawn a request to prospect for minerals on public forest land in the western Upper Peninsula, the Lake Superior Mining News reports.
On Nov. 6 Rio Tinto [...]
The Detroit Free Press reports that there is evidence that the invasive Asian carp may have already breached an electrical barrier set up in a shipping canal in Chicago in order to keep the incredibly aggressive species from reaching the Great Lakes, where they would likely destroy the ecosystem [...]
A new report from the University of Michigan’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics concludes that while we may be nearing the end of the worst decline, job growth in Michigan will continue to be virtually non-existent until 2011 — and it won’t exactly be going like gangbusters after that. The [...]
Blogging for Michigan quotes a Gongwer report (subscription only) on a new study by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) that concludes that Michigan is among the states with the most regressive tax structures, resulting in the poor and the middle class paying a much higher [...]
FERNDALE– Charles Pugh, the recently elected Detroit City Council President, says he won’t back cuts to police or fire programs, public transportation or cuts to the city’s health department programs dealing with HIV/AIDS.
“Everything else is on the table,” Pugh said.
He said moves to cut services from public safety [...]
Rick Jones
LANSING — Former Eaton County sheriff and Republican State Rep. Rick Jones says even after the death of a 30-year-old Matthew Bolick following a taser incident with East Grand Rapids Public Safety officers, he will [...]HIV activists from the group Michigan Positive Action Coalition have issued a press statement encouraging people with infectious diseases, including H1N1, HIV or the common cold, to call the Macomb County prosecutor and “voluntarily turn themselves in” to be charged with terrorism.
In the statement issued by Mark Peterson, a [...]
As part of an ongoing investigation into questionable real estate transactions, Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb announced Thursday that he plans to ask a judge to force testimony from those unwilling to cooperate with public hearings on the matter.
Bobb said he wants a judge to compel Board [...]
Time Inc.’s Assignment Detroit, as you may already know, is promoting a contest that has several of Detroit’s most prominent ad agencies competing to create the best “Selling Detroit” ad campaign.
The idea is to see what the best, local advertising gurus can [...]
A Bay City man will spend the next nine months in jail for having unprotected sexual intercourse with a 16-year-old Midland girl.
The Midland Daily News reports 21-year-old Isaiah Jacob Diaz pleaded guilty under Michigan’s felony disclosure law. Under that law, any person who is HIV positive must [...]
The Detroit News reports that the Michigan Economic Growth Authority approved $2.6 million in additional tax breaks for General Motors as an incentive to keep at least 2,500 workers at the Renaissance Center.
The most high-profile project addressed by the MEGA board Tuesday involved additional tax incentives to help [...]
As the court hearings continue over former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his required restitution payments, some very interesting tidbits have come to light. It had already been revealed that a group of prominent Detroit businessmen — Peter Karmanos, Dan Gilbert, Roger Penske and James Nicholson — had given Kilpatrick [...]
Much attention has been paid to Sen. John McCain’s comment the other day at a Nascar event that Chrysler is unlikely to survive, but that isn’t the only thing he said at the time. He also claimed — falsely — that the bailout happened because the unions refused to negotiate [...]
Last week the City of Detroit’s Department of Transportation switched transit services for the disabled passengers by halting further payments to Veolia transportation, the company that runs the Metro Lift service for passengers in Detroit with disabilities that prevent them from taking the bus.
Instead of one unified transit service [...]
An Israeli wastewater treatment company will locate a pilot project in Oakland County, Lt. Governor John Cherry announced this week from Tel Aviv, one of the stops on an economic development mission to the Middle East.
EPC Ltd. Onsite Wastewater Solutions (EPC) is a developer of waste water treatment systems [...]
Like die-hard U2 fans camping out overnight for coveted concert tickets the moment they go on sale, some of Sara Palin’s Michigan die-hards showed up last night — with chairs and sleeping bags — at the Barnes and Noble just outside Grand Rapids prepared to pull an all-nighter.
They were [...]
Gov. Jennifer Granholm said today that new unemployment figures expected to be released today will show that Michigan’s unemployment rate dropped slightly from 15.3 percent to 15.1 percent. Not exactly the roaring 20s again, but every little bit helps amid the doom and gloom of the last couple years.
[...]Longtime capitol reporter Tim Skubick, who is generally reticent about crossing the line to become a commentator, has a clearly angry post on his blog about the state legislature going on a hunting vacation rather than staying and working on Michigan’s budget crisis. He writes:
For time in memoriam [...]
U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had an op-ed column in the Detroit Free Press on Tuesday calling for the financial industry to be re-regulated in the wake of multiple scandals and trillions of taxpayer dollars being used to keep banking and investment [...]
Public defender systems around the nation are not in good shape, but Michigan’s system is so underfunded and unguided that one study earlier this year called it a “constitutional crisis.” Michigan’s cases of failed public legal representation are so shocking that they caught the attention of U.S. Attorney General [...]
Rick Snyder, the businessman from Ann Arbor who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor of Michigan, has some stern words of warning for Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, and any other GOP member who might conflate GM’s bankruptcy woes with President Barack Obama’s agenda: Cut it out. [...]
Chrysler's PT Cruiser
OK, this is somewhat predictable, but still interesting.
On Sunday, ex-GOP presidential nominee John McCain was doing his duty as grand marshal of a NASCAR race at the Phoenix International Raceway, and he made the following quip about what he clearly sees' [...]
The now-infamous C Street house in Washington D.C., owned by a mysterious Christian group called the Family or the Fellowship and home to numerous members of Congress including U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, is no longer tax exempt. The house, which was formerly a convent, has long been [...]
LANSING — The Michigan legislature is getting ready to head out for a two week holiday, and that has education advocates fuming.
The legislature has until Nov. 21 to override Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s line item veto of J-20 funding. In addition, the Senate has yet to act on a bill [...]
Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, one of Michigan’s most high-profile elected Republicans, told an audience earlier today that he’s planning on seeking another term in 2012.
Barely through the first-year of his current four-year term — his fifth term overall — [...]
A 30-year-old man East Grand Rapids Police officials say was arrested for assaulting officers has died in police custody. In order to subdue the man, police say they had to taser him.
The Grand Rapids Press reports the tasering incident has not been officially tied to the man’s death.
[...]
The Dept. of Energy’s $243 million allocation for weatherization assistance in Michigan had fixed up just seven houses as of Sept. 30, according to a status report issued this month by the state Economic Recovery Office.
The weatherization program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is managed by [...]
The Detroit News reports on perhaps the most unsurprising study since the Rand Corporation famously determined that water is, in fact, wet. This study concludes that the state of Michigan is unprepared to handle a flood of residents newly in need of Medicaid, food stamps and other social services.
[...]
Saying that he saw “signs of progress and signs of stability,” General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson announced on Monday that the nation’s largest automaker had lost $1.15 billion in the third quarter of the year. That amount was less than half the loss from the same quarter in 2008 and [...]
Michigan’s Democratic Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow are part of a new push to dilute the climate change bills that are moving through Congress, my colleague Mike Lillis at The Washington Independent reports.
Last week Levin and Stabenow joined a dozen other Senate Democrats in asking their party [...]
DETROIT—Two weeks ago, Mayor Dave Bing got job security — at least for the next four years — when he emerged victorious in the municipal election. Now, two weeks into his first full term leading the city, Bing has sold the auto supply company he founded 29 years ago.
Last [...]
While it may have gone virtually unnoticed beyond the county’s borders earlier this month, Macomb County will have a new, streamlined government structure in place next year.
The county’s current 26-member board of commissioners will be cut in half and a county executive will be added as a result of [...]
U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow said in a speech on Monday that she does not favor the so-called employer mandate that would require employers to extend health care benefits to employees or else face penalties.
Instead, Michigan’s junior senator, according to Crain’s Detroit [...]
Gov. Jennifer Granholm released a video message Monday about the Michigan Promise Scholarship. In the message, she says she is “angry” about the scholarship’s removal from a final budget she signed into law in October.
The scholarship is going to be a special focus of the governor as [...]
Congressman Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Menominee, says he is surprised how much his amendment to federal health care reform legislation to ban payments for abortion has garnered.
The Marquette Mining Journal reports that Stupak said in an interview with Media Meet, a WNMU production, he did not expect the [...]
Lt. Gov. John Cherry, who has served in the past as the chairman of the Great Lakes Commission, issued a statement Friday urging fast and effective action to prevent the Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes. The statement said, in part:
“Michigan has supported plans to protect the [...]
The Detroit Free Press reports on their own study of more than 1,800 government reports that concludes, despite state government claims that stimulus project spending has created or retained 22,500 jobs in Michigan, that stimulus money has failed to create any significant number of jobs at all since the [...]
Businessman Rayford Jackson, who was convicted this year of bribing city councilwoman Monica Conyers in 2007, will serve five years in prison, the Detroit Free Press reported late Friday afternoon. Five years was the maximum sentence that came with his guilty plea.
U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn sentenced Jackson, and [...]
In a rather odd interview with The Atlantic, Rep. Bart Stupak accused opponents of his controversial amendment to ban all abortion coverage of distorting what his amendment does and repeatedly said that the amendment didn’t actually change anything at all. Referring to the Hyde Amendment, a law passed in [...]
The Detroit News has the second installment up of their series on the abuse of asset forfeiture laws by law enforcement and it contains another alarming statement from a law enforcement official, this time Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. The article recounts this story of a woman who had [...]
Ann Arbor businessman Rick Snyder won the Kent County GOP straw poll Thursday night at an event at which RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke.
From Snyder’s press team, here are the results:
Kent County Straw Poll Results:
Rick Snyder: 44.26%
Mike Bouchard: 28.94%
Pete Hoekstra: 22.45%
Mike Cox: 3.52%
Tom [...]
A long tradition of taser abuse by police departments in Michigan continues with an incident in Lansing where an officer shot a suspect with a taser even though he had already been subdued and handcuffed by two fellow officers. Officer Ryan Smith has been suspended without pay by the [...]
The Detroit News has a very important article about the use of asset forfeiture laws by law enforcement as a means of raising revenue. The law allows the police to seize any property (including cash) that was used in the commission of a crime or was purchased or gained [...]
Lt. Gov. John Cherry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor in 2010, said on Thursday that since the votes are not there in the state legislature to enact structural reforms to place the government on a firm revenue footing, it may require a popular referendum to get it done.
[...]
The publisher of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s new book Going Rogue thinks Michigan is where the former governor of Alaska will sell the most copies of her new book
That’s why HarperCollins picked Grand Rapids to kickoff her national book tour.
A spokeswoman for Palin’s [...]
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Thursday announced the finalization of an application process for schools to seek more cash from the feds, but those monies are tied to certain expectations — like student performance being tied to teacher and administration reviews, which could put Michigan on the sideline.
[...]
Upper Peninsula lawmakers that oppose a ballot measure to regulate uranium and sulfide mines have failed to recognize that protecting Michigan’s water is essential to maintaining the U.P.’s tourism industry, according to Save the Wild UP, and have instead become “the mouthpiece for pro-mining propaganda.”
Earlier this week, Sen. [...]
Pontiac Silverdome
The stadium that was once the National Football League’s largest venue (seating capacity: 80,300) is up for auction today. Bidding on the property will close at 4 p.m.
And apparently, real estate experts say the Silverdome is a great deal — if you just [...]
Students attending Detroit Public Schools are facing a shortage of books again this year, even though emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has made substantial efforts to trim costs and promote enrollment. Bobb has also said he would make sure enough textbooks were distributed to all classrooms when classes started this [...]
Traverse City has dismantled its bayside coal plant, and its publicly owned electricity utility has committed itself to finding environmentally friendly ways of meeting the city’s power needs. But plans to buy land for a future biomass power plant were put on hold this week after citizens raised [...]
DETROIT — Some Board of Education members want a state investigation into how much the city owes the district in delinquent property taxes because the reported amount of debt has been inconsistent. The board’s finance committee voted for the investigation and the rest of the board will make the [...]
The Detroit Free Press reports on a new study from the Pew Center for the States that pinpoints the cause of Michigan’s persistent revenue shortfalls and resulting deficits: An out of date revenue structure that offers too many tax breaks and avoids taxing the most common types of spending.
[...]
WASHINGTON — It’s no mystery that some Democrats are hoping to extend emergency unemployment benefits even further into next year — both to acknowledge a jobless rate that’s topped 10 percent, and to fix a filing deadline glitch that will prevent those in high-unemployment states from getting [...]
A ballot measure that would restrict mining “under the clever guise of protecting water,” is actually “an attack by special interests on the U.P. and its people, heritage, and economic future,” according to a statement released this week by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers from the Upper Peninsula.
In [...]
Dan Gilbert
Fortune Magazine contributor (and Detroit News columnist) Laura Berman chronicles the high-stakes twists-and-turns of Detroit booster businessman Dan Gilbert in an interesting story published on Fortune’s Web site earlier today.
Berman notes that the Quicken Loans CEO is aggressively pursuing a two-state strategy, developing [...]
Blackwater Global (now called Xe), the private military contractor founded by Michigan native Erik Prince, is already facing a long list of legal problems, both criminal and civil, ranging from illegal gun smuggling and child prostitution to unprovoked attacks on civilians. Now you can add bribery to [...]
While Attorney General Mike Cox continues to contend he will not drop out of the race for the GOP nomination for governor over allegations he impeded an investigation into an alleged party at Detroit’s Manoogian Mansion, he is trying hard to keep his campaign focused on the future rather than [...]
Check out Rachel Maddow going hard on Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for publicly revealing that the U.S. intelligence community is intercepting the communications of al-Qaeda-sympathetic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, a former U.S. preacher now in Yemen whom Fort Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan apparently contacted before the shooting.
Visit msnbc.com [...]
The enormous cuts in local revenue sharing in the new state budget are forcing drastic layoffs and service cuts all around the state. Grand Rapids is the latest to announce the fallout from the new budget and, as expected, the cuts will most seriously hit local police and fire [...]
Anger over more than $500 million in cuts to school funding in the latest budget seems to be spreading in the state. Tuesday morning more than 1,500 students, teachers and parents rallied at the state capitol, demanding that the legislature restore those cuts. The Detroit News reports:
More than [...]
MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP — The Haslett Board of Education on Monday night referred to its policy committee the task of developing new policies to address issues arising from a 2007 drunk-shaming incident that came to the public’s attention recently.
Officials determined during their work session that the district [...]
Vice President Joe Biden swooped into Detroit yesterday for some political fundraising, and of course, a chili dog at Lafayette Coney Island.
(Check out the shot of Biden wolfing down the coney — as Gov. Jennifer Granholm watches and daintily sips a soda — by the Detroit Free Press [...]
In a recent conversation with media, future city council members elected just last week revealed a personal yet controversial choice: that they carried concealed weapons for self-protection.
As Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley writes, “The majority of city council members will be packing” come January.
The majority [...]
Attorney General Mike Cox says the recent bad publicity over his role in an investigation into an alleged party at Manoogian Mansion during the reign of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick will not force him to drop from the race for the GOP nomination for governor in 201.
The Macomb Daily [...]
The Michigan Board of Canvassers approved language for a ballot referendum that would lower car insurance rates in the state for good drivers and prohibit insurance companies from unjustifiably dropping customers from their rolls.
This is only the first step to getting on the ballot. Now the group advocating [...]
There was news out of both GM and Chrysler on Monday showing that both companies that recently emerged from bankruptcy proceedings are preparing for the next generation of electric cars. The Detroit News reports that GM is moving forward with plans to produce a cutting edge Cadillac electric car:
[...]
LANSING– Lansing City Council member Carol Wood Monday released a draft of a proposed ordinance which will serve as a guide to city employees in the release of public information under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act.
Under the proposed ordinance, city officials charged with responding to Freedom of Information Act [...]
The White House Office of National AIDS Policy will hold a meeting at Affirmations Community Center in Ferndale on Nov. 18. The meeting is designed to seek and receive input from communities impacted by the HIV epidemic about the development and implementation of a national HIV/AIDS strategy.
The strategy is [...]
A couple stories in Detroit’s daily newspapers today point to a big double whammy for anyone who drives: deteriorating roads and a declining pot of public money to fix them.
The Detroit Free Press reports that a study by the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation [...]
DETROIT—Last Friday was the date Mayor Dave Bing set to play hardball with city union leaders. Last month the newly re-elected mayor set Nov. 6 as the ultimate deadline for 50 of the cities bunion bargaining units to take a 10 percent pay cut through furlough days in addition to [...]
Last week, voters in Kalamazoo passed the city’s new anti-discrimination ordinance. This week, city employees are figuring out how to implement it.
According to a story in Sunday’s Kalamazoo Gazette, the city’s new protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity require that individuals alleging discrimination file a [...]
Todd A. Heywood, Ed Brayton, Minehaha Forman, Eartha Jane Melzer, David Alire Garcia, Mike Lillis, Mary Kane, David Weigel, Spencer Ackerman
