Thanks to the recently enacted Michigan state budget, Monica Woodson said the Girl Scouts of Southeast Michigan is getting a jump-start on a project years in the making: an education facility they’re calling the LEAD Institute.
The budget offered a $1 million grant to Woodson’s organization “for the construction of an immersive education destination for youth in this state offering entrepreneurship, outdoor education, STEM/STEAM activities and life skills programming.”
The money won’t quite get the Girl Scouts to a groundbreaking. They anticipate needing $35 to $40 million to complete the project, but it’ll lay the groundwork.
“We’re going to use that funding to gather data and do research and actually just do the initial planning work, architectural renderings, solidifying the location, those types of things,” Woodson said.
Earmarks – where money is sent to a particular nonprofit, government at the behest of one or several lawmakers – are rife in this budget.
MLive analyzed the largest state budget in Michigan’s history and identified 342 earmarks like the one the Girl Scouts will receive. They total nearly $1.6 billion and the vast majority – roughly 90% – are located in areas represented by a Democratic legislator in Michigan’s House or Senate. Democrats hold 56 of 110 seats in the House and 20 of 38 seats in the Senate, two-vote margins of majority.
It doesn’t necessarily indicate a Democrat, as some areas are represented by a different party in each chamber, secured the earmark nor does it mean that because the recipient of the grant money is in a particular location that the money will be spent there.
Beyond the more traditional grants to infrastructure and parks, it’s a true potpourri of projects: $900,000 for a cricket field in Troy, $1 million for an urban equestrian education center in Detroit, $675,000 to improve health care access on islands in the Great Lakes, $3 million to restore the Vista Theater in Marquette County’s Negaunee – and that’s just a small sample.
Close to $880 million of the total was passed out to government agencies, while roughly $714 million was distributed to the private sector, primarily nonprofits.
Critiques of the spending abound. Democrats, despite promising more transparency and a different way of doing business while leading the legislature, gave themselves until September 2024 to report which legislators sponsored which earmarks and for what purpose.
Bob Schneider, of the Citizens Research Council, found 65% of the earmarks his organization identified in the budget came in “the 11th hour,” meaning with too little time for them to have much public scrutiny.
“We have this much extra money, what’s the best use of that money?” Schneider said. “Earmarking gets around that. We don’t really look at the best use at that point. We’re making decisions for other reasons.”
One example: Tomra, a major Norwegian-headquartered corporation, was provided $1 million in the budget to “modernize and improve convenience ... by providing and installing reverse vending machines,” the contraptions that process returnable bottles and cans. They work with a Michigan recycling company, Schupan & Sons, to handle and process the majority of returnables in Michigan. Both retain lobbyists and are partnered with powerful industry groups like the Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers and the Michigan Soft Drink Association.
Tomra, which did not respond to a request for comment from MLive, designs and manufactures their machines abroad. On the other hand, a mile from Michigan’s Capitol, in a run-down factory, is a company called Kansmacker. They didn’t receive any grants and have never hired any lobbyists, but are the only manufacturer of bottle deposit machines in the United States. They’ve been around since 1978, and a single employee designs, engineers and programs their reverse vending machines. They’re assembled by hand by just a few workers, but have been slowly expanding.
“They’re the multibillion-dollar company and I’m just the little guy manufacturing machines right here in Michigan,” Kansmacker owner Nick Yono told MLive.
Democrats make it rain
Democrats are wielding control of Lansing for the first time in 40 years, a shift in power that’s both ideological and geographic.
The leaders of Michigan’s legislature, House Speaker Joe Tate and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, represent Detroit and Grand Rapids, respectively. And the appropriations chairs in both chambers who lead the budgetary process, represent the Lansing area.
About half of Michigan’s 10 million residents live in the five urban and suburban counties home to those metro areas: Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Kent and Ingham.
Those counties received nearly two-thirds of the earmarks, slightly more than $1 billion. More than $230 million in earmarks fell within the city of Detroit, $101 million in Grand Rapids and $122 million in Lansing.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, speaking to MLive, defended the spending as more representative of the state than in years past.
“The population centers are places that have been under-invested in for a long time. There’s a lot of great investment that’s happening in rural parts of the state as well,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said. “So it’s not one or the other. We took a look at what the needs are across Michigan and I think this budget reflects that.”
The map below lists the totals from every earmark where the recipient has an an identifiable municipality. The county totals include earmarks to county governments or for grants that will serve county-wide populations. Earmarks covering multiple specific counties have had the dollar totals divided among the listed counties. To see the state Senate and House districts that each county and municipality reside in, click the “Legend” tab at the top of the map, and check the boxes to activate each district map.
“Yes, our large urban cores are mostly Democratic,” said Rep. Angela Witwer, D-Delta Township, who chaired the budget committee in the state House. “It’s been a very long time since we’ve had a Democratic majority and they have been ignored.”
Her Lansing-area district overlaps with her counterpart in the Senate, the appropriations committee chair Sarah Anthony, a Democrat.
“The Lansing area, if we want to talk about that first, has been decades with no large investment from the state of Michigan,” Witwer said. “It is the capital city. When you look at capital cities across our nation, many of them have a budget from the state of Michigan to sustain them because it’s such a transient amount of people that are downtown.”
They changed that in this budget. Lawmakers are sending $40 million being to a developer’s plan for a series of residential towers around the city’s center, another $40 million for a “city campus plan,” which includes a new city hall, $5 million to renovate a downtown convention center and $10 million to offset the cost of state government in the area, among other grants.
Republicans have blasted the spending.
“Democrats chose the partisan path to pick winners and losers – rewarding their political allies with pork projects and unsustainable programs. Meanwhile, our local roads and bridges will continue to crumble, our understaffed local police departments will struggle to protect our communities, and our students will keep falling behind,” House Republican leader Matt Hall, R-Richland township, said in a statement after the budget passed. “Michigan taxpayers will owe more to state coffers to pay for all the Democrats’ pork and pipe-dream programs.”
Schneider notes earmarks are often used to win votes for a budget or help politicians in a tight race show they can bring money to their district, but it’s “not unusual to see it weigh heavily toward the party in power.” Republicans who voted yes on the budget, such as Sens. Michael Webber, R-Rochester Hills, or John Bumstead, R-North Muskegon, saw benefits flow to their districts. Rochester Hills alone will receive at least $75 million toward cleaning up a contaminated landfill, while more than $30 million is being sent toward projects in Muskegon County.
Some Democratic legislators even in solidly blue districts have also made a point to show they brought home the bacon. State Rep. Helena Scott, D-Detroit, and Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, presented a giant faux check to Royal Oak city officials for $600,000 for “parking structures.” Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks was at an event at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids to celebrate the $14 million she secured for the facility.
The $234 million earmarked within Detroit, the state’s largest city, came through 59 different line items.
“We know that we have to make investments in the city of Detroit and the people of Detroit,” Tate, the House Speaker, said in an interview. “That was been a priority not only for myself, but many of my colleagues to show that we can do that.”