No More Excuses
Democrats regained their narrow 56-54 majority in the Michigan House after capturing two special elections in Metro Detroit on Tuesday.
Macomb County Commissioner Mai Xiong and Westland City Councilman Peter Herzberg, both Democrats, led their opponent by wide margins in unofficial results in House Districts 13 and 25 late Tuesday.
There are no more excuses for the Democrats in not getting things done in this legislative session. If they are looking for some priorities, I have three that should be high on their priority list.
- Campaign and financial disclosure laws so that we are no longer an embarrassment as compared to other states, and the executive branch, and the legislative branch can be held accountable for how they raise and spend money. See the below article 49 of 50 Continues to Haunt Us.
- Revise the FOIA laws so that it is easy to obtain public information in a timely manner, without minimal redacted information, and with minimal expense to the person requesting the information. Currently there are too many obstacles which prevent information from being obtained in a timely manner. See the below article on FOIA and AI.
- Fix the damn roads.
FOIA and Artificial Intelligence
Speaking of FOIA, I love this article in the Detroit News Editorial Section by Michael J. Reitz, Executive Vice President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It is so apropos to the previous item above. I have included the major portions of the article.
Paul Allen has a big idea. You may not know Allen, but I bet you know of Ancestry.com, the genealogy service he co-founded.
Allen told me his focus has shifted from the family tree to government meetings. His new platform, Citizen Portal, has a simple mission: Capture video of every public meeting of every public body at every level of government in the United States.
With this service, anyone with a cellphone can look up what’s happening across Michigan. The platform aggregates meetings and creates searchable transcripts. Users can run AI-assisted searches and share snippets of the meeting on social media.
Sounds sensible, right? …But not so for government records. Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) says that people are entitled to state and local government records. But the gap between what’s technologically possible and how the law actually works is widening. FOIA does not favor the curious citizen.
A government body has up to 15 business days to respond. But you’ll probably wait longer, since that is only the deadline to respond, not the deadline to hand records over. The records officer goes through inboxes and file cabinets. He then reviews the records. If any of the information is exempt, he will blot it out with a black marker. In the end, you won’t get some of the records at all.
Eventually, the records will be ready. But then you have to pay your FOIA bill. Not just for the paper copies but for the time spent retrieving and reviewing the records. If you disagree with any of the redactions, no worries. Just hire a lawyer and sue.
The process is hostile to requestors, and unnecessarily so. Citizens have questions about how their government operates every day. It shouldn’t be a part-time job to get those questions answered. And that’s assuming the records are available in the first place. In Michigan, neither the Governor’s Office nor the Legislature is covered by FOIA. Thankfully, the Legislature is considering worthwhile legislation to change that.
Improvements to FOIA would be welcome, but Michigan needs to go further. Three ideas:
- First, agencies should flip to proactive disclosure. Rather than waiting to be asked, documents are placed in the cloud and made searchable.
- Second, government should use artificial intelligence and language processing tools to locate, retrieve and review records. If Ancestry.com can search multiple databases — newspapers, immigration, marriage, census — for information about great-grandmother Katherine, then Michigan can use similar technology.
- Third, the state could encourage experimentation and then scale it. Somewhere out there a public records officer has figured out how to process requests quickly. How do they do it? The state could commission a pilot program. Or it could host a hackathon for entrepreneurial programmers.
Trust in government is eroding. Lengthy and expensive battles over public records do not help. These are the people’s records, after all. Technology will revolutionize government transparency and accountability. The law should keep up.
49 of 50 continues to haunt us
Per the Detroit News, “The Michigan Campaign Finance Act is effectively toothless, useless and utterly worthless as a deterrent to these crimes. The statutes governing political funds and donor disclosures in this state couldn’t be more futile if they were literally drafted by crooks for the very purpose of violating them.”
Attorney General Dana Nessel said the above after unveiling 13 criminal charges against former House Speaker Lee Chatfield on Tuesday, saying he had flagrantly misused nonprofit dollars to pay off his personal credit card and fund purchases at wineries and luxury retail stores.
Nessel’s office is also charging Chatfield’s wife, Stephanie, for her role in the alleged scheme. Lee Chatfield got kickbacks from his associates and used $132,000 from his nonprofit organization, named the Peninsula Fund, which was supposed to be focused on promoting social welfare, to pay off his personal Chase credit card, Nessel said. Chatfield’s political money went to a trip to the Bahamas and buying products from the luxury fashion retailer Coach, groceries and food deliveries, Nessel added.
These charges are a long time coming. Nessel has chosen not to file sexual assault charges against Chatfield in the case of him being accused of having a sexual relationship with his future sister-in-law when she was a 15-year-old student at the school where Chatfield taught.
Until Michigan leadership addresses the embarrassing financial disclosure laws, cases like Chatfield’s will continue. It is clear the legislature cannot police itself. Without strong financial disclosure laws and user friendly FOIA laws, there is no oversight.
You cannot make this stuff up
Our fearless state leaders continue to amaze. As an incentive to get more college applicants to apply for federal aid they are offering a year’s worth of pizza to students who apply for federal aid. Here are the first two paragraphs announcing the program.
The Mi Student Aid (MISA), Reach for the Pie Sweepstakes (“Sweepstakes”) begins on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, and ends on Sunday, June 30, 2024. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.
A random drawing from all eligible entries received will be conducted after the close of the Sweepstakes period, at or about 12:00 p.m. ET on or about Monday, July 9th, 2024, to select one hundred (100) winners. Each winner will receive one gift card worth $750.00 for “Pizza for a year” (“Prize”). An alternate winner will be selected, in the order they were drawn, to award a prize if a winner forfeits a prize.
The Caitlin Clark Impact Continues
The Caitlin Clark experience delivered another television milestone as ESPN’s coverage of the WNBA draft on Monday night averaged a record 2.45 million viewers. Viewership peaked at 3.09 million, ESPN said in a release Tuesday.
The audience was more than four times as many viewers when compared to the 2023 draft, which drew 572,000. The previous draft record was 601,000 in 2004, when UConn’s Diana Taurasi went No. 1 overall.
So Much for Gender Equity
Per Meredith Clark of the Independent, Caitlin Clark, the record-breaking NCAA basketball star, was selected first pick in the 2024 WNBA draft by the Indiana Fever. However, her rookie salary with the professional league has sparked outrage over pay disparity in women’s basketball.
According to Spotrac, a website that tracks sports contracts, the 22-year-old athlete is expected to sign a contract with the Fever worth $338,056 over the course of four years. She will earn $76,535 in her rookie season this summer and is projected to earn an annual salary of $97,582 by the end of her four-year contract.
Unsurprisingly, many fans were quick to point out that Clark’s rookie salary is far less than her male counterparts in the NBA. In fact, Victor Wembanyama – the first pick in last year’s NBA draft – signed a four-year contract with the San Antonio Spurs worth $55m, per Spotrac. He earned more than $12m in his first season alone.
This leads to my Quotes of the Day.
“Greatest player in college basketball history just got an entry level project manager salary,” one fan wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“This is bogus, they have made more headlines than any man that is currently playing,” another person pointed out. “Pay women what they deserve in sports.”
Michigan Football agrees to three years of probation.
Per the Detroit News, The Michigan football program faces three years of probation, a fine and recruiting restrictions, and five current and former coaches have agreed to one-year show-cause orders stemming from an NCAA investigation into recruiting violations.
The negotiated agreement was announced Tuesday by the NCAA.
According to the NCAA, one former coach did not participate in the agreement, and that case will be “considered separately by the Committee on Infractions, after which the committee will release its full decision.”
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out in the end. It will also be interesting to see how the NCAA plans on settling with Harbaugh now that he is coaching in the NFL. More to come.
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There will be no more blogs for the remainder of the week, unless something compelling happens that motivates me to write on Thursday.
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Quote of the Day: See above under So Much for Gender Equity
Orchid of the Day: The Detroit Red Wings. Although they didn’t make the playoffs, it wasn’t for lack of trying as they won their last three games all in come from behind fashion. Last night was especially exciting as they scored with 3.3 seconds remaining in regulation to tie the game and went on to win by scoring the only goal in the overtime shootout. Unfortunately, the Washington Capitals also won, which prevented the Wings from securing the final playoff spot.
The Red Wings will enter the offseason on a high note as the memory of the last three games will be etched in their brains. I expect it to carry over into next season when they finally end their playoff drought.
The Wings are in a similar place as the Lions in 2022, when the Lions won 8 of 10 to end the season. The momentum carried over into the 2023 season when they reached the NFC conference finals before losing.
Onion of the Day: Former Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield. The charges have been a long time coming.
Question of the Day: Will the Caitlin Clark impact begin the process of closing the gender pay gap if television ratings for the WNBA rises to the same extent women’s NCAA basketball ratings did this year?
Video of the Day: Enjoy