Legislative Policy Platform Task Force Chair Frank Viviano, Macomb Township Supervisor, presents to the SEMCOG Executive Committee on December 6, 2024.
Since the Executive Committee approved the region’s 2025-2026 Legislative Policy Platform in December, SEMCOG’s Government Affairs staff and officers have been busy on a number of fronts.
Legislative Priorities for the start of the session
SEMCOG develops a new legislative policy platform to coincide with each legislative session – on a two-year cycle. The 2025-2026 platform covers a broad set of more than 100 policies across the issue areas of Infrastructure, Communities, Economy and Workforce, and Natural Assets. We engaged the Executive Committee again in January to discuss a set of “high-level priorities” to focus on in the new legislative session. Here are those priorities:
Infrastructure
- Leverage SEMCOG’s infrastructure data, expertise, and record of leadership to enhance funding for public infrastructure projects.
- Increase funding through state and federal programs and formulas to ensure that they achieve their intent to improve the region’s infrastructure.
- Empower local governments to fund stormwater systems construction, improvement, and operations using a fee-based mechanism – minimizing the threat of litigation for local governments.
Communities
- Protect and increase statutory revenue sharing funding levels and establish a permanent revenue sharing trust fund.
- Protect local control, guarding against State mandates on local fiscal/operational issues, zoning/land use, and all issues where the needs of communities are best served by locally-elected governing boards.
- Engage with statewide coalition to educate voters on the importance of local property tax revenues, and the impacts of ballot initiatives and other efforts to undermine the most significant source of funding for local government services.
Economy and Workforce
- Support resources for community development to help attract a diversity of business investment, create quality places, and strengthen communities while including safeguards to ensure community benefits of development are realized.
- Support initiatives that grow the skilled workforce in Southeast Michigan, including upskilling, reskilling, and retraining.
- Ensure that Michigan’s K-12 school funding system adequately reflects the additional costs of educating students, such as those with special needs; those with counseling and mental health needs; those who are at-risk; or multi-lingual learners.
Natural Assets
- Support funding programs and initiatives for large-scale projects to address flooding, emphasizing the importance of locally-implemented nature-based solutions to effectively manage stormwater flooding.
- Seek opportunities to limit/eliminate out-of-state waste – especially hazardous materials – including increasing fees for disposal of waste.
- Support locally developed, cost-effective strategies to attain and maintain the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).
These priorities set the table for our engagement throughout the new legislative session, including a recent visit to each member of SEMCOG’s Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C. I will recap these visits and other recent engagement in the Part II of this article, coming soon.
Read Part II: Growing relationships at the state and federal levels.
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As always, if you have questions or want to chat about your community’s legislative priorities and questions, please get in touch with me or the other Government Affairs staff at SEMCOG.
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