Grand Rapids’ Mayor George Heartwell painted his city as a destination for medical researchers, entrepreneurs, artists and young people in his State of the City address Saturday.
Albion, MI is among the top vote-getters in a magazine competition aimed at boosting community spirit. If it wins, the prize money could be used to renovate the city's downtown theater.
Three Michigan cities are finalists for top prizes in a national contest aimed at boosting community spirit. The competition is fierce as the contest draws to a close on Monday.
Readers Digest is asking people to cheer online for their favorite cities in its “We Hear You America” contest.
At last count, Grand Marais, St. Johns and Albion, Michigan, were in the top five.
Homeowners are starting to get their property tax assessments in the mail. A few organizations are hosting workshops for people who think their home’s value might be over-assessed.
"Going to the Board of Review and saying 'my taxes are too high' will get you nothing. You have to have information that justifies your contention that your house is over-assessed."
Bogaert says her organization’s workshops educate homeowners about things like how to analyze sales in their neighborhoods. Information about the Headlee Amendment and Proposal A – which govern property tax assessments in Michigan – is also part of the workshops.
Oakland County officials are also hosting a series of sessions about tax assessments through early March.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is expected to announce a program Monday to encourage more police officers to live in the city.
Detroit had a residency requirement until 1999, when the state Legislature outlawed it. Now more than half the officers on the police force live outside the city limits.
Mayor Bing has said he believes neighborhoods are safer when the cops who patrol them live there too. But Detroit Police Officer Carol Harris says she doesn’t agree.
"When I did live in that community that I did patrol, the people that I arrested also know who I was, where I lived and were to come after me, so… it’s just not a safe place."
Harris now lives in Wyandotte, and has an eight-year-old son. She says there’s “no way” she’d consider moving back to Detroit.
She says younger officers without families might be willing to entertain the idea. But Harris says cops who live elsewhere still have a vested interest the city, and care about its future.
Here are a few stories that either I heard, my colleagues and friends heard, or pieces that our online friends found interesting on Michigan Radio this week.
(We want to hear about your favorites! Please add them to the comments section below)
Members of the Cleveland Orchestra (TCO), trapped in Ann Arbor because of the recent snowfall, ended up putting on an impromptu performance on Wednesday with members of Classical Revolution Ann Arbor (CRAA), a local chamber music collective.
Because of the snowstorm, TCO was unable to leave Ann Arbor in time for a concert Wednesday at Chicago's Orchestra Hall. The musicians chose to pass the time playing with University of Michigan students and amateur musicians at Sylvio's Organic Pizza in Ann Arbor, where CRAA meets every Wednesday for jam sessions.
The first quartet of the evening consisted of Bill Preucil, TCO's concertmaster, TCO violist Joanna Patterson, cellist Ed Baskerville, and University of Michigan student violinist Dan Winnick. Other TCO musicians showed up to play throughout the evening, including principal oboe Frank Rosenwein and principal flutist Joshua Smith.
Read and watch more over at University Musical Society's page.
The Michigan Department of Agriculture has confirmed the presence of invasive brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSB) in two Michigan counties. The bugs were discovered by students from Michigan State University.
Jennifer Holton is with the Michigan Department of Agriculture. She says the bugs can do damage to the types of fruits and vegetables grown in Michigan. The damage makes them difficult to sell.
And what is does is... a little bit of character distortion on the fruit, what they refer to as cat facing, and that makes the fruit, or the vegetable, if there may be one, unmarketable for the fresh market.
Scholarships for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students are popping up all over the country and Lansing Community College has just created its own version of an LGBT scholarship.
The LCC scholarship is for gay students, under age 25, who have done advocacy work within the community. There are approximately fifty national scholarships for LGBT students, straight students who have supported the community, and children of gay parents. There are more than a dozen similar scholarships for students who want to attend Michigan’s four year universities.
Candace Gingrich-Jones is with the Human Rights Campaign. She says they’re seeing a lot of gay alumni who decide to donate money and create scholarships for LGBT students.
“It’s like if you’re a member of a fraternity or sorority, or if you’re a member of the theater club. You want to pass something on to the next group of people.”
The LCC scholarship was funded and named in honor of Betsy Lou Robson, a woman from Lansing.
Human Rights Campaign maintains a database of LGBT scholarships, broken down by state.
Michigan Radio's Laura Weber reports that the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled against growing medical marijuana plants in partially-exposed outdoor enclosures, setting a new precedent in Michigan’s medical marijuana debate. From the news spot:
A lower court had dismissed charges against an Owasso resident and medical marijuana card holder. But the Court of Appeals overturned that dismissal, and two of the three judges say the enclosure did not meet the standards set in the new law.
The medical marijuana law was approved by voters in 2008. Many lawmakers have said the law is too unrestricted and needs further clarification.
Clarification--and clarity--is an ongoing problem for medical marijuana advocates and critics in Michigan. John McKenna Rosevear wrote an article in November for arborweb.com which looks at some of the uncertainties surrounding medical marijuana. He describes Ann Arbor as a "Wild West" of in-plain-sight dispencaries and access:
The new frontier opened when voters passed the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act in 2008 (earlier laws enshrined the alternative spelling). The act protects people with "debilitating medical conditions" from prosecution for possessing or using marijuana, and sets what looked like tight controls on its production and distribution: "patients" can raise up to twelve hemp plants for their own use, or delegate the growing to a designated "caregiver."
The law says nothing about buying or selling. Yet by the time the Ann Arbor City Council hastily enacted a moratorium in August, eight businesses dispensing marijuana had already opened in the city. Anyone with a physician's recommendation can now walk in, join a "club," and walk out with up to 2.5 ounces of Blueberry Haze or White Widow--or "medibles" like marijuana brownies and rainbow-colored lollipops dosed with marijuana extract.
Roseyear's article goes on to describe how medical marijuana works--what the rules are, what kind of people are buying and who (he gets pretty specific) is selling--in Ann Arbor.
How is it affecting the rest of Michigan? What do these issues look like where you live?
After years of watching its residents travel to Michigan, Indiana, or Pittsburgh for gaming, Ohio is getting in on the action. Cleveland kicked off its first casino development yesterday.
Developers say they’ll spend $350 million to convert a former department store in the center of the city into a place for slot machines and poker.
Behind all this is Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner and founder of Michigan’s Quicken Loans. He sees this casino as the first phase of gaming in Cleveland. He’ll be building a casino from scratch a few blocks away.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says the project should create hundreds of local jobs.
They’re actually talking about how can we hire people? How can we hire local contractors, local vendors and make this investment a stimulus for this economy and the people of this city and region.
Dan Gilbert says the Cleveland casino will be integrated into the city, helping local businesses.
From General Motors adding another shift at the Flint Assembly plant to expansion in the city's medical and echnology centers, Flint's job picture is brightening.
Flint city leaders say their community posted one of the ten biggest drops in unemployment in the U.S. over the last 12 months.
Between December 2009 and December 2010, Flint's jobless rate fell from 16 percent to just under 12 percent.
Flint Mayor Dayne Walling says the city helped create or keep mare than a thousand jobs by encouraging entrepreneurial businesses.
For everybody who's left, there's a project out there that kept a job here too. That?s the other part of the story. It may not be a new job. It's not someone who's newly employed. But there are another 500 or 1000 people who would have left here if these projects wouldn't have been successful.
This all builds on what our president said in his State of the Union, that we need to create jobs and industries of the future by doing what America does best. Investing in the creativity and innovation of our people.
Walling concedes people leaving Flint also helped improve the city's unemployment rate.
Flint's unemployment rate is still above state and national levels.
A federal judge in Mississippi tossed out a lawsuit aimed at challenging the health care reform law. The dismissal comes the same week a federal judge in Florida ruled that the whole law was unconstitutional.
Ten individuals without health insurance argued that the law’s requirement to buy insurance violated their rights. One of the plaintiffs is Mississippi Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant. Judge Keith Starrett said the individuals didn’t prove they have proper standing to challenge the law because they didn’t prove the mandate would apply to them. The suit was thrown out on procedural grounds.
It's not the first time lawsuits challenging the health care law have been tossed. Politico writes, "about two dozen lawsuits have been filed against the health care reform law since it was passed in March. Thirteen have now been thrown out over procedural matters such as a right to bring the suit."
Keeping score
NPR's Health blog went to their "go-to overhaul scorekeeper" Julie Rover for a tally on how challenges to the health care law have fared in court. The bloggers on "Shots" wrote:
The judicial scorecard on the law has pretty much followed party lines. Two judges who found the law constitutional were appointed by Democrats. Two who found the requirement for most people to have health insurance unconstitutional were appointed by Republicans.
The several dismissals issued for the health care court challenges, like the one today, have not followed any party ties.
A Royal Oak man is suing the city over its medical marijuana restrictions, which took effect this week.
Adam Leslie Brook is a cancer patient in chronic pain who’s certified to use the drug under Michigan’s medical marijuana law. The law allows Brook to grow up to 12 plants at his home. But Brook’s attorney, Joseph Niskar, says Royal Oak’s new zoning rules bar him from doing that:
In January, employment increased in manufacturing and retail trade, while job losses occurred in transportation and warehousing and in construction. Employment in most other major industries changed little. Manufacturing employment grew by 49,000 over the month and has increased by 161,000 since a recent low point in December 2009.
The unemployment rate has fallen by eight-tenths of a percentage point in the past two months. That's the steepest two-month drop in nearly 53 years. But part of that drop has occurred as many of those out of work gave up on their job searches. When unemployed people stop looking for jobs, the government no longer counts them as unemployed.
Officially, there are about 13.9 million people in the country out of work. The AP says "that's still about double the total who were out of work before the recession began in December 2007."
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