Midterm season is fast approaching. In November we'll head to the ballot to vote for our state's executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The results could dramatically reshape each institution come 2023.

That means these remaining months of 2022 could very well be a time of intense legislative action. As lawmakers feel political winds change, they may seek to pass their landmark legislation and advance agendas with more tenacity.

This leaves us with many exciting opportunities to pass legislation a long time coming that make our nature and communities stronger. There are bills that will give every school and childcare center lead-free drinking water. Other bills would better keep over a million septic systems from spilling into our lakes and streams.
There are, of course, a few threatening bills in the works, too. One set could ramp up ethanol production, a move that would only create more pollution and higher gas prices. Another set might make it easier for mines to pollute.

Join the Michigan Environmental Council's water policy director Megan Tinsley, chief policy officer Charlotte Jameson, and President & CEO Conan Smith as they share the great opportunities and potential threats ahead for our state and planet in what will surely be a busy fall.

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Steve & Judy Dobson

Every Michigan child attending school or childcare centers—over 1.4 million—could soon drink lead-free water.

With 35-1 votes, "Filter First" bills passed out of the Michigan Senate on Tuesday and now head to the House.

Another year, another bad algal bloom for Lake Erie, another lackluster government effort to prevent it. Join Megan Tinsley, the Michigan Environmental Council's water policy director, and a local business owner as they share the devastating impact poisonous algal blooms can have on our environment, economy, health, and happiness. They'll also share the solutions they're advocating for in Lansing and beyond.

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Can't make the event live? Register and we'll send you a recording.

The Capitol Connection webinar series is generously sponsored by: 

Steve & Judy Dobson

This is big. Like, really big. 

It's not often we get to celebrate a truly good environmental win. Sometimes good legislation is dead on arrival. Sometimes it stalls out as a new guard of politicians arrives. And sometimes good policy is paired with the ambivalent or bad.

But on March 30, Gov. Whitmer signed into law $2.5 billion in funding to better water, parks and communities, and it's almost wholly good news. It stems from earlier proposals by Gov. Whitmer and Republican Sen. Jon Bumstead, and it's supported by leadership from both political parties.

On Wednesday morning, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer rolled out a proposal for the largest state budget in history, with billions of dollars being dedicated toward natural resource protection, clean energy, clean water and climate resiliency.

Among the largest environmental investments are $1.22 billion for clean water; $593 million for climate, clean energy and mobility; and $403 million in natural resource protections.

Charlotte Jameson, chief policy officer of the Michigan Environmental Council, issued the following statement in response.

Nearly 1.5 million Michigan children are one step closer to drinking lead-safe water in their schools and daycare centers thanks to two votes in the Michigan Legislature.

Senate Bills 184 and 185 both passed out of the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality with 5-0-1 votes on Nov. 30. They head to the Senate floor.

It began with a skim through the Yellow Pages.

Lynn McIntosh needed an environmental lawyer. Her thick phonebook yielded only one: AJ Birkbeck, Fulcrum Law.

So she gave him a call, and a short while later she was driving from small-town Rockford to East Grand Rapids in her rundown ’97 Mercury van.

It’s June 10, early morning. William Wright and Chris Yahanda wake up on a beach somewhere at Wilderness State Park. A few miles away, Lakes Huron and Michigan meet. They eat breakfast with the gulls and lapping waves.

Then, as the sunrise breaks, Wright and Yahanda break out their paddleboards. They wade into the water’s shallows, kneeling on their vessels as if in prayer. Then, once the sandbar drops, they stand and use long paddles to travel south, their feet a minnow’s height from the surface. Their friend, Davis Huber, films them from a boat.

It was the second day of these three friends' 425-mile journey from the Mackinac Bridge above Lake Michigan to, eventually, the Lansing shorelines of the Grand River.

Neither Michigan Senate or House FY22 school budgets included a $55 million appropriation in grants for schools to install and maintain filtered water fountains with bottle fillers and, in some cases, on-tap filters.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s FY21 supplemental appropriation recommended funding this critical program, which would protect nearly 1.5 million children and tens of thousands of adults from lead exposure from their school’s drinking water.

Michigan Environmental Council and its fellow Line 5 legal intervenors plan to appeal the decision of a Michigan Public Service Commission Administrative Law Judge regarding the Commission’s review of Enbridge’s Line 5 tunnel proposal.

Judge Dennis Mack ruled Tuesday that the Commission must consider environmental impacts when deciding to permit a tunnel that could surround the Line 5 oil pipeline through the Great Lakes for as long as a century. But Mack also ruled that the Commission cannot consider impacts in the context of climate change or the need for the fossil fuels Line 5 transports.

The intervenors' appeal will go before the Commission.