Porch of the Grand Hotel by FrancescaM
From the Grand Hotel at the annual Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Mackinac Policy Conference (via their "Fresh Thoughts" email), the Center for Michigan gauges the mood of the attendees:
GENERAL DISDAIN FOR LANSING: Last year, the buzz on the Grand porch was all about the need to get rid of term limits for legislators. This year, the well-heeled on Mackinac Island seem almost poised to bulldoze the State Capitol. There's absolute contempt for the legislature's ongoing budget antics, Phil Power writes this week (pdf).
The anger is most focused on the months it took the two chambers to come up with a crazy quilt of short-sighted patches rather than long-term restructuring. As the Citizens Research Council explained, robbing special funds and one-time revenue sources has been a costly knee-jerk reaction in Lansing for years (pdf). Here's just one example of how political expediency puts the state's long term interests at risk - the state plans to bankrupt a special fund to clean up hundreds of leaky underground storage tanks and instead pump the money into the general maw of government.
I don't know what else to say except that the Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference site has webcasts from the conference.
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