Senator Runestad’s statement is as follows:
I rise to address my amendment. Well colleagues, I have been working on this issue since before I was ever in elected office. Back then I would talk to people in my county who had CPS cases with horrible outcomes and I would try to help them. I worked on many cases when I was on the Oakland County Commission, I worked on case after case when I was in the House of Representatives. I sent out an e-mail to all the other offices indicating I would be willing to work on CPS cases even though they were not in my district if that would be helpful. However, due to an old, obscure Michigan law on the books, legislators and credentialed media are not permitted to get information on individual CPS cases—no matter how horrific, how barbaric, and no matter how callous and incompetent the department’s behavior.
So this last February, I put in a bill that would reverse this mind-boggling travesty and permit sitting legislators and members of credentialed media to get access to this vital information on these individual cases from DHHS, provided that they sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing them, on penalty of a misdemeanor, from disclosing any identifying information on those individual cases. This bill unsurprisingly has been thrown into a death committee. Nothing disgusts me more about this Legislature and my own state of Michigan’s government than good transparency bills like this that would help save our children from rape, murder, torture, etc., being tossed into the sealed vault of a death committee.
Few in our state are aware that Michigan was hit back in 2006 with a lawsuit regarding our rotten, despicable treatment of Michigan’s children. We are still under that court order and I believe it’s still the longest-running federal court case against any state. Nothing in Michigan’s lack of transparency ever seems to change. Today will be no different. Today’s defeat of my amendment just further demonstrates that reality. Yes, Michigan is the least-transparent state and I also believe it is absolutely the most-corrupt state in the nation. I believe the reason transparency bills like this are never allowed out to be debated or even to see the sunshine of day is because whichever party is in power always wants to protect its department and thus, by extension, the sitting Governor. It keeps that dirty laundry locked up in the back room.
Who does not get protecting though? Who does Michigan’s power structure cast to the bottom, unconcerned when it comes to protections? Michigan’s children, that is who. If Michigan’s children are murdered, raped, tortured, slaughtered, that’s just an unfortunate collateral damage in Michigan’s never-ending ongoing cover-your-ass culture. I know this amendment will go down in flames just like my CPS transparency bill, all in the interest of continuing Michigan’s culture of disdainful deceitful self-serving corruption.
Senator Victory’s statement is as follows:
I rise today in support of Senate Bill No. 432. This legislation seeks to improve and expand the current Office of Children’s Ombudsman by replacing it with a new Office of the Child Advocate. The Office of the Child Advocate will provide with the resources and authority to ensure compliance with Michigan law and to implement proven best practices statewide. The Office of the Child Advocate will also allow for more accurate data collection that works toward improving rehabilitation and treatment services that these children need to fully return to society and to live a fulfilling and productive life. This is a much-needed first step toward protecting the legal rights and welfare of Michigan’s most vulnerable children and improving the rehabilitation and treatment throughout all the state juvenile facilities. I ask for your support on this important legislation.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 435, entitled
A bill to amend 1973 PA 116, entitled “An act to provide for the protection of children through the licensing and regulation of child care organizations; to provide for the establishment of standards of care for child care organizations; to prescribe powers and duties of certain departments of this state and adoption facilitators; to provide penalties; and to repeal acts and parts of acts,” by amending sections 5a and 10 (MCL 722.115a and 722.120), section 5a as added by 1994 PA 205 and section 10 as amended by 2022 PA 69.
The question being on the of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: