Now in the meantime, since we first put forward this reform legislation at the end of last year, we’ve seen a lot of coverage of this tool as well as the reports from the Governor’s Growing Michigan Together Council that have told us a lot of the things that we had put in the reform in a really loud and strong voice. We’ve seen examples—and I know many people in this body have heard me talk ad nauseum about the Amazon HQ2 exercise here in Michigan in 2017—where the state of Michigan was prepared to offer about $4 billion in incentives, and Amazon told us that we didn’t even crack the top 20 because we didn’t have transit and we didn’t have talent. Now Virginia on the other hand offered a compelling alternative. They offered a much lower incentive—about $550 million—but paired with more than a billion dollars invested in education, from K-12 through a new campus at Virginia Tech, as well as expanded transit in northern Virginia.
Today the reform before us builds upon the work that we brought forward at the end of last year with a lot of feedback from our colleagues, our members, our stakeholders, and with the new research and recommendations of the Growing Michigan Together Council, which notes in strategy three, one of their three recommendations is to create thriving, resilient communities that are magnets for young talent. This includes developing regional, well-connected public transit systems that allow residents to get to work, school, and amenities by focusing on the fundamentals, including transit, housing, and climate-resilient durable infrastructure, businesses, and talent will seek to locate here and drive further investment and thriving communities.
In that spirit, this reform will put forward the Michigan 360 Fund as one of the three funds under the SOAR program, but it will require that 50 percent of all of the dollars we allocate into the SOAR fund be utilized for these transformative community investments, such as housing, childcare, education, transit, and the things that many of our economic development leaders, our stakeholders, and our communities are telling us that they need to be successful. This is a really exciting opportunity. I’m grateful for the Senate Majority Leader, for everybody in our caucuses—on both sides of the aisle—for your input, your thoughtfulness, and I hope that this is just the start of an ongoing conversation as we remake what holistic economic development looks like in the state of Michigan. I ask for a “yes” vote tonight.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 562, entitled
A bill to amend 2000 PA 489, entitled “Michigan trust fund act,” by amending sections 2 and 4 (MCL 12.252 and 12.254), section 2 as amended by 2022 PA 83 and section 4 as added by 2021 PA 137.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
Senator Cavanagh offered the following substitute:
Substitute (S-3).
The substitute was adopted, a majority of the members serving voting therefor.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: