Senator Hollier moved that the statement he made during the discussion of the bill be printed as his reasons for voting “no.”
The motion prevailed.
Senator Hollier’s statement, in which Senators Bayer, Santana, Polehanki, Bullock, Geiss, McMorrow and Wojno concurred, is as follows:
I think we spend a lot of time talking about communities that cannot take care of themselves. When there are communities represented by people that look like me, we talk about how they’re incompetent. We talk about their inability to get things done; how they can’t manage their finances. We talk about all the mistakes that they’ve made. But when these communities are from other places in the state, we talk about all the accommodations that are necessary to be made. We change rules. We make recommendations based on the issues that they have.
I represent a number of communities that have been taken over by the state—Highland Park, Hamtramck, and the Detroit Public Schools twice. We have communities like Flint, Benton Harbor, Muskegon Heights, and Buena Vista where they completely dissolved this community and what they said first was that they couldn’t manage their money. And then they said they couldn’t manage their community. And here we have a community where they literally can’t keep enough there to represent them. Instead of saying, “hey, we’re going to let them deal with it the same way every other community does,” we’re going to change state law. We didn’t change state law to ensure that the members of the 13th Congressional District had a Congressperson for the better part of the year that they had a vacancy. We didn’t change state law for the members of the 2nd Senate District who lost a State Senator. We didn’t change state law for the countless number of vacancies that happened across the state. But we have a small community that is pushing up against a deadline that they could not negotiate, so we are going to move heaven and earth to make sure that that small community is not affected negatively. We didn’t do that in Detroit. We didn’t do that for Detroit Public Schools. We haven’t done that in Hamtramck, Highland Park, or Flint. I don’t know why this community is any different.
Today we’ve talked about how some communities are treated differently than others. Here is another opportunity for us to say that. Either we are going to treat communities the same or we aren’t. Either we are going to seek to address the fundamental issues and difficulties that local communities have, or we aren’t. This is another opportunity for us to say that some communities matter more than others. That’s really frustrating for me. It’s really frustrating when I know that we are going to have a number of communities like the ones that I represent that had these financial challenges that are of no situations of their own. They did not control them, they did not make them, but they happened. We are going to have more vacancies in these communities and we are not going to change state law for them. What we are doing for this small community is so that they can make their deadlines because we really care about what matters to them. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about other communities, but we should care about communities in a matter that’s equitable and reasonable so the next time I come up or my colleagues come up and talk about the very specific situations going on in some of these communities where a disproportionate number of residents in this state live, I’d ask you to think about what it means to our residents, because that’s not what we’ve done at this point. Because we have been talking about consolidation; we have been talking about financial issues. But when it comes to communities—particularly in urban communities—we talk about how the people were bad; how they were managing their experiences poorly; how they didn’t handle their business. When we look at a community that has lost a significant number of their members—where they have a councilmember that literally refuses to show up—we’re willing to change state law. That’s not what we did in Detroit when we had a Congressperson lost, in my district when a Senator resigned, or in a number of these other communities. We have a real problem in this state of how we look at local governments and it’s patchwork and that’s unacceptable.
I would ask you to think about how our decisions today speak volumes about how we care about the other communities across the state and where people live and how we prioritize the work that they are going to do.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 713, entitled
A bill to amend 1954 PA 116, entitled “Michigan election law,” by amending section 381 (MCL 168.381), as amended by 2018 PA 120.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: