LEGISLATIVE UPDATE FROM STATE REPRESENTATIVE BRAD PAQUETTE

By DEBRA HAIGHT
BCR Correspondent

2021 brings new opportunities and challenges for area legislators in Lansing. Although the COVID-19 pandemic remains a major concern for everyone in government, 78^th State Rep. Brad Paquette and other state leaders have set other priorities and goals for the coming year.

Paquette, a Niles Republican, enters his second two-year term in the state house as a member of the House leadership team. He was chosen by colleagues to be the Associate Speaker Pro-Tempore of the House for the 2021 legislative session.

In that role, he helps preside over House proceedings, moderate debate, make rulings on procedure and announce the results of votes. He is one of two associate speakers pro-tempore who are next in line after the house speaker and the speaker pro-tempore.

Paquette aide Micah DeMass said last week that Paquette’s priorities for 2021 include elections and ethics to ensure election integrity, empowering teachers’ voices in education policy, combatting human trafficking, road funding and approving less expensive healthcare plans.

He will be speaking on education and other topics at two upcoming town hall events. The Cass County Farm Bureau will hold a public town hall on Monday, Jan. 25, while a School Choice Week Town Hall is set for Friday, Jan. 29.

As Paquette noted late last fall, the pandemic derailed many of the plans he had for pursuing those and other priorities in his first term as action was put on hold on many non COVID related issues for much of last year.

“Coronavirus has placed many of the priorities I had been working on concerning education, health care, human trafficking, and rural internet on the back burner as we have dealt with the pandemic,” he said. “I look forward to furthering these pursuits once appropriate.”

Besides the priorities listed above, he has been among legislators pushing to get the state’s economy back open and running. He noted in a Facebook post on Jan. 13 that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s order closing down Michigan restaurants has left nearly half a million Michigan restaurant workers without a job.

A week earlier, he wrote that “it’s clear Gov. Whitmer doesn’t get it.” “She doesn’t know what it’s like to depend on an hourly job to support her family or what it’s like to watch your business hang in the balance,” he said. “It’s wrong to force thousands of families to the breaking point and it’s wrong to use Michigan families’ futures to distract from her botched vaccine roll-out.”

Paquette is among those who have been vocal about reopening the Michigan economy and using a more regional and localized approach to handling the pandemic. He and others on the Republican side of the aisle in Lansing have spoken out against Whitmer’s “one size fits all” approach to the pandemic and failure to work with the legislature.

As for election integrity, Paquette noted in the fall that the legislature followed state law in selecting electors for the Electoral College but that they also conducted oversight hearings to address people’s concerns. “I am and will always be a strong advocate for safe and secure elections,” he said.

In speeches last week in Lansing, state Republican leaders have proposed a number of measures for the current legislative session. New House Speaker Jason Wentworth called for ethics reform and other changes to restore people’s trust in government, state media sources reported.

One change he is proposing is how lame duck sessions operate. Those sessions are held in November and December of even number years after statewide elections. Wentworth is recommending that any legislation considered in lame duck sessions should require a two-thirds vote to pass to ensure transparency.

Lame duck sessions not only feature the passage of needed legislation but bills that might otherwise be approved at other times of the year when more people are paying attention to what’s going on in Lansing.

For example, the most recent lame duck session featured an attempt by legislators to pass changes to the public notice law. The proposed legislation would have allowed governments and school boards to publish notices on their own websites or on other media outlets besides newspapers.

The legislation was opposed by the Michigan Press Association and newspapers around the state who said the move would endanger their industry and also allow governmental bodies to be less transparent. The legislation died at the end of the lame duck session without passage and would have to be reintroduced to be considered again.

Also last week, Michigan Treasurer Rachael Eubanks and State Budget Director Dave Massaron as well as the heads of the senate and house fiscal agencies announced the results of the latest Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference.

The conference gives state revenue estimates throughout each year and those numbers are used as the basis for the development of the new year’s budget. The conference results released last week gave predictions for the rest of the 2021 fiscal year as well as the upcoming 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.

While state official painted a gloomy picture of state finances last year during the first few months of the pandemic, estimates since then have shown a recovery in overall state revenue and in the revenue expected to be in the state aid fund.

Part of the revenue rebound has come from an influx of federal dollars from the initial CARES Act stimulus. The federal funds as well as budget cost savings has halved the expected revenue drop from last year, the state had initially expected to see $2.47 billion less in revenue this year and now expects that drop to be $1.24 billion. The revenue decline for 2022 is now predicted to be only $84 million.

“While the pandemic has had a dramatic impact on our economy, the state of Michigan has outperformed national averages in a number of areas,” Eubanks said. “While still down more than $1 billion compared to before the pandemic, today the state’s revenues were raised upwards primarily due to direct and indirect impacts from the federal stimulus.”

“Our economic recovery this year will continue to depend on the course of the pandemic and the additional economic relief coming from Washington D.C.,” she added. “There is cautious hope and optimism as we move forward as vaccines are administered, and we begin to put the pandemic behind us.”

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