Whitecaps 1st baseman Josh Lee, 2005
I have baseball on the brain. It's the only thing that gets me through these dark days of February. Now, before you groan at the clichéd sports analogy, just be glad it's not the clichéd "farmer in the field" analogy. That is how this all started out. ;-)
Corny, I know. I’m a hack. But it works for me.
Spring is coming for our state. A new season is before us, but, a bit unlike the baseball season, what we do in this camp over the next few months will set the foundation for years to come.
The first team meeting is tonight, and our manager will lay out the general goals. The specific playbook will be passed out Thursday.
How do we get back to being winners? First you have to train, starting with the pros...
In her State of the State address tonight, Gov. Jennifer Granholm will call for two years of free training or community college for displaced workers -- an initiative she's calling "No Worker Left Behind."
The program would be paid for with federal money and some as yet unexplained state funds, and require workers to get certification or an associate's degree in a high-demand field, such as health care.
The three-year "No Worker Left Behind" program would launch this summer, with around 7,500 workers getting free tuition for 2007-08 besides the 18,000 already being helped. More workers would be added in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years.
... followed by the rookies.
Granholm is expected to announce her plan for Promise Zones -- a way for poor, struggling communities in Michigan to set up college scholarship programs for their high school graduates.
Although no thresholds have been proposed yet, the qualifying communities would have to have a certain percentage of residents living in poverty, low levels of educational attainment, a low percentage of residents with college degrees.
If a qualifying community could raise an as-of-yet unspecified level of private donations for college scholarships, then the state would allow it to set up a Tax Increment Financing Authority that would capture half the growth in the community's 6-mill state property tax for education. To get the program going quickly, the TIFA could raise funds immediately by borrowing against future growth.
You have to identify what areas you need to work on, the areas that will put you above the others. One promising field, besides health care, is alternative energy. The bullet points from that proposal-
• Investing about $50 million over three years in public and private sector money to pay for the research and pilot programs of alternative energy companies in Michigan.
• A loan fund of about $12 million that would help the state's alternative energy entrepreneurs reduce their debt and lower costs of capital access for renewable resources.
• Spending about $7 million to install about 1,000 biodiesel and ethanol pumps across the state by the end of 2008.
• Targeting $20 million of state money and at least $11 million from private resources toward the Venture Michigan Fund to help the commercialization of alternative energy companies across the state.
Efficient operation of the organization is key.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to begin commuting sentences of inmates who pose no safety threat to the public as part of an effort to reduce the state's prison population.
Michigan's annual prison budget is $1.9 billion _ roughly a fifth of the general fund. About 1,500 more inmates are being housed in state prisons this year than officials anticipated _ for a record-high total of more than 51,000.
Older and medically fragile inmates could be released under Granholm's plan. She also plans to consider releasing, with parole board approval, nonviolent drug offenders serving a long string of short minimum sentences.
There is always the question of payroll, and if we don't solve that- the rest could fall apart.
The immediate problem facing the governor and lawmakers relates to the state's budget situation. State government is expected to be about $800 million short on school and general fund spending plans for the fiscal year that began about four months ago.
Eliminating that deficit will require government restructuring, spending cuts, increases in taxes or fees, or a mixture of all three.
Granholm said Friday during a speech to members of the Michigan Press Association that the state needs to come up with a long-term solution, as it has run out of one-time fixes and will be unable to solve its chronic deficit even once the economy improves.
To reach our goals, it is imperative that we work together as a team. One recent article gave us a glimmer of hope in that area-
Bishop hasn't closed the door on some sort of general tax increase but he's certain of one thing: There'll be huge gulf between what he might support and what he expects from the governor and the state's House Democrats.
"They're warming up the choir for a very large tax increase," he said. "And there's not a lot of interest in my caucus in overburdening people."
(One note: "tax increase" has suddenly become "very large tax increase" in a couple of different stories. Watch those creeping talking points, they are deadly.)
But stalemate isn't the Rochester Republican's style.
"I'm a manager, but I also want to be known as a leader," he said. "I want to be inclusive."
He shares common ground with Granholm on the notion of streamlining government, he said, perhaps by consolidating small or inefficient school districts and communities.
"I think that's something we could work on: making government more efficient," said Bishop. One of his first solutions would be making the Legislature part-time, a notion he hasn't been able to get out of committee.
This is a good start, but, if they end up working against our purposes and ultimately hurt the team, we put them on waivers in '08. Sometimes you have to cut loose the head cases.
Tune in tonight at 7 to see how our new season begins, and keep this in mind-
"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." - Anne Bradstreet
And I'll try not to use sports analogies again- but no promises. :-)