property house guildford

music… good evening and welcome to a special online live online town hall event withgovernor rick snyder. tonight we're broadcasting live from theoffice of the governor in the george romney building in lansing, michigan but we're not going to just takequestions from our live audience here today. many you already know the governor'ssnyder has a passion for technology. well thanks to google plus hangoutstechnology we're joined tonight by

participants in traverse city, at northwestern michigan college, in houghton at the mtech smart zone, where i'm told the winds chill is far below zero, and in saginaw at saginaw valley stateuniversity. we're gonna take questions from all of oursites tonight, but first i'm going to turn it over to thegovernor of the state of michigan for

opening remarks. ladies and gentlemen, governor rick snyder. hi...well this is great. this is a recordcrowd. well thanks for turning out such coldnight, and for those in houghton, it's just wonderful that you're stillgoing strong. that's hearty yoopers there. i appreciatethat because it's exciting. so i appreciate you taking the time.what i try to do

in these town halls are a couple things. one is giving an update on what's going on with state government how we're doing it atleast from my perspective. the second thing is, and the part ireally enjoy is, the question part because from the questions i canreally learn about things that are on your mind and hopefully have a chance to answerthose questions in a way that really you can appreciate and understand in

get better insight on why we'redoing certain things, because there's a lot going on and it's very exciting. one thing i'll do is is i'll try tobe shorter than i was last week, for any of those that made it through the state of the state,that was a whole hour um... in terms of talking, but i reallywant to take a lot of questions, so i'll be fairly short term to some commentsto set the stage particularly given the state of the state last week,

but then have a chance that have adialogue. and one thing, if you wonder why do wesort of have people read the questions and stuff like that: one thing we found is i can do a lotmore questions that way in terms of people going throughthat process, because believe it or not we found when i did it the old way, where we give people a microphone, thatoccasionally they would make a fairly long statement before we get to the point of getting aquestion.

so, so what i found is we're able to doalmost twice as many questions, which i think really is of interest to alot of people. so with that let me get started. first of all the state of the state is good. we're the comeback state in the united statesand we should be proud of that and we should be telling people across the countrythat, because too often we we sort of beat upon ourselves. i said if you go back two or threeyears when i was campaigning is

i'd find people coming in at michiganreally excited about coming to michigan until they talk to some michiganders and they heardour own perceptions on things. well, we've come back a long way butwe're not there yet where i want us to be, but the progress is very positive. if you look at it unemployment's improved a lot, still too high,

but we were at 14 percent at one point. it's slightly below nine percent. we need to keep going on that. personal income's improved in our state. we used to have among the highest inthe nation if you go back a decade or so. we dropped to about fortieth or so in thecountry. now we've started moving back up.

homes are being sold again. home sales areup about 10 percent, prices up about five percent. and one exciting fact i shared at state ofthe state that isn't even on our dashboard but i thinkis very good is as we're the only state that lostpopulation between 2000 and 2010. the onlystate that went backwards in terms of population. we actually have started growing again.

it's only about 6,000people, but it is positive progress. and so what i'd say to you is we've madetremendous progress but we shouldn't be complacent nor contentwith where we're at. with a long way to go, but it's anexciting upward path, and that's what we need to stay focusedon. and there's two or three key messagesthat i really always come back to: jobs and kids. because if you think about it, if peoplehave a job there's opportunities for all of us.

and then keeping our young people here. andit's great to see some young people joining great to see some young people joining us today. it's exciting. it gets me fired up, because i've got three kids and i want to see us have a bright futurefor our children and their children. so on the jobs front, how are we doing? well, our economy is making a good, greatcomeback

and our major industries are all workingwell. autos, agriculture, tourism, pretty much across the board. any industries are coming back. even the construction industry starting tosee some progress now. that was probably the hardest hit of anyindustry, and it's starting to see some positive movement. it's still got a long way to getback to where it was, but we're headed in the right direction. so if you look at it, that's a good signal.

and at the state government level, youmight ask, what's our role? well, our role isn't to create the jobs. it's to create an environment where jobs canflourish. because think about this: if everyone worked for thestate of michigan, we would be really scared, if we had 10 million people working for thestate. we got a great people working for thestate, but we all shouldn't work for the state. again, that's

free-enterprise working. so our role is tocreate the best environment for success. and how do you do that? it's the tax system, the regulatorysystem, finding talent, really getting a connection between people looking for job and employers needing good help. and we've come a long way in all those. and the tax system: we've fundamentally revisedour tax system

so we're among the most competitive inthe country. and we had a broken tax system. themichigan business tax was the dumbest tax in the united states. it wasfundamentally unfair, and we got rid of it. we did personal property tax reform thisyear. that will make a huge difference formany of our communities, in terms of making that them more competitive, in terms of being able to keep jobs andgrow jobs. regulatory reform:

when i talk about regulatory reform,i talk about a lot of rules we got rid of, but the point is, you don't get rid of themif they really have value, because there is an important regulatory aspect towhat we do. and people will tell you that. people in theagricultural industry will actually say 'we want to be regulated, in a smart way though.' so, overall we've gotten rid of about 1,000rules in the last couple years in our state. we'vegotten rid of about ten rules for every rule

we added, which really makes us much morecompetitive and creates a better environment. that's a good thing. the other one is how we apply the rules, though. and that gets to a big point of what ibelieve is the role of state government. we're not here just to take people'smoney and give money to somebody else, and that's the old model of how toooften how political organizations work and governments work. i define state governments our role asa customer service organization,

and you're the customer. ten million customers, and the organizations in our state arecustomers. and how do we give you great service? so it's not just the in number of rules,but when we work with people, are we actually trying to solve your problem andhelp you win, and make sure you're complying with whatthe rules are in a proper sense? and for the really bad people, go afterthe really bad people. but understand most people are goodpeople,

and just trying to get by and make a living. so that's the the regulatory front. a big one i want to work on that we'vestarted working on this, is one of the biggest opportunities and know it will comeup in the questions is about matching the supply and demand of talent. reallyhelping people find careers. and one thing that really showedthat, because i want to illustrate it to most people becuase

you hear about this and it's like, 'well, i'm not sure what exactly the governor'ssaying when he's talking about that.' i'll give you the illustration. we launched a website called mitalent.orgabout a year ago, and this was a point where we hadover 9 percent unemployment in our state. well, they went out and aggregated all theopen jobs we could find across michigan. at that point in time, we had about 80,000open jobs. think about that:

9 percent unemployment, 80,000 open jobs. if we filled all those jobs, that would dropour unemployment rate by about 2 percentage points, just doing that. and these weren't bad jobs, these were goodjobs, skilled trade jobs. one of the jobs on thelist, i'm an old accountant. we need more accountants. so we sort of built the society, a systemthat didn't do a great job of saying,

'hey, here are the opportunities, they'rein these fields.' and where do you go get training, if you're interested that as your firstcareer or you're looking for that second career? so we really launched that to start it, but one of things you're going to hearabout this year is that's going to be a huge emphasis, about doing a better job of matchingsupply and demand, and getting our educational institutions to betterlisten to our private-sector employers. to

say how do we match those things outand get that information out to parents and kids? it's really important. so one other thing i'll mention and then i'llstop. it was one of the highlights, or one of the lowlights depending on whatyou think of my state of the state address, is the whole topic of investing in our roads. i'd be interested, anyone in here likethe current roads in michigan?

anybody in those remote sites, put yourhand up if you really like the roads in michigan. okay, i don't see a whole lot of hands goingup. the funny part is is, i can tell you, i'vedone over 100 town halls all across michigan over the last couple years. i haven't had anybody put their hand up yet. it's one of those things we talk about andthen we don't do anything.

the last time we made any major change inour road funding was in '97. that was a long time ago. and so our roads are on a path right nowto just continue to crumble. and it's going to get really badif we don't invest something. so that's why i made a big deal. because iknow it's hard asking people for more dollars, but the way i view it is this is actuallya chance to save money.

again, i'm a very frugal guy. i'd normallysay i'm a cheap guy, but they like it better when i say frugal. because you have to understand, you're talkingabout precious resources and still tight budgets for many people. because the real question there is if we invest $1 billion a year over the next10 years, it will avoid us getting a bill thatwould be $25 billion. that's a big deal.

and that's a bill that we'd have to pay,the $25 billion, because if you think our roads - we're about 70 percentgood and fair on one benchmark already - those roads would bein the 30s. so the other part is, that's the first tieris, you can pay now. it's much like getting an oil change versus paying for anengine rebuild, is the way i like to analogize it. you canpay something every period, keep your oil changed, or you can havethis huge engine rebuild cost.

second thing is we pay too much inrepairing your vehicle every year for road damage. we actually looked at this in foursurrounding states versus michigan, and we average over $80higher then the four surrounding states. that could offset about two-thirdsof the cost of what we need in additional road investment every year. again, we may not get that full $80back,

but if you we even get a good chunk ofthat, that makes a huge difference in that net cost. now the third thing is, is we calculated this would create about12,000 jobs a year. and if we have 12,000 more jobsthat's 12,000 more families being successful, and that's a whole lot more spending in theeconomy that can help a lot of people out there in terms of the businesses you work for.

and the final one that you can't put aprice tag on, and this is a lot more important than anycommercial you'll ever see about being priceless, is we looked at it, if we had better roadsthey'd be safer roads and we'd probably save about nearly 100 people a year that otherwise will lose their lives intraffic accidents. and that's 100 people a year. and i think most of us know someone thathas lost a life in a traffic accident. so if you add those all up the way i viewthis is, this is this is pretty straight forward

to do. now we can talk about the dollar amount, thetiming, the transition, but the concept of doing it or not doing it is prettystraightforward. and that's the point i tried to make inthe state of the state. if you treat this like we're a big family of 10 million peopleand we just sat at a dining room table and i walked through all thosefacts, you'd go, we'd figure out how to do thisin our budget. we'd make this work. now the problem is, if you get a bunch politicians together,

they'll find a lot of reasons not to dosomething. and i'm not being critical of ourcurrent legislature, i'm just giving you the history. because again, it goes backto '97. nothing's happened since then. and that's why. so part of this is deciding what's ourpolitical culture. is it one that uses common sense and get things done or isit about politics? the good part is we've got a lot of greatlegislators. some are joining us tonight in these various

remote sites, and they're good people, andwe're all working hard on doing this together. so the good part is i think you've got a goodcrew, but you need to speak up on this topic and i'm sure i'll get some peoplespeaking up tonight on one side or the other. so with that, let me stop and really openup for questions, because hopefully we can have a good dialogue. so bill, who's gonna kick it off? thanks governor, and

our first question's going to come from thelive audience here, from kelly, who asks, "i see you're makingenvironmental quality of our great lakes a priority. please elaborate on plans tokeep asian carp out of our lakes." kelly, can you just raise your hand? oh, kelly's right here! well, i appreciate that question, kelly,because we do need to do more.

the asian carp are a major threat tothe great lakes, and the part is, is they're not the onlyaquatic invasive. i don't think most of you know, i thinkthe number's about 170 different aquatic invasives. a hundred and seventy different threats, and that number is going up all the time. so it's one of those things we do need toget on top of

and to be open with you, i wish we would've spent more emphasis overthe last two or three years, but it's been difficult. so what i would say is we've dealtwith a lot issues in the state, the tax system, the regulatory system, and we're still workingon them to improve them. but now i felt it was time to spendtime on the great lakes, so one thing that the opportunity came up

is recently i became, just before theend of the year, i became co-chair of the great lakes governors' council with governor quinn from illinois. and i think it's time to make a big dealof the great lakes, so over the course of the next year, we hope to make a majoremphasis on the great lakes in terms of aquatic invasives, in terms of other water qualityissues, water use issues. there's going to be a major issue that you'regoing to see coming up more more often about

the need to dredge our harbors because oflake levels. so there's a whole litany of great lakesissues that i thought the best answer is, andi've invited all the governors, i talked to gov. quinn, is hopefully up on mackinac island injune we're going to have a conference, a meeting of the great lakes governors andhopefully the premiers from quebec and ontario, to really highlight these issues to makea bigger deal about it, to say now let's start taking action because

there hasn't been enough to deal withthese kind of topics. so i think that's a very goodopportunity to really move forward in that way. just going back to the aquatic invasives fora minute, or invasives in a minute, because i like to use this to really put it in perspective,that there's a lot of work that needs to be done and two or three topics. the first one iseducating people about invasives. the next one is how do you sort ofprevent the whole question in terms of

keeping them out to begin with and asian carp that we're on the edge of having, going past that line, and then if you have them actually show up,how do you kind of manage, or you know contain the problem. and then how do you deal with it interms of long-term things if you get beyond that stage.

so you gotta go through each one. so one, some of the young people here maynot know this so i'm sort of speaking to the old people like me, older people, is of not understanding you're being educated.how many people remember back when you were in high school and you'd go buy a bouquet or you'd geta bouquet, depending on whatever side to

the arrangement that you were on, and it would involve not just flowers, but if you want to a florist or you'd getthe bouquet, it would have something called baby's breath. how many people are familiarwith baby's breath? now roger, i bet you knew about baby'sbreath. i don't see your hand going up there. a lot of us put our hand up. did you,

do you realize that's an invasive? and literally there are peoplethat spend thousands of hours every summer on the lake michigan dunes ripping out baby's breath? so that's one of those cases wherethere's a lot of work to be done to help us on all these issues. so both the aquatic and the non-aquatic.

thanks, thanks governor. our first, our next question comes fromsaginaw where sen. kahn is hosting, and he's standing by with a question.sen. kahn. good evening governor. governor, i'm here with rep. ben glardon and rep. timkelly, they both say hello to you. our question comes from jaquanda hamilton. she's concerned about the crime that we havehere in mid-michigan and in particular in flint and saginaw and wants to know what needs to be done to decreasecrime

throughout mid-michigan and throughoutmichigan. as a whole. yeah, i appreciate that roger. it's greatto have tim and ben with you. i can see you guys well. you got a great location at saginaw valley. i did a town hall up there pretty recently, so that was fun. we do have too much crime and inparticular there are four communities i highlight

because it's really bad and at least for places inmichigan we have four of the top 10 most violent places in the country: flint, pontiac, saginaw and detroit. so i did a public safety message lastyear to really say let's focus in on these communities. to also let you know, though, we shouldn'tstop there and we shouldn't look down upon those communities. it'san issue we need to deal with all over.

we actually have eight of the top 100 in our state. so we're putting a focused approach on thosefour communities and unfortunately it doesn't turn overnight, but i think we aremaking progress in saginaw and some of the other communities. and two or threesteps we took. one of the first things i did is we're actually increasing the number ofmichigan state troopers we have. that's something we let decline a lotover the last decade. we actually have two more classesgraduating, we had a class graduate before

the end of the year, we have another onegoing through right now, the academy. because the nice part about michiganstate troopers, one, i just think they're the best, wonderfulpeople, but by being michigan state police, wecan be flexible to deploy them in whatever part of michigan we need them. so that's part of it, and we've actuallyput more people, troopers up in saginaw. the next stage is to get people cooperatingbetter, to get the sheriff working better withthe local police, with the state police, and then bringing in the prosecutors and thecourts and working through that whole

system together. and one of things we're trying toemphasize is, and we've started a fund this better, and you're going to hear about thatwhen i do the budget message, is we're actually increasing the number ofdrug courts we have, mental health courts and veterans'courts. because in many cases, the people mayhave a substance abuse issue our mental health issue, and easy answer is not just simplylocking them up in the penitentiary, it's to get them treated in some fashion

and hopefully get them on a more positivepath for society. dealing with them appropriately, but getting a better outcome there. and we need to work through that. and then we have the whole questionabout the corrections system doing a better job of financing parolees, when people re-enter, you know, when theyreenter society, are they going to be successful or they just going to commitcrimes again and come back in the system?

we've had a pretty good program calledprisoner reentry in michigan. we're improving that quite a bit. they hadroom for improvement. one of the final things i'll always tell you,though, one of the best ways to deal with crime is to help people find a job. that gets back to the jobs point. the best crime prevention you can have inmy view is if someone has a job and family, they're not going to be out committingcrime. so we created a program, two programs,this last year. one's called community ventures,

and we're piloting it in these four communities,and the goal is to help the structurally unemployed, the people that have seriously beenchallenged about finding a job for a very long time, and to really look at what are thosebarriers and what we can do to help them. we're starting that with 1,000people and 1,000 jobs. and we're already showing pretty good progress. we're already probably the hundreds of placing people,

and we're going to keep going to getthat to really work well. the other thing was we did a summer youth initiative because in many ways if we can help youngpeople understand what careers, give them broader exposure we have a chance to getthem to avoid what could be acriminal outcome and get them in an employment outcome. and we did over 750 kids in these four communitiesagain through the dnr, working with community groups, nonprofits in those communities toreally help them be successful.

and we have the resources to continueboth those programs over this next year, along with more troopers, more tying into the criminal justice system. so we're just going to keep working hard onthis issue, not only for saginaw in particular, but for a number of othercommittees in our state. and then take those learnings and spread them acrossall of michigan. governor, our next question comes from facebook,where brian wrote and would like to know when we plan to put the shovels in theground on the new bridge.

the sooner the better. yeah, the bridge is a great opportunitybecause it literally will create 10,000 construction jobs for anumber of years. more importantly, it will create tens ofthousands of long-term jobs for michigan. and i won't go through all the bridge stuff,people are probably still tired of bridge comments, but to put in perspective for you,to give you some idea: the ambassador bridge, in terms of how much volume they have,

let me compare it to what happens atniagra in the buffalo area of new york. they have four bridges there - four - and they're all financially viable. if you come and look at theambassador bridge, it has more traffic then all four of those bridges combined. and so the point is, shouldn't we at leasthave a second crossing that will lead to more trade and more jobs? in terms of the specific question, interms of the timing,

the timing is basically, the next step thatwe're waiting for in the process is a presidential permit, which actually comes from the secretaryof state. eventually the president's responsible forit, but is gets processed by the departmentof state. and we're actually on a reasonable path toget that permit, and as soon as we get that permit, we should be in a position to reallymove forward and get to the point of starting toacquire land,

the engineering work being done tomove forward on the bridge. so that's pretty exciting. governor, the next question comes upfrom traverse city on the campus of northwestern michigan college, where sen. howard walker is thehost. sen. walker, question for the governor? good evening, governor. hi howard. how are you?

i'm fine, and i just want to let you knowthat it was probably a lot easier for you to get into northern michigan via the internet that by driving, so thank you.a little snowstorm. but i do have a question from don coal and its regarding our regulatory reforms in the areas ofwineries, microbreweries and the new distilleries. someone's thirsty!

well, thirsty and also northern michigan has found a, or they have found a home for these in thisarea, and there's a lot of interest in developing some of thesefacilities because it's a good match with our tourism industry. and don is wondering with therecommendations from the regulatory reform committee, i guess,have you

developed any position or a strategy to work through or following through on some of therecommendations and the reforms or what can we look forward to with regards to reforms so these industries candevelop even further. that's a great question, howard, and don's been working hard in that fieldfor a long time.

if you look at it, that's something thatwe simply ran out of time at the end of the year to keep pushing forward. as i mentioned, we got rid of 1,000 net rules,we had regulatory reform efforts in a number of areas. occupations for one, workplace safety, finance and insurance. this area was one of those, but itwas one of those fourth or fifth kind ofefforts.

and as you recall from the legislativeside, don, we actually had a number of bills thatwent through the legislature and thank you for your support on regulatoryreform at the end of the year. and we simply ran out of time to look at which ones in that particularreport we should be pushing forward with. so that's something we do have on ouragenda, to go through that report, identify the most prudent ones of those to moveforward with and so, we should be working together on that

with the new session getting started. next question right back here in lansing,governor, from elijah, there. he asks, "governor, foreigninvestment versus local investment - do you have apreference in terms of the continued economic recoveryrecovery of michigan." absolutely. the easiest answer is you always goto local investment first. you always want to help the people alreadyhere.

most jobs are going to come frompeople already in michigan, and those are the ones that are alreadyour customer. so you should always focus and that aheadof going after investment anywhere else. and the illustration i'll give you,that's a different philosophy then you hear from a lot of government people. and it just shows a lack of understanding of what idescribe as good business. you'll hear a lot of people say that theywere out hunting mode, that they didn't pay

as much attention to what was in theirstate, and they were out trying to bring newthings into the state all the time. for the business people in the audience,let me ask you this. if your business is challenged, if you'rehaving a difficult time in your business, do you take care of your current customersfirst, or do you go after new customers? i can hear the business people sort of laugh. because that's almost business 101, is if you have a challenged business, youalways take care of your current customers

first. it's much easier to retain a customer, work with them than ever trying to goget a new customer come in. and that's the same philosophy here. the term that you'll hear quite often,sometimes in the press and we're trying to get it to come up more often is so-called economic gardening. so it's like you garden in your ownbackyard to grow jobs before you go off

hunting. now what i'll tell you is is we're doingsome hunting, because you shouldn't just be exclusiveone or the other, it's really what percentage and how you balance thosetwo things. so the bulk of our resources and effortare on economic gardening and they're going to stay there. but we're doing well enough now interms of creating an environment for success wherewe're doing some hunting. so for example, i did trade missions to,

i've been to china, japan, korea, germany, italy and canada. and we're going to continue to do someof that over the next year. so most likely this year i'm looking to a tripto israel because of they're very high-tech,and i think there's good opportunity to bring businesses to michigan from that. and then most likely i'll be back inchina sometime in the fall.

so it's that balancing act but the balanceis clearly weighted towards economic gardening, helping michigan businessesright here. and that's the same thing. one thing iwill mention is, i blew up most of the tax credits forbusiness, because that was part of huntingis we're giving huge tax credits out to people to come into our state, where we weren't doing things for peoplealready in our state. i didn't think that was fair.

so to give you some idea of magnitude, the amount of tax credits we'repaying for this year are out of this year's budget that were given out years ago, so this is how much we start our balance,our budget with in the hole before we even start saying we need to balance that, $500 million. and so my view is, shouldn't we be treating people evenly, creating a levelplaying field? so i got rid of almost all

that. we kept some strategic dollars to giveout some cash, but it's only a fraction of what thosetax credits amount to. so we've restructured a much fairersystem that i think is much smarter for us for the long term. governor, the next question comes to us fromfrigid houghton, where dave nyberg is hosting at the m-techsmart zone in michigan tech's lakeshore center. david, youhave a question for the governor? i do. good evening, governor. this questioncomes from tom tikedon,

he's a county commissioner here in houghtoncounty, and he's also the director of main street calumet. tom's question is, "governor, you mentionedtransportation improvements in your state of the state address. can you share some specific ideas about howwe accomplish transportation infrastructure improvements in michigan?" yeah, no, i appreciate that. and you guysare at a cool site. i've been to the m-tech up there, it's very cool, so

they're high-tech up there. so i don't know that they're trying toshow off, but stay warm first. as a practical matter, in terms oftransportation infrastructure, we do need to invest, but it's not just about, i talked aboutwhere the dollars would come from, let me talk about where the dollars would go. because i think that's worth talkingabout, about how the funds would get distributed.

to give you some idea, the current formula that they used todistribute our transportation dollars are undersomething called act 51. and when i came to lansing, i'm not a careerpolitician, so i kept on hearing people talk about act51 this and act 51 that, a lot of act 51 stuff, so i finallystopped and i said, 'isn't there like an act 51 almost every year when theypass acts? say of what year they're from!' so i said, 'what year is act 51 from?'

and bill's laughing because he's the guytold me, he goes, 'governor, it's act 51 of 1951.' and that's the statute that decided howwe distribute our road funds. now, for those of you that haven'ttracked and been around michigan a very long time, the interstate freeway system wasn't started untilafter 1951.

to give you some idea that things havechanged slightly since 1951. well, they have modified it over time. so i said, 'give me a chart of act 51, where the dollars go.' it's like a bowl of spaghetti. this thing's got lines and curves going allthis different ways. it's all goofed up folks. it doesn't make any rational sense. a lot of it depending on who might havebeen in office at that particular time to say, 'okay, they got something for theirarea

verses this area.' so i said, 'shouldn't we clean this up?' again, we don't want to take, we don't want to cause huge issues for areasthat are already getting money, but for this new investment, let's invest it basedon what would be smart. to actually put it where main commercial corridors are, where themost important places are to invest and do it in a thoughtful fashion, and clean up the old act 51situation.

so that's a big part of this reformpackage, too, is to use your dollars smarter, and when i say dollars i appreciate theinfrastructure question because it's not just about roads. roads are criticallyimportant, but we actually have some important railinfrastructure things we need to invest in in this state, both passenger but also freight. ifyou talk to the agricultural community there are some important things we canimprove there. it also deals with harbors. in particular, that can be an importantissue for the u.p.

and the lake shore issues because, one of the issues you're gonna come upis this harbor drudging issue that's going to come up over and over because oflake levels. and so we need the dollar resources todo more with our harbors. and then finally there's the whole issueof mass transit, public transportation. we have some good systems, but one illustration was is we just gotlegislation passed for the regional

transit authority for southeasternmichigan. that was a case where we had probably the worst set-up for public transportation of any major area in the entire united states. we've avoided dealing with itappropriately for the last 40 years, and now we have a structure to helpaddress that situation and deal with it appropriately. in terms of demand, we were top 10in terms of demand for regional transit

needs in metro detroit. our raking in terms of capacity, in termsof ability to serve, we're ranked below 100, and so we're getting that straightened out,and that would be part of the use of these dollars, so it would be very widespread. now a lotareas that, if you think about it, if i go through that list, it touches almost allof us in some way in our lives,

in terms of a better economicopportunity. we're going to go next back to saginaw wheresenator kahn is live from saginaw valley state university, senator kahn? hi. i've got a question from emily andsimilarly from samantha. they're both concerned about theaffordability of college education. they remember the promise scholarship and howthat was helpful. what are we going to be able to do in the future for theaffordability of post-high school education?

yeah, there's at least three ways to workit because college is too expensive today. i mean that's a major challenge. believe me i know, i've got three kids. i've got two in college right now. and if you stop and look at it, thethree levels that need to be worked, the first level is just better costmanagement, in terms of the universities in theinstitutions involved in the process.

that if you look at it, just like we've donea lot of things for best practices to say as a state how we need operate to bemore efficient, the universities need to do that. and they're trying, they're workingtowards that, but what i'd say is that i think there's still room for improvement. so i don't want to be critical, it's morelet's get on top of it and work at it. and to put it in perspective, there'sa lot of limits on what we can do as state government because there's a lot ofautonomy to the university system in

michigan. so i really encourage you to talk to peoplein the universities to really work that issue, and i think they'll respect that comment andwork it. the second one is the financial aidquestion. is there more we can do to help with financial aid? because the promiseconcept came up. we used to have some programs, some meritscholarships. what i would tell you this is theydisappeared before i got in office, largely, because of budget challenges.

if we have an opportunity to look at someof that, i'm happy to look at it, but i wouldn'tdo it that way. and what i mean by that isa lot of it was pure merit, and to be open with the you, i always wantto recognize merit. but given the cost of education, i want to look at need, and really try to give it to people thatneed it the most.

and i speak to this from personalexperience. my oldest, my son, actually got some of the award money from the old program, and we're very fortunate. i've beenfortunate my career where we can afford college for our kids. so we actually made donations touniversities for that dollar amount more to sort of saytake the money back, would you please, and give it to people that really needit, so they can stay in school or go to school.

the last one is we need to thinkmore innovative, because the first two probably don't surpriseyou, but let's think out of the box. let's be morecreative here. and we passed some legislation this lastyear that was really cool so i want to thank, thank you to roger and ben and all the people working this, howard,that were part of that and i know tim, you're going to jump in on this one, but we did something called dualenrollment,

which said if you're in high school youcan also get credit in college. and part of the goal here is, can't we lookat building a system longer term where you might be able to complete a whole yearof college while you're still in high school? wouldn't that be cool? because think about that. if you completedyear of college before you finish high school, how much would you save? that's one year out of four, that would bea 25 percent savings.

so that'd amount to a bigger savingsamount than almost anything else you could think of. and we didn't have a system to do that verywell. we can improve. and to me this a very personal onebecause you've heard the nerd thing right? everybodyknow i'm a nerd? the history of that actually goes backto the fact i started college when i was a junior in high school. and so i started going to college

basically full time while i was in high school. the obnoxious part of this was i actually took government when i was in college. when i was ajunior high school, i got an a. see, i was a good nerd. and then i got to my senior year in highschool they didn't recognize anything i had done. they wouldn't give credit, theydidn't give anything for it. so because of michigan curriculumstandards, i actually had to take

government in high school in my senior year even though i had an a ingovernment in college. that was a very worthwhile class by theway, but that just shows by being innovative thinking out of the boxyou can make a huge difference, so let's think that way too. coming back to the audience right here inlansing, bill asks "when the education achievement authoritywas selected to point the way to reviving

failing schools, what experience, what history of success was demonstrated by the eaa toconvince you that the eaa was the rightorganization to remedy the problems?" bill, you here? raise your hand. great, well i appreciate the question bill. let me give you an update. there'snot experience yet with the eaa in terms of a lot of results because they just startedtheir first school year in september,

looked all across the united states. we did a lot of research, and the main model we ended up using wasnew orleans. because katrina came and literally wiped out their schoolsystem. things were so desperate inlouisiana, they had a clean sheet of paper to say if you are designing aschool system, what would it look like? to really account for what is the

best state of thought for public education in the country. and they created something called thelouisiana recovery district, and so a lot of cases, we went tolouisiana. i even spoke to the guy that had been superintendent, we spoketo people in the louisiana government about how well worked. we talked topeople of the department of education at the national level, arne duncan, the secretary of education,

and really took that. and then wefound some other pieces and we tried to put the best model together of bestpractice. and that became the model for theeducational achievement authority that we launched in detroit with 15 schools inseptember. and the idea there is a couple uniquethings. first of all, it's for persistently failing schools, schoolsthat have had a terrible track record. a number of these schools had zero collegeready students graduate from them prior to us coming into these schools. soit's for the schools that were the most

desperate in some ways. and the idea was, it's not a schooldistrict. it's a system of schools. and the idea is, you push as much resources out of thecentral office and as much into the classroom as possible. so the goal is to have close to 90 percent of the dollarsin the classroom rather than in other functions, and build off of that.

but very importantly, it did something else.they have a longer school day, they have over a 200 day schoolyear. because there's a lot evidence, if youlook around the globe, the place's being most successful, they just have more time in school, because you can lose a lot over a summer time. and then beyond that, they actually have gone to somethingcalled student-centered learning, where really the students are sort oftaking more charge of their education.

those of you that are familiar with mystory at all, it's a similar kind of model, where basically the students aremastering levels of competency. so one thing that you found inpersistently failing schools, a lot of kids would just flunk a grade, and they could flunk a grade more thanonce. there's no flunking in these schools. it's only a question of how long ittakes you to master level of competency so you can move on to the next level.

so you can see culturally, it sort ofcreates a whole different tone. so kids aren't there to flunk, they're there to succeed and mastersomething. ways the teacher becomes much more a coach, and the model really works. it's really cool. i went and visited theschools, i've been there a couple times to visit students. i'm going to go back inthe next month or so, and talk to parents and teachers andthe kids. it's a great opportunity, and so

we hope to help these schools and we hopeto add some schools besides detroit that are on the persistently failing list.it's never going to be a huge organization. and sometimes people think, well, it's going to take over all the schools inmichigan. that's not going to happen. that's not it's intent. it's to deal with these persistently failingschools. and what i hope happens is they can be a place of innovationthat any school, it's an open model, so

any school district can say, 'we want tostart doing some of the same things that they're doing for kids that aren't on the persistentlyfailing list.' and i hope schools start doing that stuffbecause then the eaa can go learn from them. so in a lot of ways, it's a place toreally innovate in education, to really say it's about moving to thefuture and being creative and really focusing on student growth. so it's very exciting. the eaa is something

i'm pretty passionate and fired up about. the biggest challenge is when you do somethingso new and novel like that, a lot of people are challenged with change. actually i do that with a lot of things ido, and we tend to take on tough issues, and everybody likes change until it shows upright? that was a really good idea until you askedme to change something. so that's a big part of the barrier and we'rejust going to keep moving forward.

thanks governor. going back to traverse city:senator walker, you have a question for the thanks again governor, i have with me jeff,and he's from, he's a staff person with representative wayneschmidt. i'm going to turn over the opportunity to him to ask you a question. hi governor, thanks again for using traversecity in this experience again. representative schmidt is unfortunately unable to attend tonight. he's down in lansing working on some proposals.

two questions, trying to mash them together,one from steve and one from james here in traverse. talking about transportation funding and your proposal. mainly, how will your proposal be equitableboth for businesses and individuals, and to that point, how will that help local communities such as grand traverse county and northern michigan?

great, i appreciate that. wayne's doing agreat job in terms of working on stuff, so i appreciate that. i'm glad you can be be up there to share. in terms of if you look at thewhole process, why is it fair? because these areuser fees largely. they're not what i would call "attacks," but really saying is based on how muchyou use the road, if you think about gas

tax. this is to change it to a percentage, andthere are some variations. when we talk about average cost, theaverage cost that we're calculating is about $120 per vehicle to get about $1 billion a year. that'snot insignificant, but it varies dramatically based on what kind of vehicle and how much you useyour vehicle. so if you don't drive much at all, you wouldn't pay much at all.

if you drive all the time or that's your business, you're goingpay a lot more. but you're using the roads. isn't it fair that you pay more orless based on your use of the roads? on the registration piece, we do that basedon value in michigan. so if you have that used car, that inexpensive car because youcouldn't afford a lot, your percentage increase is going to bevery low. if you happen to have that big luxuryvehicle you're going to pay more.

so there's really, it's really based onvalue of the vehicle and very importantly road usage, and that seems to be pretty fair answerwhen you look at that model in terms of saying it's a user fee. so the more you use the more you pay. theless you use, you don't pay. if you use public transit and don't own avehicle, you don't pay anything. in terms of the traverse city area, one things we're focusing on, as i mentioned,is

changing the funding formula, it's really to reflect where thegreatest demands are, in terms of are there important roads that we need toprioritize? again, michigan actually does a very good job of an asset managementplan. every year, mdot, or every couple years, they do a five-year plan topresent what priorities are, and i remember howard, if you go way backwhen i was campaigning, i remember coming to your campaign headquarters and we had adiscussion about how there's a road or two right near where your headquarters was thatwas a big commercial stretch. it wasn't a

long term stretch but you had a wholelot of commercial businesses, industrial businesses on this stretch of road that needed to make sure it was improved andin good shape because that was about a lot of jobs. and those are the kind of thingsthat we really want to prioritize to say, 'let's make sure we're being successful interms of job creation, and then let's make sure we're takinggood, better care of our roads all across the state.' one thing i will share with you too, though,

i talked about $1.2 billion and italked about $1 billion. we're actually talking about givinglocal counties or groups of counties the ability to do a local option. and again, that would be a vote of the people,that would be up to you in your community. but to decide you want to focus in onyour own projects, your own road projects, your own mass transit projects, your own infrastructure projects. here's anoption that you can decide

you want some additional adder to make an investment in the things youwant to prioritize the most. that seemed pretty fair because that happens in many placesacross the country. going back to houghton now, where dave nyberghas the next question. dave? yeah. governor, this question comes from kimstoker. kim's the president of the upper peninsula economic developmentalliance. he's raising his hand there. kim is a proponent of this project calledthe u.p. link project, which is a high-definition video processing project that he's workingon.

he would like to know how they can partnerwith the state to do business smarter through the use of high-definition video conferencing. yeah, i would be happy to learn moreabout that. that one i've heard of but i don't know enough about. if you look at the basics, we're actuallygoing through several steps to make it happen. and one, this just happened over the last year or so,is we're finally getting

broadband connection across thebridge. it's actually mind-boggling to me tolearn that we didn't have a real broadband connection across the mackinacbridge to connect the two peninsulas. a lot of it is completing thatcircuit around the lakes, because that really opens up a lot of opportunity and that could tie right into your project. again, that's the question of what kind offiber is it, what's the capacity, how to manage that in an effective fashion. so i think it ties right into that,because

one of the cool things you can do that i believe is probably behind some of your question,kim, is you can do great business or great economic development work orgreat creative work anywhere in the country if you've got enough bandwidth to do that. and so the question is, is we've got fabulousquality of life places. we've got traverse city, houghton,both are now high recreation areas,

that if people could say they could livethere year-round because they have better connectivity, we could see growth and say, 'hey, iwant to live right there do my business. i can do business all around the globe fromright here.' so that's where the high-def piecereally comes in. so that's a very worthwhile thing tolook at, in terms of making that connection. one of the other things thatsurprised me, just to give you a side note so you recognize, we have some thingsstill to work on. because there actually isn't a goodelectrical connection

even between the upper and lowerpeninsula. and i think that's something that needsto take place. so for example, the lower peninsula, we pretty much get all our powerjust coming in from the south, and the u.p.'s getting all their's pretty much fromwisconsin. and wouldn't it be bright at some pointif we actually say let's complete a much more reliable circuit, beause in thenorthern parts of the lower peninsula and in the u.p. they actually occasionally brown outor other issues because of quality of

power. so those are the things that you sort of always assume are just a given,but we actually haven't done well on electrical connection or broadband, whichties into your high-def question. governor, the next question is right herefrom lansing from mike who asks, "the state ofmichigan has the tenth highest most expensive autoinsurance rates in the nation, but provides best benefits when a catastrophic accidenthappens.

how would auto no-fault reform stress the already overburdened medicaidsystem, or what does it make make a difference?"mike, where are you? mike, i appreciate your question. actually i'll be happy to talk aboutmedicaid separately because there's a big question coming up there, but interms of the no-fault reform, to give you some idea is, in terms of magnitude, we're the tenth mostexpensive, but the severity of our claim, theaverage no-fault claim in michigan is

$44,000. the next two states, number two is $17,000and the next one after that is $10,000. and we do need be thoughtful because you'retalking about injured people here. so there's two. one is there's a question,should there be a cap on medical expenses? and the way i describe it is i don't likethe word cap, but there should be some kind of number that goes with the standardpolicy that then people can decide you want to buy more because it's no-fault.you decide whether you want to get additional

coverage beyond that. so you shouldn't belimited in how much you want, but to give you, that's not the biggestconcern. the biggest concern is really more on the management ofmedical costs for somebody that gets hurt. so that issue of limitations are one thing. and to give you some idea, a $1 million limit would be 20times higher than the next highest state in the country. those are huge orders of magnitude, so we'retrying to be very good here. and again,

i'm not even saying that, i'm just givingyou an illustration of what $1 million would do. that would be 20 times the nextclosest state in terms of limitations. and again, you shouldbe able to buy higher. but the bigger one is the management of themedical cost question because right now, basically people that are hurt are payingfull list, which is full price, where almost no one is paying list formedical.

if you have any kind of insurance or you'regoing in, it's a substantially discounted number. so the point is, is can't we get it to bea more discounted rate, which could drop those costs by a lot that come out of your premium. so there's room for improvement to stillprovide care but to do it in a much more cost effective fashion,

that we should look at. and there's a whole issue of autofraud insurance. there's a whole bunch auto insurance questions we need to workin michigan. on your medicaid expansion question, or medicaidquestion, that piece is a fairly small element compared to thequestion about, we now have to address, are we going to increase medicaid for lots of people, probably in about the range of a halfmillion people in michigan?

and that's a big choice we need to make, andto be open with you, i'm going to make my recommendation when i do the budgeton feb. 7. so i'm not going to give you the answer tonight,but i'm going to tell you the big question. the big question on medicaid expansion is, in my view, is not just the cost feature, but the question is do we have enoughcapacity to take people in and and put them in amedical home model, which is, means they have a primary carephysician, they actually have a place for medical care

where can be managed in some fashion to beeffective and actually keep people healthier and well to begin with. because if we can't do that, it simplyleads to people going to the er two or three more times. the costs skyrocket and it would become, itwould be awful in terms of cost prohibitive for all ofsociety. so the big question that needs to beanswered in my view is how much is our capacity to haveprimary care people or get them into the system so we take care ofthem the right way? it may not be there day

one, but we have a plan to do that? so that's what we analyzing right now, isour capacity and plan, talking to the health care community and other people. thank you, governor. we've had really greatparticipation in from all three places and we're moving now toward the end of ourallotted time. i want to remind everybody that if you have a specific question hasn'tbeen answered

or you greet, or you would prefer totalk offline, you can reach governor snyder's office at 517-335-7858. again, that number is 517-335-7858. we're going to take the the final questionnow from saginaw, and senator kahn, you're live on theair, go ahead with your question. okay. we have a question here from a barbara who wonders where we're going with thefunding, the funding formula for

special education that is, is funding forspecial education being looked at or does it need some changes or how would we go about deciding if it does need a change? yeah, we're looking at all parts of oureducation funding formula, because it's continuous improvement. howdo we keep doing better? so i would say it's more than justspecial education, it's the whole funding model,

and again, the goal is how do you work with people to optimizestudent growth? so we can work on the system to get themost growth, most positive growth out of each child every year. because one of the things we have to do is, shouldn't we try to get to the point where for most kids, they can grow at least oneyear or more every year of school? and we're not doing that today. we've got a lot of really good people inthe education system, a lot of great teachers,

a lot of great people in the system, but our outcomes are not very good, for special ed and otherwise, for most kids. only 17 percent of our kids arecollege ready when they come out of high school, in terms of if you look at the acttest, saying did they do well enough on allsubjects to say

they are doing well to go off to college. 17 percent. that's up from 14 percent two orthree years ago. and when people say, 'well, the governor'sfull of it, because i don't buy that,' i always like to give you the other stat that reallyillustrates it, makes it tangible, is what percentage of our kids do you thinkhave to take a remedial class before they can take an entry-levelcommunity college class, when they go off to community college?

you know what the statewide percentage isthat need a remedial class? it's in excess of 60 percent. so we need to do better. special ed kids deserve specialattention, obviously. a lot of it is also going to the point of what are special ed kids? and then making sure we have, to find the right way and

identified the right way, and working with their families to makesure we can follow up. so we have done some cool stuff. one of things i'm proud of, one of the bigaccomplishments last year is we did something with autism, in terms of helping provide coverage forautism. because that gets into a lot ofeducational learning issues. that what we found, and unfortunately it'shard when someone gets older, but if you can help work with

someone when they're still very young, the evidence is compelling now that you can actuallydramatically improve the quality of their life, theirfamily's life and actually the cost to society. so those are the kind of things we needto be looking at all the time, so i'd give you an illustration. we are lookingat special ed, but we have big issues on all kids, but then we are having, have had realsuccess with autism, for example, in terms

of at least starting a process to reallyhelp children. thank you, governor. we've had a lot of questionstonight and i want to thank everybody for joining. governor, i want to turn it over to you forjust some closing comments at this time. thanks, and i appreciate everyone joining.thank you for people involved in houghton, traverse cityand saginaw for joining.

hopefully you found it to be an interestingexperience. those of you, those of you here inperson, we got a record crowd here. what we really are tryingto do is leverage technology in a way to say, 'let's talk all across the state to do thingstogether.' because the biggest thing we need to do in my view is really work on our culture inmichigan. and what do i mean by that? it's harder tochange a culture that to change any law or regulation. and a lot of it is just becoming more positiveabout who we are

and recognizing we're all in this together.so i have a philosophy called relentless positiveaction that i get up and live every day. no blame, no credit. you simply hired me to show up and use common sense tosolve problems, and to be relentless in pursuing solutions, and going after one problem afteranother and just keep going. we actually have an expression in our officecalled we work in dog years.

because when i first came to office isaid to we got to get at least four years worth of work done in the first sixmonths, but i said we got more than six months worth of work to do. and so i stepped back to say okay, what'sthe closest thing? four years, six months, stuff like that. dogs! seven to one. so we jumped on the dog year concept, and we actually live that. and i'll put bill on the spot. iactually terrified poor bill at the end

of the year. we were working on a specialmessage and stuff like that on energy and the environment, we were workingon this, i believe that's when it came up. and we're working really hard onsomething and i said, 'bill, you know about dog years, right?' bill'slike, 'i got it, i'm with you on dog years.' i said, 'bill, think greyhound.' it's about going even faster. so we're going to continue to work hard butthat's why we need to have a good dialogue, and that's why i reallyappreciate you taking the time. hopefully this has been worth your time andattention.

i'm honored to be your governor. i'mfired up to be your governor. we've come a long way, but we're not stopping. this is not the time to be complacent norcontent nor take anything for granted. now's the time to use dog years andrelentless positive action to continue on a path to make sure that these last two or three years end up being several decades of positive growth for michigan.

because it's not only us, but it's like for the young people thatjoined us today, say how do we create this environment so they can have a michigan where theydon't have to deal with a bunch of the stuff that we're cleaning up now, and they can think about their future,their kids' future and just look towards the future in a very positive way. that's exciting. so thank you so much for joining us. ihope you enjoyed it.

thank you. thanks. nice to see you. thank you. ladies and gentlemen, this concludes tonight'stown hall event. thank you to all for joining us. drive safely and keep warm.