Michigan transparency plans die again, keeping public in the dark

• Michigan House ends two-year session without votes on public records, ethics reform legislation
• Democratic sponsors bemoan delays, decisions by House leadership
• Michigan one of two states to fully exempt governor, lawmakers from public records requests. Ranks among worst states for ethics laws

LANSING — Efforts to bring increased transparency and ethics reforms to state government once again died this year alongside Democrats’ trifecta control.

The House adjourned Thursday without taking up a Senate-approved plan to expand Michigan’s open records law to the Legislature and governor, which remains one of only two states with such broad exemptions.

House leadership also never took up a package of ethics reforms aimed at curbing conflicts of interest and strengthening the implementation of a voter-approved personal financial disclosure system that shed little light on politicians’ entanglements. 

It marked yet another biennial death of legislation aimed at bringing reforms to a state government that has been rocked by a series of scandals and has ranked among the worst in the nation for ethics laws.

State Rep. Erin Byrnes, a lead sponsor on a major ethics reform package called the BRITE act and chair of the House Ethics and Oversight Committee, told Bridge Michigan she thinks “corporate influence abounds” around state government and felt that influence as her colleagues pushed on policy changes.

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Jason Morgan, another Democratic representative behind the BRITE act, said the failure “speaks to the big secret about Lansing.”

“It's not always Democrat versus Republican. It's a divide of who is beholden to big corporations and special interests and who isn't,” Morgan said.

If some of the transparency legislation had made it to the House floor for a vote of all members, Byrnes, D-Dearborn, said she was confident much of it could pass with bipartisan support.

But the House’s lame-duck session ended in disarray Thursday after one member in the Democrats’ razor-thin majority refused to show up and every Republican walked out with an ultimatum, forcing adjournment and effectively killing the proposed expansion of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. 

House Speaker Joe Tate, D-Detroit, was unable to convince holdout legislators to return to session and didn’t negotiate an agreement with Republicans, leaving the chamber without enough members to hold a vote, much less pass anything.

Freedom of Information fail

The House implosion was the latest setback for a bipartisan effort led by Democratic Sen. Jeremy Moss of Southfield and Republican Sen. Ed McBroom of Vulcan, who have spent a decade working on public records legislation

Their proposed expansion of the Freedom of Information Act, which applies to all other levels of state and local government, would have allowed citizens to request emails or other public records from the Legislature and governor’s office. 

But it included special carve-outs and protections for lawmakers and the governor, and less recourse for people if their request was denied. Those drew criticism from transparency advocates, such as the Michigan Press Association, who previously called the bills a good first step that doesn't go far enough.

The proposal wouldn’t have taken effect until after the next statewide election, in 2027, after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had left office. It would not have been retroactive, meaning none of her records could ever be requested.

Whitmer had run for office in 2018 on a promise to voluntarily open her office to records requests. She has not followed through on that promise.

The last state House Speaker, Republican Jason Wentworth of Clare, began his two-year tenure declaring ethics reforms to be a top priority of his caucus. The House approved a public records plan in 2021, but the legislation died in the GOP-led Senate without a vote in 2022. 

This time around, it was largely the Democratic-controlled House that stymied bills.

‘Distressing’ inaction

Before they won majorities to begin 2023, Democrats had spent years decrying a culture that allowed lawmakers to operate in secrecy out of public view, sending taxpayer dollars to colleagues and major campaign donors while spending lavishly using secret fundraising accounts fueled by undisclosed donors.

None of the legislation passed by Democrats during their time controlling state government will substantially restrict those opportunities.

“It seemed clear to me that the speaker has not been interested in passing substantive legislation for the last year and a half,” Morgan, the House Democrat, said of Tate. 

“What we saw was delay tactics by the Speaker of the House, who never had a good reason for delaying things, and it seems clear to me that the main reason he wanted to delay everything was so that it would have a harder time passing.”

Dave LaGrand, a former Democratic representative recently elected mayor of Grand Rapids, was among those who held press conferences demanding more transparency from the Republican majorities in the past. 

Democrats’ inaction has been “really, really distressing,” he said, calling declining trust in government a fundamental threat to democracy.

“​​The only way you get trust is transparency,” LaGrand said. “Secrecy does not make anybody trust anything.”

He noted there was nothing stopping Democrats from taking up transparency legislation before their final weeks in the majority. The open records expansion was introduced in 2023 but didn’t move out of a House committee controlled by Tate until mid-December.

“Power likes secrecy,” LaGrand added. “And so when anybody has power, it is hard to get rid of secrecy.”

Ethics reforms die on the vine

A contingent of progressive lawmakers, determined to make change, spent months working on a package of bills aimed at combatting some of state government’s most egregious ethical failings. 

The legislation would have banned elected officials from becoming lobbyists in their first year after leaving office and expanded Michigan lobbying law to include disclosure of lobbyist activity involving legislative staff.

The proposal passed out of committee this month but Tate did not put it on the House agenda despite backing from prominent Democratic officials like Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Byrnes, the House ethics chair, said the package had been dramatically slimmed down from its original aspirations in order to earn the blessing of Tate, who had assured supporters the legislation would move through the House.

“We set aside several bills,” Byrnes added, arguing the package “was still strong in its own right.”

Byrnes said the ethics and oversight committee had been frequently stymied. House leaders got to decide which committees get to handle legislation and “quite frankly, we had struggled to get any bills in our committee.”

“The BRITE Act was really our chance, I think, to show what we could do,” she said.

Another BRITE act sponsor, Rep. Betsy Coffia, D-Traverse City, said they had been deliberately misled by Tate who promised he would fully support the legislation but “actively worked to slow it down and prevent it from succeeding."

Rep. Tom Kunse, a Republican from Clare, had been a sponsor on a GOP-sponsored package of bills with similar intent, and said he would have voted in favor of the ethics and open records proposals if he had the opportunity.

“That’s not a partisan issue … we would have got 100 votes on those,” Kunse said, but also placed some of the blame on Byrnes for not pushing harder to get the BRITE act out of committee.

“At some point, you have to stand up and take a stand,” he said. 

Republicans helped kill the legislation by walking out of the chamber in protest over pending changes to the state’s wage and sick leave laws. It was still worth it, Kunse said, saying House Republicans will champion the same policies when they take the majority in 2025.

Personal financial disclosures remain vague

Michigan voters passed Proposal 1 in the 2022 election overwhelmingly, after campaign ads ran promising to shed light on lawmakers’ conflicts of interest.

Lawmakers, however, were also tasked with specifying how much detail they had to provide in the disclosures — which, as it turned out — was not very much. 

While lawmakers have to report sources of incomes and assets, including ownership of businesses, they don’t have to go deeper, meaning any assets placed in an LLC they own, as Whitmer has done, are exempt from disclosure.

Reporting the monetary value of any of those things is strictly optional, and nearly all officials filing disclosures declined.

In a late-night session before the plan was approved in 2023,  legislative leaders blocked lawmakers who attempted to force discussion on bills creating more comprehensive disclosure requirements.

A year later, Byrnes this week called the implementation of personal financial disclosures “the biggest professional heartbreak of my entire career,” but “I also feel optimistic about what we can get done in the future.”