Congratulations to the Detroit Tigers as they enter the All Star Break with a one game lead in the AL Central. The Tigers are again giving us something to cheer for – going 14-5 in their last 19 games, including winning their last five, and sweeping the Red Sox, the team with the best record in the majors. The Tigers have five All Stars, and Jim Leyland is managing the AL side in tonight’s All Star game. If only we had as much to cheer for from our local representatives.

Unfortunately, the current representative for the 101st District has been on a bit of a slump recently. In fact, he hasn’t really gotten his footing since the legislature reconvened last January. In fact, just today – 181 days into this legislative session – our representative introduced his very first bill of the session! Evidently, with a budget crisis in Lansing and real economic challenges facing our state, he was perfectly happy with the status quo and couldn’t find a single thing that needed fixing or improving. For those tracking the stats at home, out of the 110 members of the Michigan State House, only two have done less so far than the representative from the 101st District, with Republicans Jack Brandenburg and John Stahl failing to sponsor a single item so far this year (three others have one each, but all of them got around to it before today). Oh, and the bill introduced today? It makes minor revisions to two definitions in the Michigan Penal Code. Perhaps the slump is not quite over yet…

Meanwhile, Senator Gerald Van Woerkom, whose district covers Mason county as well as three others, has been best known this year for his role in pushing a controversial legislative package dealing with how CAFOs are regulated under Michigan law. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to argue with the science behind the criticism of CAFOs – or factory farms, as critics call them – from a human health and water protection standpoint. However, CAFO proponents also have a point when they point to the economic stresses facing today’s farmers. With rising land costs and diminishing profit margins, many farmers feel that their only option for success is to achieve economies of scale, which CAFOs certainly provide. Furthermore, as last year’s controversy over the Suttons Bay Rooster demonstrated, the conflict between the traditional, rural way of life that has characterized much of the history of Northwest Michigan and the urban assumptions many new residents bring with them when they move here is only intensifying. While I think the key to solving both dilemmas in the long term is to reconnect people with where they get their food – creating massive new markets for local farmers and improving the freshness of our food intake in the process – it’s hard to discount the very real fears facing our local farmers. Rather than trying to find a true solution that balanced all of these concerns, however, Van Woerkom deliberately pressed forward with an antagonistic plan designed to again divide environmentalists and farmers against each other. Perhaps the ultimate sad irony in this whole story is that instead of allowing the Michigan Agricultural Environmental Assurance Program to bridge the artificial divide between those in the agricultural and conservation communities by ensuring agricultural best practices and recognizing the role farmers play as the original stewards of the land, Van Woerkom cynically used this innovative and voluntary program to drive a wedge between environmentalists and farmers.

And then there’s Senator McManus, who represents Manistee, Benzie and Leelanau counties, as well as a number of others. First was her rather strange proposal to create a new state park, funded not through state park funds but through a voluntary additional contribution, that would include all of Michigan’s Great Lakes bottomlands. While the intent to promote diving in Michigan waters was certainly a good one, this proposal has to rank right up there with the iPod story for sheer strangeness. And if you thought that was weird, then check out the meltdown when local students dared question the wisdom of balancing the state’s budget on the backs of our schools. Then there was her comment to the Leelanau Enterprise that she is working on a new revenue source for DNR funding beyond traditional hunting and fishing licenses. As is the m.o. of the Senate GOP caucus, however, she obviously couldn’t divulge any more information to us commoners: “I can’t give you specific details because it’s all been behind closed doors.” While I certainly support greater funding for the DNR and conservation programs in general, it is more than a bit disingenuous for McManus to call for “a new revenue source” for conservation funding after voting in lockstep with her Republican colleagues to cut $311,000 from the Department of Environmental Quality and $510,000 from the Department of Natural Resources earlier this year (and that was just in this year’s budget!). Where was the “new revenue source” then? Or, come to think of it, where is it now?

And then finally, after her original irresponsible vote to eliminate the Single Business Tax without a replacement, leading to multiple downgrading of Michigan’s credit rating and provoking the worst parts of our current budget crisis, McManus was one of just three Senators to vote against the new Michigan Business Tax (see page 60). This legislative compromise represents a tax cut for 40,000 Michigan small businesses and our major manufacturers, and won the endorsement of the Small Business Association of Michigan, and even the Michigan branch of the National Federation of Business, which opposed replacing the SBT, but called the replacement “a welcome retreat from proposals being pushed by big business and chambers of commerce that would have raised taxes on many small businesses in order to finance a generous tax cut for a handful of large corporations. From that perspective, the new plan is a victory for many Michigan small-business owners.” The fact that McManus would vote against a tax cut for the majority of Michigan small businesses shows just how out of the mainstream she has become. This is a vote McManus should have to own up to for the rest of her political career. It’s time for all of us in Northwest Michigan to relegate the McManus brand of politics to what President Reagan once called “the ash heap of history.”

So that’s it - the All Star Break! And while local people may not have much to cheer for when it comes to our representatives in Lansing, at least we still have the Tigers!