Eager to do something about the state’s F grade for integrity, on Tuesday a group of more than 60 of the state House’s 110 members introduced bills requiring Michigan’s elected officials to publicly disclose their finances. The eight-bill package would require financial disclosures from state representatives and senators; candidates for the state House and Senate; candidates for the state’s executive offices; candidates for judicial offices; individuals serving on and candidates for governing boards; and individuals on and candidates for the state board of education.
Michigan is currently one of only two states in the country that don’t require elected officials to make such disclosures. This is a particular problem in the Great Lakes State because shorter term limits there mean that elected representatives, particularly in the state Legislature, frequently maintain their private business interests during their public service.
Democratic state Rep. David LaGrand told Daily Kos that last year the same package of bills “sort of died without a trace.”
According to a 2018 report by the Center for Public Integrity, it hasn’t been unusual for the state’s legislators to vote on bills that might affect their own or a family member’s bottom line, even in the rare cases where they disclosed a potential conflict. A 2018 bill that would have made it a felony for representatives to vote on bills that could affect their finances also died in committee. Given the uphill climb the bills seemed to face, what changed to allow the package to make such a splash this year?
Republican state Rep. Mark Huizenga, another of the package’s co-authors, chalked the progress up to “a different environment, in the sense that we've got a lot of new freshmen involved.” One out of five state House incumbents was term-limited out in 2018.
According to LaGrand, this year’s success is “more a matter of the idea having been discussed and in Lansing for some time.” LaGrand added that he started talking about disclosure with freshman House colleagues “before they got elected, so they came into the Legislature already partway into the conversation.”
Legislators have also been practicing. In 2017, 15 legislators, including LaGrand, filed voluntary disclosures with the Center for Public Integrity. Michigan’s newly elected executive branch has also been taking the lead.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has posted her 2015-2018 tax returns, as well as disclosure forms for 2017 and 2018, on her office’s website. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson published her disclosure in March. Attorney General Dana Nessel has not yet made a general disclosure, but a spokesperson for her office provided a copy of her 2017 and 2018 tax returns to Daily Kos.
Huizenga said that the disclosure form created as part of the bill package is another factor in the proposed legislation’s newfound popularity. The form is “designed so that it's easy and simple for both the legislator to fill out, and for people that want to look at it online and say they know exactly what's happening,” he said.
LaGrand added that the required disclosures are thorough. Under the bills, candidates and elected representatives would be required to disclose “all ... sources of income,” including “interest in a corporation, a privately held corporation, or whether it's interest in real estate, or whether it's stock holdings.” Candidates and office holders would also be required to report their family members’ sources of income, and whether or not they have any lobbyists in their family.
The bills don’t require the release of tax returns. LaGrand is fine with the omission, because he says tax returns alone aren’t a thorough enough method of disclosure. “If you're holding a non-dividend-paying stock and you're just holding it, it's not going to show up in your tax returns,” he said.
Speaking of releasing tax returns, Huizenga denied that state Republicans’ interest in financial transparency puts them at odds with Donald Trump, saying that a request for full disclosure and “a complete showing of someone’s tax returns for the previous five years” are different things. “What we’re trying to do is ensure that the voters know that we're making a vote based on not having a conflict,” Huizenga said. “If you own a company that's a gravel mining company, and you vote on gravel mining, then you should be transparent and let people know that that's a conflict.”
“I think that's a very different subject matter than … having this invasive process of asking for tax returns,” he said.
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.