Michigan

Late in 2017, Michigan lawmakers ended their legislative year seeking a fix to another problem with drinking water in the state. It wasn’t lead contamination this time, but rather the discovery of 28 sites in the state with known levels of PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The Legislature allocated $23.2 million for various response and mitigation measures.

In early 2018, the Minnesota attorney general finalized an $850 million settlement with 3M over groundwater contamination in the east metropolitan area of the Twin Cities. The cause: The company’s disposal, over decades, of PFAS chemicals used for products such as Scotchgard, stain removers and fire retardants.Though these chemicals were used for decades, and many of them have been phased out of production, they are considered an “emerging contaminant” — because environmental and health officials have only recently begun to test for the presence of PFAS chemicals in drinking water, detect them, and understand their potential impact on human health.

The new funding in Michigan will be used to purchase new lab equipment, expand testing of drinking water, and purchase filtration systems for affected residents. A longer-term fix is likely to be more problematic and costly, whether it’s pumping out all the groundwater and removing the chemicals or hooking up the owners of private wells (this has been the group most affected in Michigan) to a municipal system.

Michigan has 3,000 miles of coastline and more Great Lakes water within its jurisdiction than any other state or province in the basin. But one of the big ecological threats to this freshwater system is well outside the state’s borders — in Illinois and Indiana, where invasive species of Asian carp would be most likely to enter the Great Lakes basin, via the Chicago Area Waterway System.

The E-Verify program allows employers to check whether newly hired workers have authorization to work in the United States. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to work, nor are many people in the country here on short-term visas. Created in 1996 through federal legislation, E-Verify is an internet-based system that uses data from the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security; verification can be instant, and rarely takes more than 24 hours. Individuals who receive “tentative non-confirmations” can challenge the finding.

There is no federal requirement for employers to use E-Verify (they do have to collect and verify I-9 forms), and one criticism is that people with fraudulent documents get through the system. The federal government does very few audits, so there is little enforcement of verification requirements. Still, a number of states have requirements of some kind for employers to use E-Verify (even minus such a state law, some employers use the system; see map).

Michigan will be keeping a closer eye on the long-term fiscal health of its local governments under legislation signed into law in late 2017. SB 686 aims to address concerns about unfunded liabilities in pension and retiree health care systems.