Governor-elect Rick Snyder announced this week that John Nixon will play a key role in his administration as the new budget director. Mr. Nixon currently serves in a similar capacity for the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget.

The budget director announcement was one of several key appointments made this week, as the Governor-elect named his first department directors and other administration personnel. Mr. Snyder gave the first glimpse of how his vision to reinvent Michigan will take shape as he announced that Dan Wyant will be group executive for Quality of Life, a new role that will bring a more streamlined business management model to state government for the departments of Environmental Quality, Natural Resources and Agriculture & Rural Development.

Governor-elect Snyder said that Keith Creagh will head the Department of Agriculture & Rural Development and Rodney Stokes will serve as director of the Department of Natural Resources. Mr. Wyant will also serve as director of the Department of Environmental Quality in addition to his role as group executive.

Additional staff appointments announced this week were Bill McBride as director of the State of Michigan Washington, D.C. office; Marsha Quebbeman as director of administration overseeing finance, information technology and office administration and Norm Saari as the manager of appointments.

Mr. Nixon will play a critical role in implementing Governor-elect Snyder’s call to create an understandable and accessible presentation of state spending that is designed to give the public a greater insight into government operations and spending. Mr. Nixon currently serves as president of the National Association of State Budget Officers. He is a certified public accountant and was named CFO of the year in 2008 by Utah business Magazine.

The group executive concept is expected to be the template for Mr. Snyder’s governing organization. He said the model was taken from his experiences in corporate governance and will be used to implement other areas of his cabinet.

The Governor-elect said he expects to have a total of six group executives. In addition to Mr. Wyant, treasurer-designate Andy Dillon and Mr. Nixon also are expected to serve as group leaders.

Mr. Snyder said he will still have regular discussions with his leadership team, but the group executives will be meeting more frequently with the governor on policy development and implementation.

A proposal that started its legislative life as the Aerotropolis program to create a tax free renaissance zone to encourage logistics hub development in areas surrounding Wayne County Metropolitan Airport has evolved over the past year into the Next Generation Development program to support possible projects in five areas statewide and the addition of another ten floating renaissance zones.

The legislative package would allow creation of up to five zones through inter-local agreements around multi-modal transportation areas (which could include airports, sea ports, train, highway, or other systems). Within each Next Michigan district there could be 12 geographic areas designated for renaissance zone development. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation still has to approve each individual zone.

In addition, the 10 floating renaissance zones include 3 that have to be designated in rural areas of the state.

Legislators expressed concern about creating the large areas available for tax abatement projects because supporters of the plans said there are no projects or entities specifically waiting for the development so that they can locate in Michigan. The supporters argued that making these resources available, which exist is other neighboring states, would aid their recruiting efforts in attracting logistics based companies and just-in-time inventory distribution centers to the state.

The state’s tourism and hospitality industry received a boost early Friday when legislators approved spending $10 million from the 21st Century Jobs Fund to continue a limited advertising program for the Pure Michigan travel promotion campaign.

Supporters held a Lansing press conference Monday urging legislators to approve $25 million to fully fund the advertising promotional program. Legislators said that level of funding was not going to be approved, but agreed on a plan to spend $10 million, in addition to the $5 million previously appropriated.

The $10 million includes spending $1.5 million on winter tourism promotion immediately and the remainder will be spent in early March on a national cable advertising buy to tout the state’s tourism industry.

Throughout the past several weeks, supporters of the tourism industry have been pushing for passage of a permanent source of funding for the state’s promotion campaign. Proposals included allocating a portion of sales tax annually to support tourism, establishing tax increment financing districts to collect revenue for Pure Michigan and increasing taxes on rental car usage in the state.

In the end, though, legislators continued the funding on an annual basis, with the expectation that the industry will resume their Lansing quest next year to secure approval for the permanent funding.

After hours of final discussion and negotiation Thursday, the House and Senate agreed on plans to approve spending of about $1 billion on capital improvement building projects for 24 university, community college and other state facilities. The state’s portion of the bonding will be $383 million with the colleges responsible for raising the remaining funds for their individual projects. No project would get more than $30 million from the state.

Included in the approved projects are:

• Grand Valley State University classroom/office additions ($30 million)
• Mid Michigan Community College Mount Pleasant campus unification ($8.852 million)
• Bay de Noc Community College nursing lab/lecture hall remodeling ($750,000)
• Michigan State University plant science facilities ($30 million)
• Central Michigan University bio-sciences building ($30 million)
• Oakland University engineering center ($30 million)
• Wayne State University Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research Building ($30 million)
• University of Michigan Ann Arbor laboratories renovation ($30 million); Dearborn science and computer information building renovations $30 million) and Flint science laboratory building renovations ($16.6 million).

The 71 departing legislators Thursday night completed their final farewell speeches before Senate and House colleagues and joined fellow members in casting the final votes that ended their legislative careers. A very few members from both chambers will return for the ceremonial, and lightly attended, sine die end of session ceremony later this month.

While noteworthy for completing funding for capital outlay projects, providing stop gap money for the Pure Michigan tourism promotion campaign, the Next Michigan renaissance zone development program and scores of other issues, the final day likely was more marked for what it did not accomplish.

Despite spirited and passionate lobbying by several legislators and interest groups, the Senate did not take up measures to fund insurance programs for autism related conditions; it did not bring up for a final vote legislation that would have allowed for the Detroit River International Crossing bridge project; the preliminary discussion never materialized to bring up so-called Blue Cross Blue Shield legislation to implement individual market reform for health care insurance and numerous other issues that passed in one chamber but were not voted on in the other.

The autism coverage likely was the most discussed issue between supporters and the Senate. In the end, the GOP Senate leadership said they discussed the issue extensively in a closed door caucus but could not muster up enough support to being the bill up for a vote before the full Senate membership.

Since no further voting will occur this year, bills that did not pass need to be re-introduced after January 1 if they are to again be considered by the legislature.