Mike Duggan's independent campaign to become governor is front and center on OTR this week along with our lead story what's happening on the budget, on the OTR panel Chad Livengood, Zoe Clark and Bill Ballenger.

Sit in with us as we get the inside out.

Off the Record.

Production of Off the Record is made possible in part by Bellwethe Public Relations, a full service strategic communication agenc partnering with clients through public relations, digital marketing and issue advocacy.

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And now this edition of Off the Record with Tim Skubick.

Thank very much.

Welcome to Off the Record in Studio C Mike Duggan on the program later on.

But let's start out with the lead story this week the Michigan house had a chance to dock themselves some pay until they got the budget don and they whiffled and waffled.

Then what did they do?

Well, the vote failed.

But let's just put this into context because I mean, yes.

Well it needed a two thirds majority.

Yeah.

Because this would have been a constitutional amendment, one that wouldn't have actually docked their own pay in real time.

Put it on hold.

Right.

But but not for this legislature.

This wouldn't even go into it.

This wouldn't even have made it onto the ballot till 2026.

It would'v been a fiscal year after that.

So this whole like, they decided not to, you know, it's like, well, okay, that wouldn't have happened in real time.

But basically Dems were like, No, this is all just theater.

We don't, you know, think that Republicans are continuing to be serious about the budget and it failed.

Question I mean, this is the caucus that has not passed an actual budget yet.

They've had a they've had seven or eight months now to her at least seven months to pass a budget for to fund the government.

And now they're just taking votes on whether to give pay cuts to a future legislature.

Well, how does this play at home?

Well, it looks terrible obviously and it plays right in, I mean, coul they not have figured that out?

I think they.

But they're in gridlock deadlock or they're just so hunkered down, locked in to their positions.

They just have to look past that.

Look, I'm to give you a suggestion.

Just move the fiscal yea back to where it was originally Let's not go down that road.

48 other states... Bill we only have, it's a short show.

Okay.

I mean, it was a gimmick back in 1976 by Bill Milliken and th Democratic legislature to kick because of a budget crisis to kick the fiscal year, start three months down the road, bring it back, put it on July 1st where everybody else is, and you won't have to have a constitutional ammendement.

Z, help him out.

I'm just going to let him keep going.

I mean, look, it's too far gone, right?

This is this is a process that now has been ingrained in how things work.

I'm not saying it's a workable process, but you can't even get one year's budget done.

You think the whole entire state is suddenly going to be like, Oh, yeah, let's go back to July one.

Jon Lindstrom has written a lot about this and thought a lot about this, and it's.

But let me stay on this vote for a second.

What can the Democrats why were they thinking what did they have to lose by voting and sending the message to the people that we're being responsible and punishing ourselves if we don't do our job?

I mean, they're going t the marginal Democrats are going to see this in mail, in advertising against them.

You think?

And and so Matt Hall's Republicans will be able to try to litigate this.

And they may say, look Matt Hall, you know, drove this the state into into a government shutdown, which is where we're headed towards at this point.

at 40 days out.

In marginal districts did vote for.

Doesn't matter if they're still running commercials.

But they well, they may run them, but they would be lie and that could be pointed out.

And so what we have righ is now the headlines about this instead of the real headlines, which of course, is schools.

Some schools have already started.

If they're not, it will be in the next week or two.

And many coming back without an idea of how much money they are going to have.

We've we heard of Okemos School District basically coming out and saying they're going to stop lunch and breakfast programs for the students because they don't kno what the budget is going to be.

You have superintendents going come on, get your act together.

But, you know, this is this is now sort of the should they dock their pay or not has now become sort of the story of.

Some schools starting the school year off, laying off people.

I mean, that's all.

So this all plays into the hands of our guest coming on.

Mike Duggan, who says the whole thing is broken, put me in there and I'll fix it.

He had an event this week.

He did?

Yeah.

So Tuesday night he had 800 people packed into Michigan Central.

And for those who are unfamiliar outstate Michigan Central is Detroit's old train station that sat vacant for 30 years until Ford Motor Company put $700 million into renovating it and had 800 people in there.

And when they were announcing that 200 current and former elected official were endorsing him for governor.

And some of these folks were some some some existing office holders, a lot of mayors throughout.

Metro Detroit.

Mark Gaffney former president of the AFL-CIO.

Yes, Mark Bernstein.

Democratic Mega-donor, Former wannabe candidate for governor.

Now, he still may run for governor one day.

but nevertheless Bernstein, big time donor to the Democratic Party.

Big time influencer, University of Michigan Regent Denise Ilitch of the Ilitch family, also Michigan University of Michigan Regents, several other board members on university boards.

Brian Barnhill, who used to work for Duggan, who's Wayne State Governor.

Marshall Bullock, former state senator who's now State Board of Education.

So what?

So what?

Well they do all the the fishers now of the Democratic Party are fully exposed.

The day after this happened, Curtis Hertel Jr., the chairman of the Democrati Party, ordered these Democrats to lose their access to the voter date system.

The program known as VAN that the Democrats rely on to get out the vote and win.

And like a guy named Mo Baydoun who is running for Dearborn Heights, Mayor, immediately lost access in the middle of his campaign for mayor to the state party's voter system as retribution.

What did you expect Mr. Hertel to do send roses to Mr. Duggan?

I mean, probably not, but but this is just this is just also, again, feeding in to Duggan's claims that the Democratic Party is becoming a narrow organization of elites that if you don't toe the line, I bet you that he'll talk about that in a little bit.

I think he might.

Yeah, Mike Duggan could not have written a better Week for himself.

I win.

And then, of course, his endorsement of who he would like to be.

Right.

His successor, Mary Sheffield, the president of the Detroit City Council.

Back to our first topic this pa cut thing was Mike Duggan's idea I mean, Mike Duggan is now propelling ou ideas as if he is the governor, while our governor is is very absent from the scene completely.

Wait a second, she issued a memo to the mayors people, and I'm sur the leak came from her office, not anybody else.

Of all the meetings that she' had with everybody, the the guy, the only person not on the list was a janitor of the capital.

I mean, every day I open Instagram and find out where Governor Whitmer was that day somewhere else outside of Lansing.

And now we found out that this week in the middle of Matt Hall's press conference, that Governo Whitmer is headed off to Japan in early September, and.

He came to her defense.

Well, he's he seems to come coming to our defense a lot these days.

And I don't see Democrat doing that in Lansing right now.

You don't see Winnie Brinks out there defending the governor.

This week in Michigan Politics was just fascinating.

Like, again, it wasn't so much that there were just these, like huge headlines.

There wasn't a budget, but just watching the dynamics at play and this sense that we're sort of careening towards at least a partial government shutdown, unclear who's in control, who actually wants to make a deal at this point.

It's unclear.

Alright quick Shutdown yay or nay.

Yes.

I don't know.

Maybe 12 hours.

No, there will not.

They'll get a deal.

Speaking about deals.

I was going to say save this tape.

Now.

I do.

I do have control of the tape.

Here's Mike Duggan.

Mr. Mayor Welcome to Off the record.

Nice to see you on this beautiful Friday morning.

Thanks for showing up Thanks for having me.

All right.

I kno you hate hypothetical questions.

Try this on for size.

Let's assume that you're governor.

Let's assume that you're one vote short and giving your road fix package fixed.

You need one vote.

And you've got a lawmaker who wants some money from the state for a local project.

And in return, you get the yes vote.

Would you do the deal?

You know, I think what this state has done with these earmarks is terrible.

So you wouldn't do the deal?

I won't tell yo it's impossible to do the deal, but it's become the entire currency of Lansing.

Is i everybody puts their earmarks in the amount of money they have squandered instead of putting in affordable housing, money in schools, fixing roads over the last four or five years, with all of these legislators getting an allocation of their favorite projects is wrong.

I won't tell you it will never happen, but I'm going to try to dramatically shift away from the earmark that we've seen in recent years.

But the intent of the question is when the rubber is on the road and you need something, are you willing to horse trade?

You know, I've been in this business for 40 years, and so I would never horse trade for something I thought was wrong.

But if I though there was a meritorious project that got moved up in the priority list, you know, those are the kinds of agreements you make every day to build coalitions.

So the general public that doesn't understand this game will say he's just like everybody else.

So I would say, look at the city of Detroit in the ten years before I got elected, when 200,000 people moved ou and it had the highest homicide rate in the highest unemployment rate in the country.

And look what's happened in the last 12 years.

I partner with city Council, which 12 years ago city council was much watched TV, must-watch TV and cable at night with people who tune in.

We fight with each other.

12 years I haven't vetoed anything.

We brought the factories back.

We got the street and we got the violence down.

We did it by working together.

And sometimes I had to agree to things council wanted and sometimes they agreed to things that I wanted.

But that's that's what happens when you actually make government work.

Mrs. Clark?

Mayor let's talk about what's happening right now in Lansing, of course, which is actually not much, right?

We have a budget standstill in many respects.

It sort of plays right into your hand, of saying Lansing is broken, sort of, you know, a plague on both their houses.

I'm curious, though, if you were governor, if we're going to continue a hypothetical here and you had the divided legislature that we see right now, what would you do to get these two sides to work together to get a budget?

So the first thing I've done is I propose legislation that says if the legislators don't meet the July 1st statutory deadline for a budget, they don't get.

Paid.

Which failed in the house yesterday.

or the governor or lieutenant governor.

but isn't it interesting?

It's already been put up for.

A vote And defeated.

And defeated.

But you have a Winnie Brinks an Matt Hall with public statements both agreeing to the same thing.

In fact, yesterday, Speaker Matt Hall gave you credit.

He basically said, you know, Mike Duggan wanted this.

We're putting it u on the board.

It failed, though.

So what would you do differently?

So what I would do is this you saw the event I had on Thursday night with 800 people filling the train station, but you had to see the group.

We had carpenters, hospitality workers, the union outfits next to wealthy business people, next to farmers from out of state, next to teachers.

And what I will do is what I've done.

Detroit.

I'm going to build a coalition.

When I went to put the Amazon facility of 2600 jobs in Detroit, I had the business community at the city council meetings next to the carpenters and the plumbers and the millwright who said, We need the jobs.

And we built coalitions that got there.

And what I would do is this is the coalition is coming together today.

You a number of reporters I raised half my money from Democrats and half my money from Republicans.

Those folks aren't going to give me money and go away.

They're going to be part of coalition that calls the people they have a relationship with and say the nonsense is over.

Ohio and Indiana are clobbering us right now on economic development.

We're a national embarrassment.

It's got to change.

What would you change abou economic development policy in Lansing?

So, Chad, you've been here long enough.

You remember Jennifer Granholm, and the Great Recession.

MAGA credits huge credits for the auto industry.

Rick Snyder came in and said, those are terrible.

He stopped all credits and then he realized, Whoa, we went too far.

Brought back transformational brownfield, which is my approach in Detroit for 12 years.

We don't give cash up front, but we will say, if you're going to take this vacant building or this vacant lot, we will give you a discount on the new taxes you pay.

Transformational Brownfield was working.

Then Ford puts a couple of battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Everybody panics.

They start saw.

They give away huge amounts of cash upfront, which I think everybody agrees now isn't work.

And then they cancel everything.

And now we're back to no economic development.

I would do what I've done in Detroit.

We have had exactly the same policy for 12 years.

You want to come into our city, we will make the land available.

We will give you the fastes permitting anywhere in America.

We will give you discounts and future taxes.

You've got to give preferenc to Detroiters in getting jobs.

And that has landed US $10 billion investment.

So would you get rid of the MEDC?

No, I make the MEDC function.

I mean, the MEDC function, hasn't functioned in years.

How do you make it function better?

Use SOAR and MEDC.

I mean.

I didn't want to get rid of SOAR but I have an economic development team that when you walk in, they tell you day one, every every time.

Basically, GM, Ford or Suunto cites a new power plant in southeastern Michigan.

The parts supplier comes and sees me first.

And if I have a site they want to come into Detroit.

If I don't have a site, I tell them day one, sorry it's going to take me six months to demolish the building on their properties.

Okay, We don't have time.

We'll go out to another place.

Every one of my team is disciplined in giving people quick, honest answers.

MEDC you can't find anybody in any part of the state who was anything good about the support.

And a lot of times it's just a clear competence.

I don't know if they are where they are because they don't have clear direction, because the legislature keeps changing the rules or whether they don't have the kind of staff they need.

But it needs to be an advantage.

And I'm saying I'm fighting Columbus, Ohio.

Who are trying to take the growing tech companies in Detroit, and this Jobs Ohio group is out competing us in in recruitment.

That's got to stop.

So the days of the chec upfront are over if you get in?

Yeah, I mean, it would take an extraordinary case to be a check up front.

I do not believe in that and I haven't done it.

But this is how we built the Hudson's building.

This is how we built the the, the 5000 employee Jeep plant.

Here's how we built the Amazon plant is we said we will give you a discoun on the new taxes as you build.

I'd rather have $300 million in the train station for Ford than have zero.

And so I gave Ford a discount from 400 to 300 million.

We got 1000 people working in there.

We've got investment.

That's the way that you do it, the way we should do it.

I think Republicans and Democrats mostly agree with that.

Mayor, what is the biggest issu facing Michiganders right now?

Our kids can't read.

I mean, the schools ar just terrible and it's not new.

It's been going on for 20 years.

You know this, 60% of the fourth grader in the state of Michigan don't read a grade level.

The single biggest thin holding back the city of Detroit is our public school system.

We have 7000 people moved back last year but very few families with school aged children.

And it's been the same thing in Lansing.

You've covered it as the legislature went from well, grade the schools, ABCD afternoon.

We're going to scra that will make it a percentage.

You know, we're to scrap tha will make it red, yellow, green.

And then 20 went back to ABC after that had 23 scrap ABCDF.

No principal or teacher has any idea what they're teaching too.

But you've all seen the numbers on how Mississippi's gone.

Teach the kids phonics, get them in small group settings, have tutors to back them up, hold the principals accountable.

If we don't change the direction of the public schools in this state, it's hard to see what our future is.

Should that direction include, Should that direction include vouchers?

Give the money to the parents, let them choose the education they want?

Vouchers is a necessary, but I would like to see the charters and the traditionals held to exactly the same standard.

So no, I'm not in favor of vouchers.

I do believe in choice between traditionals and charters but I think they have to be held to exactly the same performance.

If you really believe in choice give them the money.

Let them choose.

Yeah.

So we have in the city of Detroit, about 200 schools, about 100 traditional and about 100 charter in.

Parents will tell you we don't have good choices.

And there ar some good performing traditional some good performing charters, but not nearly enough.

And nobody is holding the schools performing badly accountable.

I don't see how vouchers solves your problem.

Now you've got more schools that nobody's holding accountable.

I'd rather take the money we're spending, measure them on their progress, and move our principals after three years, we aren't making improvement.

Now, I know that's got some people upset, but there's no business in this state where if your manager was losing money for three straight years, that's okay.

Come on back.

We'll bring the kids in for another year.

We just.

Keep sending these kids to failing schools.

You talked abou what can conflict over the first eight or nin years, ten years of your tenure.

How about the grand bargain and the bankruptcy?

Yeah.

How important was that to you to be coming in as mayor after the city emerged from bankruptcy?

What of it, It cleared the balance sheet in in Jerry Rosen who brokered tha and Judge Rhodes who you look at the bankruptcies across Americ they've dragged out for years.

Judge Rhodes got the bankruptcy over in 18 months.

Would you've been able to accomplish what you did in the last decade if that hadn't happened?

So I have always believed that I could have worked it out without an emergency manager, but it gave us a fresh start.

But, Bill, think about this.

The day we got out of bankruptcy, we still had the highest homicide rate in America.

We still had a 20% unemployment rate.

We still had 275 parks that were overgrown.

And so it gave us a chance.

But if you look at what we've done over the last 12 years since the bankruptcy, I don't think anybody would have predicted what we did with that chance.

What about population growth?

You lost a lot in the first decade, 50,000, as big as the city of Pontiac.

Now, you turned it around the last couple of years.

You think it's going to stay that way?

Oh, yeah.

And so the Census Bureau and are now in agreement on the last two years on the counts an and we gained about 5000 2 years ago, 7000 last year led the state of Michigan.

We were one of the fastest growing cities in America.

But think about what that means, Bill.

When you bring 7000 more people to your city, you need 3500 housing units or people are going to be pushed out.

We built 4000 new housing units, including thousands of affordable housing units which is why we have no tents, no tent cities in Detroit.

When you just look at the construction going on, all of over the city, come and you'll see cranes coming in the lots, cranes coming in Michigan Avenue.

It's a da I've waited for for a long time.

And I'm confident that the next mayor and the next city counci are going to continue to build on a politics of unity and not division.

As long as they do progress is going to continue.

You think Mary Sheffiel and Pastor Kinloch will be able to continue the work we've done without any backsliding?

So of course, I, of course, have endorsed the council president and certainly City council has been a 12 year partner.

And this is the really interesting thing.

You know, the last time a sitting city council member got elected mayor of Detroit it's even before you, 1947, Eugene van Antwerp.

It's been it's.

Sorry.

I was trying to remember.

But but think about this.

For 75 years when we came to have elected mayor, things were going so badly, nobody wanted to vote for somebody as part of the system.

Mary Sheffield just won the primary in a landslide.

As a council president.

There is a historic difference in the way the politics of Detroit has shifted and all the councilmembers deserve credit for that.

Mr. Mayor, you were instrumental in the passage of the 2019 auto insurance law.

Since then, there has been one documented case after another of catastrophically injured peopl who cannot get access to care, including a guy named Brian Woodward, a Detroiter who died in the hospita 90 minutes before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that he should never have lost his in-home care from the 45% cut legislature has not done anything about this.

What will you do to change this?

So I agree with you on that.

They should have never tried to retroactively change the catastrophic coverage I never thought that was true.

Did you tell them that?

Yeah, but by then it took over in the middle of the night.

Go back and look at what I was doing.

I wanted PIP choice in this state.

Our everybody on Medicare was paying $1,000 in their ca insurance with health insurance they didn't need and wouldn't pay in any other state.

I wanted people to have choice and we've done that.

We've gone from basically the highest car insurance to the third highest I have in the last month, sat down with the insurance industry, with trial lawyers, with long term care people, the hospital association.

And I said getting from first to third is not enough progress and it's had consequence.

As it Chad points out.

I said instead of what you guys did the last time with the late nigh showdown, let's get in a room.

You got a guy here who understands the issue and let's figure out a way that we protect the people who need it, that we take the waste out of the system on the excessive payments, that we make sur that trial lawyers get rewarded for effective advocacy but don't get paid when they aren't doing work.

Let's make the whole system work together.

That's what it's going to take at the last time was was basically a showdown with guns.

The people said.

Who is standing in the way of some kind of reform?

Complexity encourages the most complex thing I've ever dealt with.

Yeah, I guess what I'm talking about is we've seen over the years since 2019 different chambers or committees vote in favor of some kind of reform, and it always ends up not passing.

It's all posturing.

By whom?

By who?

By whichever side is on some people posture for the Democrats, some people posture for the Republicans, and then they go and raise money at election time in the insurance industry because many of the Republicans in the trial lawyers get money to the Democrats in the long term care people get by the Democrats, the hospitals get by it, everybody in and and they use the issue to raise money.

We can fix this.

States all over the country have figured this out.

And I think I probably am the one person who's got a strong enough relation.

I started out in the hospital side and then I got to the side of fighting for Detroiters who couldn't afford car insurance.

I understand this issue and and everybody, if you get them alone, will say this system is terrible.

Now what's the fix?

The fix is I don't try to ou lobby you and screw your side, that we take the waste out of the system, make it affordable and protect the kind of people that Chad is talking about.

Nobody set out to do that.

If the president called up today and said, I want to sen the National Guard into Detroit, would you sign off?

Yeah, I don't.

The answer is no.

And I don't see any chance of that happening.

What we have in the city of Detroit, Is it wrong to have the NG come in?

It's bad strategy the right strategy to mix troops with police officers is not good law enforcement strategy.

We have right now an outstanding partnership.

There is a new U.S. attorney, Jerome Gorgen, That Donald Trump appointed, and they criticize appointments.

Another place.

This was a career gun prosecutor.

In the four month he's been there, he has doubled the law enforcement.

Why can' those two sides work together?

They are working together right.

Now in the.

They are working together right.

No the NG and the cops.

The National Guard are army.

That's not what you need.

But we did have did you see three days ago, we had tragically last week of July, a six year old boy shot and killed at his home when two gangs were shooting each other three days ago.

The feds and the Detroit Police Department, backed by the prosecutor, raided 11 of those houses, netted more than 40 weapon in are shutting down that gang.

That's how you work together.

The polic doing the enforcement, the U.S. attorney doing the prosecution.

And I don't want to discount this.

I was asking for the fed to do this when I was prosecutor 20 years ago.

This U.S. attorney has doubled the number of people working on gun violence in Detroit in the four months he's been there.

This is the partnership we should have.

And I think they're happy with it.

Kind of finally, Michigan Democratic Party this week cut off access and candidates to have their voter data who have endorsed you.

Can you speak t this in this kind of move here?

This is the world we're living in.

Curtis Hertel will rant about Donald Trump, the authoritarian president.

And as soon as some people who are lifelong Democrats who say, I'm going to support Democrats in the House and Senate, but I think Mike getting the people together, was better for our school kids.

Curtis Hertel says you're kicked out, we're shutting off your voting list, we're going to trash you.

The Democratic Party used to be a broad party that included autoworkers and farmers and senior and young people starting out.

It is now a narrow orthodoxy.

And if you don't adhere to what they say, you are out.

And I think it's going to prove disastrous for them in 2026.

But our folks knew this was coming.

They had the courage to stand up anyway.

Mr. Mayor, we're done with this part.

You'll hang on for overtime?

All right.

You're a gamer?

Oh, yeah.

All right, let's do some close credits, then back with more.

Mr. Mr. Mike Duggan.

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