Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor's professor of political science and director of Community Engagement at Indiana University South Bend.

Today, we're focusing on Michigan's highly competitive race for the state House in District 38.

This district, stretching along the Lake Michigan shoreline includes portions of Berrien, Van Buren and Allegan Counties.

In 2022, it was one of the closest races in the state, and this year it could determine which party holds the majority in the Michigan House of Representatives.

Our guests today are the two candidates vying for this crucial seat.

Incumbent state representative Joey Andrews, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Kevin Whiteford, will be conducting separate one on one interviews with each candidate to hear their perspectives on key issues facing District 38 and Michigan at large.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

I want to start by asking you what motivated you to run for reelection and what qualities, accomplishments, experience do you think makes you the best candidate for District 38?

Yeah.

So my first term, of course, and two year terms, you get to start a lot of projects and get to finish all the projects you start.

And so there's a lot of things that we've been digging into that we want to continue working on over, you know, another several years, probably things around like Lake Shore erosion, a huge issue in our district given that it stretches along about a hundred miles of Lake Michigan coastline, you know, shoreline restoration, the housing crisis, which is very acute in our area, a lot of Union Pier, for instance, median house price of $750,000 right now.

Try and find ways to address some of these housing issues that we have in district.

And I know Michigan's having a kind of a population crisis that's been in the news a lot.

You know, we're 49th for growth in the country, I guess, you know, thank God for West Virginia because they're 50th.

But, you know, trying to figure out how to draw people back into the state.

These are a lot of, you know, big issues that need more attention and excited to be able to work on those going forward.

And I think I bring a good perspective to the legislature.

I've lived in the center of that and harbor area for more than 20 years.

So I know the community.

I know the district very well.

Growing up there, my licensed attorney.

So, you know, a good understanding of a lot of the issues in front of us.

Was a small business owner for a few years.

I owned a solar installation company.

So, you know, a lot of the issues that small business owners face, but also my career just prior to moving into the legislature was working for the Michigan AFL-CIO.

So a lot of experience on the labor side as well.

And, you know, understanding the kind of balance that has to exist between workforce and business and then how that kind of all wraps into our community locally.

Let me follow up on a couple of those things.

And first of all, the economy is obviously very important, including attracting and growing both jobs and businesses.

What would be your specific policies that you'd like to see to increase the number of businesses locating in Michigan?

Yeah, So Michigan does a really good job right now of drawing in large projects.

So we have this sort of large attraction fund.

And so we brought in there's a large battery plant going in near Battle Creek.

Know there's some factories being built in Holland right now, Genesee County.

So we've done a good job drawing these big projects in and we have a lot of support for small businesses, but there's kind of this missing middle ground in housing, but it also exists in our attraction and development fund.

So all of these like that aren't billion dollar investment projects but are bigger than like, say, maybe a million or two that they need to get their project off the ground.

That's where we need the investment right now to help draw more in.

I think we've done a good job on the side of making Michigan a desirable state, right?

I mean, we have great natural resources.

We're improving our investments in education to make it a good state to raise a family.

And we have a lot of great protections for workers and civil rights and that sort of stuff.

So a lot of things that make people look at Michigan and say, okay, this could be a good state to live in.

We we just have to do a little bit more to make it an attractive state to do business in as well.

Start bringing those jobs into the state.

Now, what about that issue of housing?

Because with those jobs, you want to attract people and of course, they will need places to live.

What are your specific suggestions for that?

Yeah, I think a lot of this our zoning needs a lot of reform in Michigan with a lot of kind of old and outdated zoning practices that go back to the seventies, very restrictive zoning practices.

So, you know, something I've noticed is often you'll have a developer who wants to come into a community, build maybe apartments or townhouses, but then they run headlong into, you know, all of these like height restrictions, minimum lot sizes, setbacks and all that sort of stuff.

Planning commissions that are kind of intractable and unwilling to compromise.

And all of this sort of stems from, you know, we have a really strong local control system in Michigan, which has its benefits in a lot of ways.

But the zoning is sort of gotten out of control.

And so I've been a pretty strong advocate for zoning reform so that projects can actually come into our communities and, you know, there's issues with cost as well.

And we've done a lot to put money into our housing authority in the state to subsidize some of that.

But at the end of the day, you put all the money you want into a program.

If somebody can't get the approval to build, then you know, they can't they can't build anything.

And our housing authority estimates that up to 30% of the cost to build right now is in zoning and approval.

Mean, you think about paying architects and engineers and lawyers to navigate all of the zoning and approval processes.

So the more we can simplify that, the easier it's going to be to get housing built and bring down some of these costs.

Even as an attorney, you think that's a bit too much to be paying for those services.

Now in terms that you mentioned protecting the lakeshore and having good natural resources, another thing that can be problematic for people is public health.

In terms of contamination.

I'm thinking particularly of lead contamination in the water in Benton Harbor.

What kinds of things should the legislature do to make sure that doesn't happen again and to others?

Yeah.

So the governor has put in a mandate that all lead lines in the state need to be replaced by 2040, which is a pretty fast timetable.

And so we've been putting funding every year into the budget to help local communities invest in replacing old lead line infrastructure.

It's starting to happen across the state.

Benton Harbor was obviously a great example of getting it done quickly because a crisis happened and now we're trying to get this replaced so we don't have future Benton Harbor, Flint style crises.

But, you know, a lot of communities that we have in Michigan or their old infrastructure communities, you know, they're a hundred years old, some older.

A lot of them have led lines that they've still got in some way, shape or form functioning.

And it's going to just be an expensive infrastructure project.

But it's an important one because we've seen twice now in Michigan what a public health crisis it can turn into if you don't, you know, get on top of it early.

As we think about public health and the health and safety of children, more specifically, one of the stories in the headlines this year certainly was the parents of the teen shooter at Michigan's Oxford High School becoming the first in the U.S. to be prosecuted with a ten year sentence for not and making a gun inaccessible or intervening in some way with their son.

School safety is, of course, a key issue across the country, including in Michigan.

Are there additional steps that you would recommend the legislature take?

I think we've started taking some good steps In the last year, we passed safe storage laws, mandatory background checks and red flag laws, all of which we've already heard from law enforcement have been used to save lives in different situations and circumstances.

We've put about another 125 million into school safety funding.

Just recently in a supplemental we passed, along with some ongoing funding into school safety.

We're trying to do all we can to make schools safer, but a lot of this is comes down to, you know, it's very easy to get guns in this country, which makes it a challenge in general to keep, you know, keep people safe.

If somebody wants to get a gun.

A lot of ways for them to do it.

And that's that's a challenge, to say the least.

But also with a mental health crisis, you know, we don't fund mental health services.

A lot of health insurance doesn't cover mental health or they'll cover two or three visits.

So they get to figure out exactly what's going on with you.

But then you don't get the following appointments where they could actually help you work through it.

We don't have school counselors in schools.

The ratios are through the roof.

The kids can't get individualized attention when they need it.

So I think one of the things we can do is make bigger investments in mental health across the board and require that it's covered by insurance, as they like to say.

Recently, a health health care shouldn't stop at the neck all the way.

So I think those are some steps we can take to help continue to try to address some of the underlying causes here.

But we've got to, I think, have a maybe a national conversation in a more serious way about how easy it is to get access to firearms, because at the end of the day, you know, if you have a mental health crisis and you can get a gun too easily, we're just making it too easy, you know.

Now, Michigan is one of just two states in which the legislature and governor's office aren't subject to the open records laws that give citizens a right to, of course, request those documents and reports produced with taxpayer money.

What are your thoughts on moving toward more transparency and what kinds of records should remain confidential?

Yeah, I generally have a pretty strong proponent of transparency, and I think government functions better when it's more transparent and not less transparent.

And we've seen a lot of negative byproducts of the lack of transparency over time.

You know, we made some steps last year passing some transparency laws around finance and that sort of thing.

I was part of a group that was hoping we could push for a little bit more in that regard, making sure that people aren't hiding money with their spouses or children and that sort of thing.

That's a real concern, I think, for people is know, these are people taking money on the side and being able to just show openly that it's not happening goes a long way to building public trust, which I think is what a lot of this comes down to, is that the public has lost trust in their government, no matter what level you're talking about, state legislature or federal trust in governments just at an all time low.

And anything we can do to help rebuild that trust with the public by showing them that the worst things they imagine are happening aren't happening, and we should probably do.

Now, obviously, there's you know, there's some records that for various reasons, probably shouldn't be public.

Things around business deals that are in progress is a really good example of a big companies looking at siting themselves in your state.

They're probably sharing secrets that are, you know, vital to their business operation.

And if those were suddenly public, then it creates sort of a difficult position from a competitive standpoint for them.

And so I think there are some there are definitely some areas where you need to have the ability to have some temporary, at least discretion.

Right.

Some nondisclosure, that sort of thing.

But broadly speaking, if you're getting into public service, you know, your finances should be more transparent.

Our transactions in the capital email, that sort of stuff that we're that we're having on an official level is something that the public should be able to FOIA if if they need to.

I just think more transparency is better.

I think the public would actually find there's not a lot to see.

In most cases.

It's pretty boring day to day.

You know, transit transactions back and forth conversationally.

But but again, they don't know that right now.

Right.

And that's where so much of the the mistrust comes from is they just assume that there's a lot of nefarious backroom dealing going on.

And it's just it's really not the case.

Now, if you're reelected, you could be reelected to a majority, but you could be reelected to a minority status in the House.

And so I wonder what you think in terms of your goals of pushing platform issues for your party versus working in a bipartisan way on issues of importance to Michigan.

So those last few seconds we have.

What would you do in each case?

Yeah, So, you know, we have one seat majority right now.

So obviously it's tenuous whether we come back in majority or minority.

You know, I like to work on a lot of things that I consider more bipartisan economic development, energy policy, those sorts of things.

You know, we're working on a bipartisan package around nuclear energy in our office with a few Republicans.

So I think there's a lot of room to work on things like housing and economic development in a bipartisan way where there's actually both Republicans and Democrats that agree with each other and Republicans and Democrats to disagree with their own parties on some of this stuff.

And so that's that's sort of my hope is to keep working on a lot of those sorts of subjects where it doesn't really matter which party is in control.

We can kind of keep working on those things in a productive way.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

Unfortunately, we're out of time and good luck with the rest of your campaign.

Thank you very much.

want to start by asking you what motivated you to run for office and what experiences and qualities you think makes you the best candidate for district 38.

So.

Well, thank you for having me, Elizabeth.

Today, I would say number one, right to my head would be my kids are grandkids.

We have to make a better future for them.

We have to figure out how to get along on both sides of the fence.

And only when we do that will that happen.

I believe long term we have to fix that.

My qualifications are beyond most legislators in Lansing right now.

I'm a CPA.

I will be the only CPA in Lansing and the House and Senate side.

I also have a master's in tax law.

I've done business and taxes in 50 states and 33 countries.

And so I understand the country.

I understand the state of Michigan.

I understand the global impact and decisions that are made as an accountant.

Let's face it, the economics today, I understand that thoroughly and how that impacts not only individuals in their household but businesses and everything else.

So that's that's what I bring to the table.

Let me follow up on that and ask about your specific suggestions for keeping Michigan's economy growing, including the growth of small businesses.

We have to stop overregulating.

We regularly small businesses to death where they have to basically close.

I think the biggest thing that's going on right now is the tip income, the forced mandates that they're going to put on small businesses across the state are going to crush them.

And when you have a one person shop or a two person shop, those are the differences.

I know what that feels like because I was a small business.

I had many small businesses throughout my life and they've grown to a decent size where my kids are running most of everything.

My biggest, I'm going to tell you right off the bat, my biggest goal is to hit the income tax.

The state budget went from 60 to 60 billion to 83 billion in three years.

That's a $23 billion increase.

The population in the state of Michigan has gone down during that period.

The average income level in the state of Michigan is one of the worst in the country as far as the state is concerned.

It also has gone down.

We have to figure out how to put more money in the pockets of the people, period.

That is really saying, hey, A, as a business, if I raised an extra $23 billion, I would have said, well, we've got to give that back to the customers.

And those customers are our taxpayers.

I think they're starving for money.

It has been a bipartisan thing When I hit the doors, everybody wants it.

And so I think we have to address the income tax, get rid of it.

If not, get rid of it, reduce it significantly so we can put a lot more money back into the pockets so that you're sort of day one top issue that you'd want to work on right away.

Well, kind of one of the top ones, I think, which is easy when you're talking about a 60 or $83 billion budget.

One of the things that happened within the last this year is they eliminated $300 million that went to mental health and security for the school systems that should be reinstated on January 2nd.

Everybody believes that there's a mental health problem not only in the state of Michigan, but nationally.

I also have a very passionate background with kids.

I want to do whatever I can to help kids.

And because of that, Benton Harbor will know this very well.

I have been very involved in the Boys and Girls Club for a long time.

And because if I could save or help a child at any point, I want to do that.

This mental health and security thing for the school system has to be number one priority, has to be back in.

And of course, that's going to be bipartisan.

And how in the world they got rid of it?

I have no idea.

So let me ask you about that, because earlier this year, as you know, the parents of the teen shooter at Michigan's Oxford High School who killed four people, injured another seven were actually held culpable for letting him access a gun and for not intervening earlier in what the judicial system decided was a act of negligence on the part of the parents.

So school safety, as you said, is a very important issue.

What kind of policies would you like to enact in the legislature to help with that issue?

I think, you know, we just hit it and we'll go into a deeper, I think, mental health has to be addressed.

It has to be addressed like a common cold.

We have to attack it at the kindergarten, first grade level.

We know factually now as a CPA and with a master's in science and taxation and all the degrees and everything else that I have, I know numbers and I know money.

It's over 85% of the inmates in the jails in Michigan have had a mental health problem when they were a child.

Why are we not addressing the mental health problems as a child?

I went ballistic when I found out that they got rid of the $300,000,300 million.

I'm a numbers game.

That's a kind of pop.

And then $83 billion budget.

That just doesn't make sense.

The only thing I could explain when you get rid of 300 million for mental health and security for school systems is you want more people in the jails later out.

I don't know if we want more people in the jails, but that's how they get there.

We've got to address the mental health problems at an early age, which is kindergarten, first grade, and we got to get those service workers there.

So that's my opinion.

So put the money into mental health instead of in incarceration.

yeah, absolutely.

And that saves you a lot more money, right?

That's right.

So Benton Harbor, you mentioned Benton Harbor.

That is an area that's faced a number of severe public health issues like lead contamination in the drinking water.

What actions would you support to protect areas like that, provide safe, clean water for all Michigan residents and protect our Great Lakes?

I've done business, like I said, in 50 states.

Okay.

We know and I know I think we have some of the best water not only in this country but in the world.

We have to protect our water everywhere, right?

All the lakes.

And I'm I've lived on the lake.

I've lived I understand Lake Michigan.

I understand the problems that it faces all the time over so many decades.

Right.

They get the erosion, then it goes away.

Then the erosion comes back in.

And it's a cycle.

The bottom line is we need to protect that.

When you get into the contamination of water, we need clean water.

That's a major problem.

And it's across the state.

It's not just in one community or the other.

You know, back I've done a lot of real estate.

My my life.

You know, when they built buildings back in the sixties and seventies, they made a lot of things out of lead pipes.

Lead pipes corroded.

They got to a certain point.

Those are the things we're trying to correct.

Right.

And so we want cleaner and better drinking water.

We have the best water, in my opinion, in the country.

So let's figure out how to protect it.

So it sounds like you're saying when it comes to regulations, you're not saying let's get rid of most regulations or let's put on more regulations that it really depends on the particular issue.

There may be overregulation of business, but perhaps in a few cases, either under regulation or under enforcement in terms of this clean water.

Absolutely.

I'm going to tell you this.

Nobody's doing this.

My opponent has not is not a bipartisan person.

Okay.

As a business owner, what are you going to do about something like that?

You want somebody who is on the environmental side and then you want somebody on the business side coming into a meeting room with multiple people on both sides saying, what is the best way to handle this today, five years and ten years as a business person, when we make decisions, we say, hey, what is the impact of this decision today?

And in five years and ten years?

What's happening today, by the way, in my opinion, we got politicians in politics for their own service.

We got to get back to the 1700s when people got into service, people, you know, they were working their butts off running businesses, and then they were creating this great country, Right?

People get out, got away from serving people and they're serving themselves.

We have to get into a room and we have to get people on opposite sides.

And only when that will happen will you get a better solution for the people of this state.

And so my opinion is that's what you do and I don't care how hard it is, but I have already proven that because I have co-owned Benton Harbor, I've co-owns Benton Charter Township, I've come to Covered, I've co-owned Saugatuck and Douglas, and those are the Democrat areas of my district.

And I felt very comfortable in there because guess what?

I was just overwhelmed by the fact that everybody, for the most part, was civil.

Now, once in a while, you're going to get the crazies on both sides, by the way.

I'm going to get them on the right side.

I'm going to get them on the left side because they're going to scream at me for whatever reason I want to.

I had a woman the other day.

She actually called me at one in the morning because my phone number is available.

One in the morning.

She calls me and I pick it up and my wife goes, Why are you doing this?

Well, I got up.

I was getting a glass of orange juice.

I said, Hey, I'll answer this lady screamed at me for 10 minutes.

I said, Hey, after you ask me five questions, you've been screaming at me for 10 minutes.

I'm going to go back to bed.

I do have your number and I know who you are.

Honestly, I probably will never talk to you again because I honestly don't like getting screamed at by the left or the right because that doesn't do any good for anybody else, especially me.

So you're open for the discussion, but let's have it civilly.

Yes.

Now, Michigan is one of the two is one of just ten states that has a full time legislature.

Some people have argued that Michigan should move to a part time legislature.

What is your thought on that full time with term limits as you have now or part time or all politics should have term?

You know, George Washington started it right as the first president.

He said, hey, I've only got two terms.

I'm done.

We need to give somebody else another chance in order to have a political system that works, you have to have term limits across the board.

That's my opinion.

Secondly, part time, I'm not in this for the money or the job.

I'm in it to for the people.

And we need more politicians and more people who are in to do civil work service for people.

Therefore, if that's the case, I want to be people ask me that question.

I'm like, I'm not into politics as a career.

My opponent has clearly indicated that he is.

I'm that I've had a career and I've been very successful at it.

And so what I want to do is bring to the table, what do you supposed to do as a politician?

And I pick the biggest piece that I could do where I could actually reach to people individually and talk to them individually to understand their issues.

I think that's what a service person needs to do.

So I think it should be short term.

If you wanted to pay me nothing to do this job, I would do it.

Now.

I know a lot of people can't do it for nothing.

I got it.

I understand that.

But I think part time we should.

Honestly, with today's technology, I think we could possibly be a legislator at 100% of the time at home.

We don't need to be in Lansing.

Tell me when I need to vote and I'll do it.

You know, I want to be in the district as much as possible, talking to the people in my district to understand their problems and the issues.

I have been told throughout my district and our district that I am the person that shows up.

I will show up.

I will talk to people on both sides of the fence all the time and listen to what they have to say.

And so I think that's my job.

And so I want to be in my district more.

I mean, so.

Well, unfortunately, we're out of time.

Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Kevin White Ford.

And good luck with the rest of your campaign.

Thank you very much for having me.

That's all the time we have for this week's Politically speaking.

I want to thank our guests.

District 38, State Representative Joey Andrews and District 38 candidate Kevin Whiteford for joining us today and for sharing their perspectives.

I'm Elizabeth Bennett, reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

See you next time.

This WNIT Local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.