LANSING - The new Office of New Americans will allow the state to develop coordinated policies that could attract immigrants to the state, and becoming an EB-5 visa center could allow the state to seek out immigrants, administration officials said. Immigration was a major emphasis in Governor Rick Snyder's State of the State address. He
EAST LANSING - Rob Fowler, the chair of the Health Endowment Fund Board created with the conversion of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan into a nonprofit mutual company, said Tuesday the board would likely spend the first half of 2014 working to understand its role and would be ready to start allocating funds in
LANSING - Governor Rick Snyder announced Tuesday that he has named Jarrod Agen, a veteran of communications shops in both the government and elections, as his new communications director. Agen comes to Snyder from Empowered-U in California, where he was vice president for marketing and communications. The co-founder of Empowered, Steve Poizner, had hired Agen
LANSING - The next Legislature will come into office with some new ideas on how the state should structure and fund schools. The State Board of Education laid out a schedule to develop the policy proposals at its meeting Tuesday, with the goal of having a report completed in November 2014. While the board wants
LANSING - Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger and his colleagues said on Thursday tax relief for working residents who helped add to the state's surplus monies is a key addition to the caucus's action plan in the 2014 legislative session. Bolger (R-Marshall) said during a news conference at the Capitol that along with tax relief,
WASHINGTON DC - Maybe the fourth time will be the charm for Sen. Patrick Leahy's data privacy protections standards. Leahy (D-Vt.) reintroduced his data privacy protection bill to Congress on Wednesday, for the fourth time since 2005. The Personal Data Privacy and Security Act would create a national standard for how businesses would have to
IONIA - The Michigan Manufacturers Association announced to support the introduction of a bill package aimed at encouraging the statewide hiring of parolees. MMA was joined in the press conference by State Representative Joe Haveman (R-Holland), State Representative Klint Kesto (R-Commerce Township), State Representative Lisa Posthumus Lyons (R-Alto), State Representative Harvey Santana (D-Detroit), State Representative
LANSING - Governor Rick Snyder told reporters Tuesday the revenue estimates have not been released yet and it is too soon to determine if an income tax rollback would be a responsible answer to possible surplus funds. "Let's get the facts first and then let's make sure we're being fiscally responsible for the long term,"
LANSING - The year 2013 started quietly for the 97th Legislature as is usually the case in the first year of a new legislative term, but quickly ramped up into another year of significant changes in Michigan law. Gongwer reviewed the 277 public acts so far in 2013. There is one bill the Legislature must
LANSING - The Michigan Public Service Commission has not yet determined if it will review the activities of certain utilities as crews continue to work on power outages in the Lansing region after the past weekend's ice storm, the commission's executive director said Thursday. After major outages, the commission has occasionally reviewed utilities in affected