Land O Links
FROM LAKE TO HERE: Waukesha, Wis., wants to draw its city water supply from Lake Michigan under the provisions of a 2008 compact of Great Lakes states. (courtesy photo/used under Creative Commons license)*Waukesha, Wis., located about 15 miles west of Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan shoreline, wants to draw its water from the Great Lakes because its old supply is tainted with radium:
“The city is the first municipality in the United States located entirely outside the Great Lakes basin to request a diversion of water under terms of a 2008 Great Lakes protection compact.”
*The Legislature is approaching its summer break and appears to be in no mood to make any major changes to the state’s transportation funding scheme. This page gives a quick overview of the results of Michigan’s current transportation policies and funding.
*It’s tough at the top. A collection of activists in the Tea Party political movement sent a letter to Gov. Rick Snyder conveying their opposition to expanding the Medicaid health program.
They included a warning: “It is with careful consideration that we decide on a course of action that is, in our view, politically problematic, but nonetheless a forthright answer to a governor who will not listen to his base: Conservatives should not help this governor get re-elected.”
*More evidence for the argument that going to college is pretty much in everyone’s interest:
“We often talk about college dropouts as if they just wasted money going to college. They took out all those loans and now they’re no better off, economically or professionally, than if they’d just stopped at high school, because they have no college degree. That’s not really true. According to a recent study performed by the Hamilton Project, college dropouts still earn more than mere high school graduates.”
*Brewing scandal in the Buckeye State? Ohio Gov. John Kasich and the Legislature teamed up two years ago to put a state economic development agency in charge of selling liquor wholesale. The agency, JobsOhio, gets to use the resulting profits to do its work.
Enter the state’s auditor, who wanted to see how the money was being used. But Kasich and the Legislature teamed up again to pass a law to block a public audit of the funds, allowing only a private audit.
“Outside experts say the amount of effort taken by Kasich and Republican legislative leaders to block the JobsOhio funds from being audited is ‘unusual.’”
The most recent state audit of Michigan’s economic development agency, MEDC, can be found here.
*Matt Yglesias touts the common European method of “proof of payment” on public buses and the like to advance a singularly American goal: speedier travel.
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