Michigan facts guide

Take a drive along Michigan’s rural roads and you will encounter treasures we know as Pure Michigan. But rural Michigan holds other, often hidden, stories… Poverty, uneven medical care and lack of high-speed Internet access. Young adults continue to leave rural communities for jobs elsewhere.

In 2010, an estimated 1.2 million Michigan residents had no health insurance. By 2016, that fell to approximately 527,000. But, as of this writing in early 2018, the future of health care is unclear.

For more than a quarter century, policy makers have tinkered with Michigan’s social safety net. Whether reforms have improved the state’s welfare system remains a matter of ongoing debate.

Michigan’s lakes and rivers face a wave of challenges. At the same time, the state continues to grapple with new threats to drinking water in communities besides Flint.

Debates about Michigan land resources — and how best to use them — are as old as Michigan itself.

As it enters its second decade, the Pure Michigan campaign has become a flashpoint for critics who say its success is evaluated based on flawed assumptions about its return on investment.

We see the problem every time we drive into a pothole or read headlines about sinkholes, broken water mains and flooded freeways. Yet state leaders haven’t yet done much.

Michigan is a tale of two kinds of cities. Some have healthy and diverse economies. Others face deep and long-term financial crisis and depressed local economies. And Detroit, the state’s flagship city, is a complex chowder of economic revival downtown and deeply troubled neighborhoods on the periphery.

It’s a question fundamental to democracy in Michigan: How open and accountable is our state government? On a variety of fronts, the answers are troubling.

State government is a huge operation with responsibilities (and expenses) in every corner of Michigan. Paying for it all in a balanced state budget every year is one of the first and most important constitutional responsibilities of Michigan’s governor and 148 state legislators.

Michigan voters may decide as many as eight ballot measures in November 2018, from legalizing recreational marijuana to changing the way Michigan politicians are elected.

All statistics cited throughout this guide were professionally researched by the nonpartisan staffs at Public Sector Consultants, the Center for Michigan and Bridge Magazine