This is an excerpt from a column I wrote on Friday for Dome Magazine about the successful formula used by the Michigan Taxpayer’s Alliance to defeat local and regional millages.
By Chad Selweski
Tax proposals presented by municipal and school officials typically enjoy a built-in advantage as government employees, their friends and family, and their labor unions present a united front in arguing that additional revenue is needed to prevent dire cuts in public services.
Yet, a somewhat rag-tag anti-tax group based in Macomb County is on a “winning streak,” defeating four local and regional millage proposals while faced with David vs. Goliath scenarios.
The Michigan Taxpayers Alliance (MTA) played the leading role in striking down three recent tax plans in Macomb plus the southeast Michigan Regional Transit Authority millage in November 2016, which would have spent billions of dollars on mass transit expansion across Metro Detroit.
The MTA’s most recent surprise victory came earlier this month in the Nov. 7 local elections when the group defeated a 3-mill hike for the police/fire Public Safety Department in Fraser, a Macomb County city, after the alliance exposed a huge amount of red ink in health care benefits for city retirees, plus bloated salaries for current employees.
Though led by former Republican legislator Leon Drolet, a Democratic campaign consultant, Joe DiSano, expressed admiration for the anti-tax alliance’s campaign against the Fraser tax hike proposal.
“No Michigan city has handled its budget and legacy costs as ineptly as Fraser,” DiSano said in post-election messages on Facebook and Twitter. “… It was a pleasure watching Leon Drolet pick them apart.”
A former state House member who now serves as a Macomb County commissioner, Drolet spends part of his time scrutinizing budgets and financial data of cities, townships and school districts — and irritating mayors, township supervisors, and school superintendents in the process.
In addition to the defeat of the regional transit tax and the Fraser millage, the alliance shot down a countywide Macomb school millage in 2011 and a tax-linked bond proposal last May in Chippewa Valley, one of Michigan’s largest school districts.
The MTA can claim credit for those four defeats because in each case they were virtually the only opposing force taking on those ballot proposals. In neighboring eastern Oakland County, where anti-tax activity is sparse, four of five millages on this month’s Nov. 7 ballot passed.
In fact, the MTA’s impact on millage elections has prompted some of Macomb’s local officials to send intermediaries to Drolet’s door, seeking to make the case in private that their township or school district has engaged in responsible budgetary reforms that justify future millages or renewals.
Continue reading here.
