The table was set in the Michigan legislature.

The political environment had shifted from headwinds to tailwinds for environmental and justice advocates as for the first time in forty years, Democrats had a political trifecta. The control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature. 

While majorities were slim, they didn’t need a Republican vote to send progressive environmental bills to the desk of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for signature. Bills that had been in the making for years if not decades.

But the time for action was short as on January 1, Republicans, who would likely be less sympathetic to some of the Dems’ legislative goals, would be back in control of the House. 

Then on Thursday, it all went up in smoke.

Republican legislators and a key Democrat abandoned the legislature in protest of the process. Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) threatened legal action against the legislators unless they returned to work. Then, House Speaker Joe Tate (D) abruptly adjourned the lame duck session for the balance of the year – effectively killing any pending legislation.

“Our politicians talk about pure Michigan but it’s pure rhetoric,” veteran policy expert Dave Dempsey said to Planet Detroit about the legislative failure. 

Bills not passed do not carry over to the 2025 session, and will have to be reintroduced to a GOP-majority Michigan Legislature, where they would require bi-partisan support to move forward. 

Michigan legislature ‘fail’

To Christy McGillivray, legislative and political director of the Sierra Club Michigan Chapter, the lame duck meltdown is symptomatic of a larger system issue in the Michigan capitol.

“Lansing has been a revolving door between lobbyists and legislators for decades now, and it shows,” she told Planet Detroit. “And that’s not a personal attack against anyone in office right now. It’s an assessment of the outcomes of the incentives that are baked into a really messed up structure.”

Years of work to position bills for passage on septic tanks, drinking water affordability and more are left undone as the house adjourned early. A bill that made it to the Senate to give tax incentives for e bikes never got a vote.

The backdrop is that the lost environmental protections resulting from Michigan’s legislative failure came at an inopportune time  “as state political gridlock and federal environmental rollbacks loom large in 2025 and beyond,” Michiga Environmental Council Spokesperson Beau Brockett told Planet Detroit. 

In a post to Instagram, MEC blamed Democrats Karen Whitsett (D-Detroit), Peter Herzberg (D-Westland) and House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit) for the failure. 

Whitsett abstained from House votes, aligning with Republicans over concerns about neglecting Black community priorities, while Herzberg withheld support for a water affordability package.

“They have squandered the moment for corporate influence and personal grievance. They have let their colleagues and the Great Lakes State down.”

Here are some of the bills that died in the 2024 lame duck session:

Septic codes

Michigan is the only state that does not have a statewide set of regulations for septic tanks. This leaves it to local governments who may have various views on their regulation which can lead to inconsistencies and increased threats to groundwater. 

The proposed bills would have set statewide standards for construction, maintenance and inspections of septic tanks that would minimize the chance of failures.

Those bills had been “thoroughly negotiated,” according to Michigan Environmental Council’s (MEC) spokesperson Beau Brockett.

The work by environmental groups to enact septic codes began in earnest as far back as 2003, environmental policy expert Dave Dempsey told Planet Detroit in an email exchange. 

“This is as close as we’ve gotten to legislation and maybe as close as we will get for a long time,” said Dempsey, a senior adviser to the nonprofit For Love of Water. 

Everyone agrees on the need to take action on septic codes but it doesn’t happen, Dempsey said. “The result is continued contamination of our waters and endangerment of private drinking water wells.” 

“It’s an embarrassment that Michigan will remain the only state in the union without a statewide sanitary code,” Dempsey said. 

Drinking water affordability

It’s approaching 10 years since state Sen. Stephanie Chang (D) introduced affordable drinking water legislation as a new representative in Michigan’s 6th district. 

Since, she has worked to educate colleagues on the affordability issue, demonstrated that it’s a statewide problem affecting both urban and rural areas and developed bi-partisan support for legislation. 

In a statement to Planet Detroit following the adjournment of the current House session, Chang praised the various entities who worked on the bills, then moved on to the legislature in 2025.

“What I know is this – more and more Michiganders are facing unaffordable, rising water rates, and the 103rd Michigan legislature must act with urgency. Otherwise, the families across our state struggling to make ends meet will go further into crisis,” Chang said.

Chang declined to comment on next legislative steps for affordability bills. 

Detroit’s Monica Lewis-Patrick, President & CEO of the advocacy group We the People of Detroit, has been in the forefront of the campaign for affordability legislation. She told Planet Detroit that without it, people “will continue to face shutoffs, unaffordable bills and the stress of uncertainty to this natural resource.”

Community solar

Bipartisan legislation to allow residents to subscribe to offsite solar arrays owned by third parties and receive utility bill credits for the energy produced also died in the House this week. 

Known as “community solar,” the bills’ advocates say it’s a crucial step for enabling low- and moderate income households to benefit from clean energy while saving money. Industry groups also say it would give clean energy companies a boost. Community solar subscribers save an average of 10% on their utility bills. 

While the bills enjoyed strong bipartisan support – Justin Carpenter, director of policy at the nonprofit Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council, told Planet Detroit that many “libertarian-minded Republicans” were on board with the legislation, it has faced strong opposition from utilities who see it as a threat to their business model.

In a letter signed by utilities, business groups and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, utilities argued that the legislation is “unnecessary and impractical.”

Part 31

A bill to amend Michigan’s Part 31 rule, which prohibits the state’s environmental agency from rulemaking to enforce regulations, is now defunct.

It had the support of the Department of Environment Great Lakes & Energy (EGLE). 

“EGLE supported proposed Part 31 legislation,” spokesperson Hugh McDiarmid told Planet Detroit. McDiarmid said that EGLE Director Phil Roos had engaged legislators on the issues in the past two weeks, though he would not reveal the substance of the discussions. 

The bill would have given the agency “clear authority to use the best science to protect public health,”  McGillivray told Planet Detroit. “That means that we are really vulnerable when it comes to the rollbacks and attacks that are going to be coming from the federal government, and we know they will come

The bills’ failure follows a Supreme Court decision that strips federal regulatory agencies of their rulemaking powers. The Supreme Court’s decision in Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce overturned the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws. 

This shift will make it harder for agencies like the Environmetal Protection Agency to implement environmental regulations, as courts must now independently assess whether agencies acted within their statutory authority. 

“Polluter pay”

While it may not have been a return to true “polluter pay” as it briefly existed in Michigan in the early 1990s, the Michigan Senate passed pollution clean up legislation last week that set up a vote on the issue in the House before the second chamber went into meltdown this week. 

The legislation would have required greater transparency around polluted sites, updated cleanup criteria as new risks were discovered, made it easier for the state and individuals to sue over impacts from pollutants like PFAS and potentially increased the amount of contaminated sites cleaned up.

Business groups were adamantly opposed to stricter cleanup rules, but the legislation could have been extremely popular. A 2023 poll from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling found that 92% of respondents favored reinstating a polluter pay law and 95% supported having corporations pay for cleanups rather than taxpayers.

Dempsey said the legislation would mean “more responsibilities for owners of contaminated property to control the source of contamination before it spreads beyond their property and endangers public health, and more transparency in how the department handles contaminated sites.” 

“Both of these ought to result in more protective cleanups,” he said.

This could have helped Michigan get a handle on the estimated 24,000 contaminated sites in the state, around 14,000 of which are ‘orphaned sites’ where no responsible party has been identified.

State Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), who championed the legislation along with State Rep. Jason Morgan (D-Ann Arbor), was hopeful disclosure rules contained in the legislation would prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill when pollution is found to be migrating off a site after the property owner has left.

Morgan had said that passing the pollution clean up legislation would 

Was one of the most significant things the Democrats could do during the entire two years of their trifecta. 

Momnibus

The MI Momnibus bill package, a comprehensive set of measures aimed at addressing racial inequities in maternal healthcare, was among the bills left behind when the Michigan House recessed for the year.

 The bipartisan legislation, which includes Senate Bills 818-823, 825, and House Bill 5826, had cleared the Senate and proposed expanding access to midwives and doulas, improving patient protections, addressing systemic racism and supporting community-driven programs. 

“Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women,” said State Senator Erika Geiss (D-Taylor), one of the bill sponsors.

However, a related bill package (House Bills 5166, 5167, 5168, 5169, 5170, 5171, 5172 and 5173)  to improve maternal mortality rates in Michigan was one of the few to pass out of the Senate before adjournment and is headed to Gov. Whitmer’s desk.

This legislation would codify existing programs and implement new measures to support maternal health. Key provisions include requiring the state to establish a perinatal quality collaborative, mandating insurance coverage for blood pressure monitors for pregnant or postpartum women and expanding mental health screenings during child wellness checkups.

Additional reforms in the package would rank perinatal facilities by level of care, from basic to specialty, and require hospitals to provide informational documents to help parents enroll newborns in insurance. 

While most of the package passed with bipartisan support, the perinatal facility ranking bill divided lawmakers along party lines.

Hazardous waste

The Michigan House also failed to vote on hazardous waste bills that might have addressed concerns about shipments of radioactive and toxic waste to sites that are largely concentrated in Wayne County. 

The legislation, sponsored by State Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D-Trenton), would have raised tipping fees for liquid hazardous waste and placed a five-year moratorium on new hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities and site expansions.

The bills were passed by the Senate after the public learned that very low-level radioactive waste was being sent to a Van Buren Township landfill from several Manhattan Project-era sites. The same landfill had received contaminated soil from the East Palestine rail disaster in 2023. 

Meanwhile, communities like Romulus and Detroit have been dealing with ongoing public safety and odor issues from hazardous waste sites.

Six of the state’s eight hazardous waste facilities that take off-site material are located in Wayne County. And 65% of those living within a three-mile radius of Michigan’s commercial hazardous waste facilities are people of color, according to the Sierra Club. However, they only make up 25% of the state’s population. 

Camilleri said during a meeting of the Michigan Senate Committee on Energy and Environment that the legislation was especially important because “a round of deregulation is coming” with the Trump administration.

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