MARQUETTE – Responding to scattered teacher protests in Marquette, Escanaba and the Lower Peninsula this week, Gov. Rick Snyder Friday defended his decision to appeal a court order to return $550 million to teachers that was collected to fund retiree health care.

The Mining Journal held a 20-minute interview with Snyder Friday covering the economy, education funding, transparency, energy and the environment at the end of his week-long lap around the Upper Peninsula.

The Court of Appeals in June found a 2010 law that deducted 3 percent from the paychecks of school employees to fund the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System was unconstitutional.

Attorney General Bill Schuette has declined to provide counsel for the governor’s appeal.

“Well again, (Schuette) has to make his own decisions,” Snyder said Friday. “The way I view it is, this was actually a law signed into law by my predecesor, this isn’t a law that I put in place. I’m the governor of Michigan and one of the responsibilities of being governor of the state of Michigan is you enforce the laws of the state of Michigan. So I view it as just part of my responsibility to say, ‘There’s a law on the books that has a legal question,’ and the role of of the governor is not to make legal opinions.”

Snyder said lower court decisions were not unanimous, and he wants to take the issue to the Michigan Supreme Court for a final decision.

“And I’ll follow whatever they come up with,” he said.

Economy

Snyder said he is most proud of his work on Michigan’s economy, which has seen a resurgence evidenced by 475,000 new private sector jobs since he took office in 2011.

According to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, private sector jobs have grown by about 16 percent – as compared to about 13 percent nationally – since February 2010, the national low point for employment after the Great Recession.

Manufacturing, construction and business and professional services each made up almost one-third of the jobs added, according to the report.

“And again, government doesn’t create those jobs, we help create an environment for economic success, and it’s working well,” Snyder said.

Snyder said he eliminated the Michigan Business Tax, because it was fundamentally unfair and “the dumbest tax in the country.”

“So we got rid of that dumb tax and replaced it with a flat 6 percent corporate income tax,” Snyder said. “So it’s not like they’re getting out of paying (the) tax, it was just made simple, fair and efficient.”

Snyder said his new commissions on infrastructure and education will build a roadmap for the state for the next three to five decades.

Energy

Snyder said he is also proud of the plan announced Thursday by Cliffs Natural Resources and WEC Energy Group to build two new natural gas-fueled electric generating facilities to replace the Presque Isle Power Plant. The plants, necessary to the viability of the U.P. power grid, will be operational by 2020, but their locations have not been decided.

“That’s the thing that was my greatest concern, and had been an issue of concern for a long time and extra cost to the Upper Peninsula,” Snyder said. “So this is a chance to get more reliable, affordable power.”

Snyder said natural gas is far superior to coal in terms of sustainability. He dismissed potential concerns about long-term financial or environmental costs of the extractive practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

“To have the opportunity to go to natural gas and to move away from coal I think is a huge improvement,” Snyder said. “There’s a separate issue you can say in how you get natural gas, whether you have fracking or not. And actually within the state of Michigan, and fracking technology has evolved, but historically, we’ve had over 10,000 wells fracked in Michigan without a problem.”

Snyder said the state has commissioned the University of Michigan to study the future of fracking.

“So we don’t want to assume the past practices will work as well, but actually that’s one of those things where there have been instances where people didn’t do it right. Actually, Michigan’s a pretty good case to say it’s been done well and in an environmentally smart way, so I think the natural gas answer is a very good one,” he said.

Environment

Snyder said he believes his new appointee to head up the Department of Environmental Quality, Heidi Grether, a former oil and gas industry lobbyist and executive, will do a “good job protecting the environment.”

The Detroit Free Press called the choice a “sick joke” and “astoundingly tone-deaf,” in a July editorial, citing concerns about an aging oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, pollution and public health in the wake of the Flint water crisis.

Grether replaced interim director Keith Creagh on Aug. 1, following the resignation of Dan Wyant in December 2015 after his department was found responsible for ignoring elevated lead levels in Flint’s drinking water.

“(Grether) wasn’t representing (BP) in causing the (Gulf oil) spill to happen,” Snyder said. “She was representing (BP) in the recovery process and understanding the consequences of having those problems and how best to respond to them.”

Snyder said she was also deputy director of the Michigan Agency for Energy and worked in the Michigan Legislature.

“I think she’s got a good background,” Snyder said.

School funding

Snyder said there have been no cuts to education, only investments.

Kurt Weiss, public information officer for the Department of Technology, Management and Budget, said in an email that the governor’s first budget in 2012 did make cuts, but that since 2011, K-12 state appropriations have increased by $1.4 billion.

Weiss said the upcoming 2017 budget includes $60 to $120 in per pupil increases and more than $1 billion for the school employee retirement system.

Snyder said funding inequities date back 20 years to the implementation of Proposal A, which created the per-pupil funding model.

“So there’s a differential between school districts, so in the years that I’ve been governor, what we’ve been trying to do is actually we’ve been giving additional funding to the ones that are on the lower end of the spectrum,” Snyder said. “So the ones at the minimal level are getting twice as much per-pupil increase as the ones that are at the higher level, so we’ve been trying to close that gap. The challenge was, that gap was very large.”

College tuition

In June, the Northern Michigan University Board of Trustees raised tuition again to meet the state’s tuition restraint cap of 4.2 percent for the school year that starts Monday.

Despite declining enrollment and a significant budget deficit, the board opted not to bust the tuition cap due to the risk unspecified fiscal penalties.

Trustees complained the cap has caused NMU to fall far behind other universities in funding, violating the constitutional autonomy of the university and interfering with the board’s fiduciary responsibilities.

“Twenty years ago, two-thirds of our funding came from the state; in 2005, half of it; now one-third,” said Trustee Steve Mitchell at the June meeting. “Parents look at us and say, … ‘Why do you guys constantly increase tuition?’ Well, we have to do it, because the state has aggregated its responsibility to higher education by continually lowering the amount of money that we receive.”

Snyder said his administration did make one cut to higher education in 2011 due to a huge deficit.

“Beyond that, I’ve been trying to restore that funding,” Snyder said.

Snyder said he worked out the tuition cap with the Legislature at two times the rate of inflation.

“There’s nothing to say that they can’t make their state tuition whatever they want,” Snyder said. “There’s consequences if they go more than twice as much as inflation, which seemed like a reasonable number, given that two times is pretty good. … The real issue here is when you use percentages, if you’re at the lower dollar amount, it is a lower dollar increase, so what you find is the universities at the higher end don’t want to see it change. The universities at the lower end would like to see it more based on dollars.”

Snyder said if trustees have improvements in the formula, to bring them forward.

“Continuous improvement,” he said.

Transparency

Michigan was ranked last in a national study of state ethics and transparency, released in November 2015 by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, two nonprofit organizations that promote government transparency.

The study, called the State Integrity Investigation, based the findings on access to public records and information, political finance, electoral oversight and accountability. The investigation does not measure corruption, the report states, but overall accountability and transparency.

Michigan is one of only two states where both the governor and Legislature are exempt from open records laws, and Snyder in 2013 signed changes to campaign finance laws that some claim increase the influence of “dark money” on politics.

Snyder said Friday he is always open to having a discussion with the Legislature about opening up Freedom of Information Act laws to include the executive and legislative branches.

“There are pros and cons to it – it’s not a simple question, because in the executive office case, you want – what opportunity do you have for me to call on staff people to say, ‘I just want to have a discussion and bounce around ideas and do policy formation,'” Snyder said.

The Flint water crisis was a good illustration of his openness, he added.

“We actually released more emails, we’re in the hundreds of thousands,” Snyder said. “And hopefully that showed that I’m very open to giving information to people. I think people looked through those and didn’t really find anything.”

Snyder said he released all the emails, with equivocation.

“We released them all, pretty much,” he said.

He reiterated his openness to having a discussion about expanding FOIA laws.

“It’s not a yes or no. It’s like when you say that, what does that exactly mean? So that’s the discussion you need to have,” he said.

Mary Wardell can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248. Her email address is mwardell@miningjournal.net.