Last month, during the Lame Duck Session of Michigan s legislature, there was a move to repeal this child protection law. Fortunately, MEC action in the Capitol halted the attempted repeal. MEC succeeded in this case because a reasonable legislator listened to our reasoned discussion of the act s merits. This was not a big battle but an affirmation nevertheless of the importance of the work MEC does monitoring and lobbying in the Capitol. Without MEC, this hazardous substance ban would have been history.
Some victories come harder.
As reported in an earlier edition of this publication, MEC spent three years and thousands of hours working on electric utility deregulation legislation. Understandably, we were disappointed when powerful interests primarily Detroit Edison and Consumers persuaded the governor and legislative majority to reject a number of our proposed clean air protections which other states had incorporated into deregulation legalization. But MEC did not come up empty on this work. Not all our environmental battles are fought in the Capitol, however. After five years of work we counted our land use victories in counties and townships throughout the state.