Greek letters and word games: Transparency is a foreign language in Michigan
It's a small club in Lansing, and the 10 million people of Michigan aren't in it
Transparency is a foreign language in Lansing. Sometimes literally.
Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that when a Michigan environmental consultant warned of a Flint-style public health crisis in Benton Harbor in September 2021, he wrote his concerns in Greek letters.
Consultant Andy Leavitt’s transliteration of Roman to Greek letters in emails came to light in a federal lawsuit against Benton Harbor, which was filed in June. Per the lawsuit:
The top of Leavitt’s email contains three sentences rendered in Greek alphabet font (i.e., each English letter replaced with its Greek-alphabet counterpart), which appears to be calculated to conceal the statements. Decoding the text (i.e., by changing the font to a standard English font) reveals that the consultant prefaced his grave concerns about the water crises with a reference back to his prior warnings and the State and City Defendants’ failure to learn from the Flint tragedy: “Hot off the presses. As I warned there are some major red flags. It seems like we are back at square one having not learned from Flint.”
Administration officials told MIRS news service there was nothing to see here. Leavitt’s Greek letters were not an attempt to evade the public eye, they explained, but rather a coding glitch.
That excuse might be more believable — who among us has not had a sensitive email appear in Greek? — if opacity weren’t the norm in Lansing.
As Mike Wilkinson noted in Bridge, the Michigan Constitution bans budget earmarks for “local or private purposes,” absent a two-thirds vote of lawmakers in favor.
Rather than do the politicking necessary to gain two-thirds support — which might require improving on the 90/10 split on earmarks in favor of the current legislative majority party — lawmakers use word games to skirt Michigan’s supreme law. Because both parties benefit from this arrangement, depending on who holds power, nobody challenges it.
Wilkinson wrote:
Lawmakers for years have been allowed to steer billions of dollars to pet projects by using vague language to skirt the state constitution while keeping the ultimate beneficiary of taxpayer money secret from the public. By excluding the exact recipients of the grant in bill language, lawmakers only needed a simple majority to approve pork spending on local skilled trades programs, museums, parks, private companies, and even a cricket field in Troy and members-only swimming pool in Ann Arbor.
Sometimes, Wilkinson reported, even state officials can’t tell the recipient of an earmark from reading the language.
Wilkinson sought the counsel of James Hohman, the Mackinac Center’s director of fiscal policy.
“I think they are already running afoul of the Constitution,” Hohman said.
The 10 million people of Michigan elect 150 people we send to Lansing to represent our interests: 110 House members, 38 senators, a governor and a lieutenant governor.
Too often our 150 elected officials in Lansing operate like they’re running a social club, not a state. If it’s good for the club, it’s good, whether that requires Greek letters or word games.
Lansing is broken. Any candidate for state office should admit this and vow to improve on this dynamic.
Next summer, when a candidate for office comes to your door, ask what they think about earmarks and the FOIA law in Michigan.
Then listen. Report back what you hear.