by Tim Skubick
July 10, 2009

If it weren’t for bad luck, this current governor would have no luck at all.

Jennifer Granholm has now presided over the longest recession in Michigan history, longest since the Great Depression.

She has presided over more budget cuts than any other governor, with still more in the pipeline.

Her track record of lost employment will never be broken.

And then there’s the corrections department.

While she can’t control the economy, she does have some influence over what happens in the prison system, and in recent days the record stinks.

Item: 62 sex offenders were erroneously released.

Item: A mentally ill inmate was erroneously released.

Item: A former inmate on parole was targeted to be arrested, but before the corrections folks got to him, William Dunlap got to his girl friend. He allegedly killed her with a sledgehammer and an ice pick. A prison spokesperson suggested, “In many of these cases, after the fact, you wonder if you could have done something different.”

No, really.

Add to all this the Granholm administration’s forced march to parole 3,400 inmates who have served their minimum sentences.

Republicans are lobbing one political haymaker after another at the governor, suggesting the public is unsafe, and the next shoe to drop will be GOP attempts to link Lt. Gov. John Cherry to all this as well. Remember, he’s running for Granholm’s job next year.

In a moment of extreme candor about a month ago, Corrections Director Patricia Caruso stated the obvious: running the prison department is a “ticking time bomb.”

Unfortunately for Ms. Caruso, the ticking is getting pretty loud.

House GOP leader Kevin Elsenheimer is demanding that the “early prison release program” be halted. He labeled the recent rash of screw-ups an “appalling breach of security and the public trust.”

No, really.

The governor’s office, in a rather feeble attempt at a retort, reminded the GOP leader that this was not an early release program. It was a distinction without a difference that appeased no one.

Then, in another statement of the obvious, the governor’s office noted that the governor, in reference to the 62 sex offenders, “is demanding that safeguards be put in place to prevent this from occurring again.”

No, really.

Even though the department rounded up these folks before they did any harm, the fact that it happened can’t be erased.

Caruso is in sort of a catch-22. She and the governor will take some hits for reducing the prison headcount to save money. But even if the state built more prisons and handed the bill to the taxpayers, eventually some of those crooks would get out and commit another crime.

“That is an absolute guarantee. No one can prevent a horrendous crime…Our job is to manage the risk,” Caruso suggests.

The only way around that is to keep everyone who goes to prison in prison forever. That might work, but it’s unconstitutional.

So Madams Granholm and Caruso keep their fingers crossed that no major crime is committed by one of the 3,400 inmates on their way out the door.

It will take only one heinous offense by one of them to produce another tidal wave of bad luck and publicity for the embattled governor and her corrections side kick.

Yes, really.

Tim Skubick is Michigan’s senior Capitol correspondent and has anchored the weekly public TV series “Off the Record” since 1972.

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Mr. Outsider Trying to Get In
First there were three and shortly there will be four GOP candidates for governor.

Welcome self-described non-politician Rick Snyder to the fray.

“I’ve never run for office,” the Ann Arbor entrepreneur explains on one of his YouTube videos posted this week in which he also takes a swipe, albeit gentle, at the other three in the hunt.

“Everyone is a politician” claiming their experience is what the state needs, and “it’s that experience that created this mess,” the outsider concludes.

His reference, without naming names, was to Attorney General Mike Cox, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard and West Michigan Congressman Pete Hoekstra.

Since the first of the year, Snyder has traversed the state on a so-called “listening tour” that ends during the week of July 20, when he stops listening and starts campaigning.

Synder faces some challenges:

1. He is a virtual unknown, but apparently has the largess to correct that as he attempts to buy name identification. It can be done.
2. He knows very little about the inner workings of Lansing, but he considers that a huge asset.
3. He is untested on the issues and has steadfastly refused to answer direct questions from the working media on abortion, stem cells, gay marriage and all those other dicey wedge issues that often infiltrate a GOP primary. He promised that when he became a candidate, he would tackle reporters’ nosey questions.
4. He has no base from which to run. In fact, some believe just being from “arrogant” Ann Arbor is a minus. Cox has won two statewide races. Bouchard is strong in Oakland County and Hoekstra brings support from West Michigan, where he’s served in Congress for close to 20 years.
5. Do voters want another GOP/business guy running for governor? The last one four years ago didn’t do so hot. What was his name? Dick somebody or other?

Synder seems undaunted by all this as he launches an outsider’s effort to get inside state government.

Kalkaska: Here We Go Again?
With the domestic auto industry in turmoil, Michigan has received more than its fair share of negative national headlines recently.

But back in the early 1990s when the autos were humming along, it was a tiny and out-of-the way school district Up North that captured the nation’s attention…and none of it was good.

“Kalkaska Shuts School Doors — Runs Out of Money.”

The closing of a school system was big news, and turns out the flap over Kalkaska broke the 20-year-old logjam in the legislature and led to a “reform” of the way we pay for schools.

Fast forward to the here and now…more Kalkaskas may be unfolding.

“We are having that conversation,” reports Ray Tellman, the lobbyist for 33 of the state’s poorest inner city and rural districts with 20 percent of all the students in the state.

Faced with the double whammy of losing students and losing state government funding, some of these schools may spend their money until it runs out and then board up the classrooms.

Tellman observes that with all the past and future losses of state aid, some boards are fed up with all the cutting and will “look at this other option, that they will go with what they’ve got and see what happens down the road, and if they can’t go any further, then they stop rather than decimate their programs.”

No one is there just yet, but don’t be shocked when and if you read the headline: Kalkaska Re-do: Schools Close for Good.

God vs. Unions
To the untrained eye, you would assume that Michigan’s Democratic governor and organized labor have a peachy relationship.

Nope. Sometimes it’s more like prunes.

All this goes back to her days with mentor Ed McNamara, who ran Wayne County government with a decidedly anti-labor tinge. Eddie and the union guys didn’t always see eye to eye. And since Ms. Granholm learned at the knee of Mr. Ed before she ran for governor, the unions were not exactly head over heels in love with McNamara-lite.

Once she became governor, she immediately knocked heads with labor over the Democratic Party chair. The UAW wanted Mark Brewer to stay. The governor wanted longtime pal Butch Hollowell to take over. She would not budge. Labor would not budge. So they hatched a hybrid: the two guys would be co-chairs. It was an unqualified disaster.

Recently she tried to convince the state troopers union to take time off without pay, and failed, and two years ago she pimped the Michigan Education Association over its insurance coverage.

It’s not that she is anti-labor. She’s just not as pro-labor as the unions would like.

And now she and labor disagree on the need for a new state constitution.

The governor favors a so-called Con-Con, while labor is headed toward a rejection.

Union bosses figure if conservative Rs get a chance to rewrite state law, labor will get a right-to-work state and lose the minimum wage and gain a prevailing wage that unions loath, and union benefits and retirement stuff could be lost.

Either the governor never thought of that, or she doesn’t care. Whatever the reason, it’s just another example of how she and the union movement are out of step.