by Gongwer News Service
May 30, 2008

Legislators went north this week to the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference, where they chewed on subjects such as the Michigan Business Tax, the state’s transportation needs and how to get more young people to flock to metro Detroit. But most notably, perhaps, was a discussion about term limits, whether to have them at all and, if so, how long a term must be for lawmakers to competently pull their weight around the Capitol without stretching their term so long they feel more beholden to lobbying interests than their neighbors at home.

The announcement from the Kalamazoo Regional Chamber of Commerce that it has run out of money to continue its efforts toward a ballot petition drive to reduce the legislature to a part-time body without term limits became a timely nugget for the debate on the island.

The specific question boiled down to whether the current limits — three terms for House members and two for senators — created a crop of inexperienced lawmakers unfamiliar with each other’s negotiating ways and led to an excruciatingly prolonged debate over the budget last year, or whether term limits have given the state a legislature with more experience in life than on the session floor.

And experience is what it all boils down to, said former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz, who said no matter where lawmakers’ loyalties lie, term limits have left legislators less prepared to act.

“There never was, there isn’t and there never will be a substitute for experience,” said Mr. Schwarz, also a longtime member of the Senate. He added that the budget debacle happened because those involved did not know each other well enough to know each other’s boundaries and styles.

And he said the short time in office does not allow for those just entering the legislature to have mentors to show them the ropes, an experience he said he had from both sides of the mentoring relationship.

Legislative leadership is also in agreement that a change in the current term limit structure is due.

House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford Twp.), House Minority Leader Craig DeRoche (R-Novi) and Senate Minority Leader Buzz Thomas (D-Detroit) all said at a presentation on Thursday that they would support an end to term limits, with Mr. Thomas saying term limits “have broken a wonderful institution and taken away from the legacy of many great people who have served.”

Mr. Dillon said he’d like to get a ballot proposal to end term limits before voters before he leaves office and added that he had originally supported the current limits.

Mr. DeRoche said perhaps the recent performance of the legislature might actually work toward the goal of eliminating term limits, since he doesn’t think people were likely to want to change the system until they saw it failing.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) backed a proposal introduced earlier in the year that would cut the time to 12 years from the current 14 years, but allow it to be served entirely in either chamber.

“We don’t have the kind of continuity of leadership in the legislature that we need right now,” Mr. Bishop said.

Even Patrick Anderson, CEO of Anderson Economic Group and one of the drafters of the current term limit structure, said that while he blames last year’s budget disaster on a few who “just didn’t do their jobs” — not term limits — he isn’t opposed to changing the rules a bit.

“I never said six years or eight years was the perfect number,” he said, while vigorously defending the term limits concept. “I’m willing to talk about whether that’s the perfect number sometime before the 10-year anniversary of the full turnover.” That anniversary is coming in 2012.

While his group has run out finances to push the ballot issue forward, Steward Sandstrom with the Kalamazoo Regional Chamber of Commerce still thinks his part-time legislature proposal is the best way to have lawmakers who are connected to their constituents and yet educated about the issues they must decide on.

Greg Schmid, the man behind a different part-time legislature question that would retain term limits, said he’s pushing on with his effort, although his group has collected only about 10 percent of the number of signatures required to get the initiative on the ballot.

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