A reporter returns home to Michigan to take stock of cleantech
Reporter's Notebook
I grew up in western Michigan and lived in Ann Arbor for six years. In the 1980s, I attended college at the University of Michigan and, afterward, worked as a reporter on the police beat at the Ann Arbor News, the long-since closed local newspaper.
After decades living and working overseas, I recently jumped at the chance to return to Ann Arbor to look at the city’s ambitious decarbonization plans. I was especially interested in how those plans were playing out amidst the choppy political crosswinds in one of the country’s swingiest swing states over the last few elections.
Since I last lived in A-squared, as the city is affectionately known to its residents, much has changed. One thing that hasn’t: Ann Arbor is still a haven of progressive liberalism. But Michigan at large is deeply politically polarized over so many issues, often pitting the city’s clean energy ambitions against Republicans in the state.
Until recently, the Republican Party, itself deeply divided between a faction that’s more and another that’s less enthusiastic about former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, has stymied clean energy ambition in the state, especially in Democratic bastions like Ann Arbor. With Republicans in control of the state legislature until two years ago, the Democrats who control Ann Arbor’s government were often left to fend for themselves in carrying out their decarbonization plans.
This dynamic changed dramatically with the mid-term elections in 2022. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer won reelection that year. But even more significantly, the legislature flipped from Republican to Democratic control. The change unclogged a pipeline of federal and state climate funds that are now flowing to the local level. Ann Arbor leaders are currently deploying those funds across the city, which you can read about in my story this week.
Among the things that have changed: nearly all the city parks where I played basketball or ran back in the day now have solar panels installed.
I was thrilled to see that. Almost as thrilled as I was to watch my alma mater, the good old Maize and Blue Wolverines, pull out a last-minute football victory at the Big House against the Trojans of the University of Southern California.
Go Blue!