Ed McBroom on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the fight for local control
Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom represents one of the most distinctive regions in the country: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this conversation, he discusses the independent character of the U.P., the burdens federal and state policy can place on rural communities, and the challenges facing family farming and local industry. He also reflects on the culture, toughness, and deep sense of place that shape life in northern Michigan. He recently spoke with American Habits editor Ray Nothstine.
I want to ask about life in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I lived in Oscoda and in Grand Rapids and spent many summers in northern Michigan.
The U.P. is totally different. How do you handle the winters? Are there any stories or details that help people understand what it’s like? I’ve always had respect for people who live up there. It builds character.
Sen. Ed McBroom: Winters can be really difficult up here, but the people who live here have grown up with it, so we’re used to it. Even our construction codes for roofs are substantially stricter in this area. Most people are familiar with spending a significant part of some winter days up on the house or garage, pushing snow off.
I think my predecessor once had the highway closed on him, but he had to keep moving. He took other roads, got lost in the woods, and ended up driving his car on a snowmobile trail. Apparently, it was more passable than the highway.
Even in the Houghton and Keweenaw area, I’ve seen restaurant signs above the road while the driveways into McDonald’s or Culver’s disappeared behind snowbanks.
Look, I know you could probably give a lot of examples, but what do you see as the number one area of state or federal overreach affecting your community and constituents?
Sen. McBroom: Right now, the thing that probably stands out most in my mind is energy. We deal with a lot of federal overreaches through environmental regulation. Certainly, federal overreach through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on our hydro facilities has been stymieing hydropower for decades, to the point that a lot of our power companies are just giving up on hydro altogether, which is ironic considering it’s such a wonderful, clean source of baseload generation.
Beyond that, the wolf issue is always on people’s minds. The fact that they brought wolves back to the U.P. at all is seen by many of us as a significant piece of federal overreach. They didn’t come and ask permission. They just said, “We’re bringing wolves back.” And they only brought them to the U.P., even though wolves were also part of the natural population downstate a century ago.
They’ve decided that people live here, but they still don’t give us the right to manage them. Now the U.P. has more wolves per square mile than anywhere else in North America.
Probably the worst example I can think of, though, is how the federal government manages the federal forests.
Prior to the ’90s, the federal government made money every year harvesting federal forests. Now it has to appropriate money because it allows all these goofy law firms to sue over a timber cut, and then we pay those lawyers for suing us. It costs us more money to harvest the timber. Then, of course, we don’t harvest enough, and we end up with these big wildfires breaking out all around the country.
Here in the U.P. recently, we had a meeting about the Hiawatha National Forest. They were going to remove trails and access points. When we sat down with the community, many of whom are volunteer firefighters and need those trails for fire protection, not just for the forest but for nearby homes, the woman from the Forest Service said, ‘Well, you don’t understand. We had a hearing in San Francisco where people wanted us to do this.’
So, for folks up here in the U.P. to be told that the federal government is changing how it manages forests here because somebody in California cared about it, and then to hear the Forest Service say, ‘Oh, it’s just as much their forest as it is yours.’ People were furious.
We have a nickel and copper mine north of Marquette, the only one currently operating in the U.S. As that project was being developed, they renovated an old mill to process the material. It’s about 60 miles by road from the mine to the mill. There was an old roadbed there—some of it had been improved, but much of it was too rutted up—that would have cut more than half that distance and kept the trucks from having to drive through three major urban areas.
The idea was to build County Road 595. The anti-mining folks thought that if they stopped the road, they could stop the mine, which turned out not to be true. Worst of all, they got Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and other lawmakers from elsewhere involved. They used the Obama administration to stop that road from being built, to stop the mine.
In the end, they didn’t stop the mine. Now the traffic runs through those communities instead. Of course, that means more CO2, more diesel burned, and more disruption for locals. That was the federal government getting involved in a very deleterious way, and it was exceptionally frustrating.
Michigan isn’t as bad as some states, but a lot of what people experience is really the state administering federally funded programs with strings attached. From a federalism standpoint, what should the legislature do to oversee that process, hold the executive branch accountable, and make sure those dollars are used the way constituents intended?
Sen. McBroom: There are certainly bigger things you and I could discuss regarding how to stop this crazy train, and the feds should never have taken all that money from us in the first place.
But then you’ve got to deal with reality too, right? I’m with you.
Sen. McBroom: Right, we’re on the same page. The crazy train ought to be stopped, but this is where we live.
A good example is food stamps or bridge cards. A few years back, during the Gov. Snyder administration, the state hired the first-ever person in the U.P. to track down food stamp fraud. He was a former policeman. I met with him many times.
He could easily get a list of people who were receiving food stamp benefits from Michigan—federal dollars—but clearly weren’t living in Michigan, because every time they swiped the card, it was in another state, a lot of activity in New Mexico. All he wanted to do was go into the system and shut those cards off if they were being used in a state not adjacent to Michigan. But they wouldn’t let him do it.
Instead, he had to track the people down, make phone calls or go visit them, confront them, and then set up a plan for them to pay the money back. He couldn’t even shut off their cards until he had personally talked to them and given them a warning. It’s ridiculous. All he had to do was go into the system, shut the card off, and the problem’s over. Forget it—we’re never getting that money back from those people.
There were times when he’d be somewhere in a state investigating one claim and get a call saying, “We think there’s some major fraud happening in Houghton right now at a store. Get there.” Well, he’s five hours away. Unless you’re sending a helicopter, it’s going to be tomorrow. He told me, “Ed, I could have four of me up here. There’s so much to do.”
We could spend a lot more effort doing that, but the state agencies dragged their feet. They didn’t want it. And when he retired, they didn’t replace him.
If we’d just do some things like that, we could crack down on a lot of fraud. You need somebody who can shut the system off. The computer could automatically cut off people using these cards across the country. It’s exceptionally frustrating, because there are easy ways to fix a lot of it. Of course, we’re never going to get all of it.
Part of the reason Michigan isn’t suffering quite like Minnesota is because we’re not quite as easily defrauded yet. We do have some rules and inspections in place that have prevented some of that, especially on the daycare issue.
Michigan has a terrible, overburdensome state regulatory system for daycare licensure that caps some places at six children. We’re not a great state to extort on daycare, but we are on food stamps. These are areas where we should clearly be much more aggressive and commonsense oriented.
After grad school, I worked on a cattle farm. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. I came away with a lot of respect for anyone farming.
As a dairy farmer, what are one or two policy changes, at either the state or federal level, that would most improve the outlook for family farms in Michigan? And what do policymakers misunderstand about the trade-offs so many farmers in Michigan are dealing with?
Sen. McBroom: You’ve hit on a number of different things that are all very real fights and very real issues. Farming is exceptionally volatile, especially when it comes to annual income and job security. It’s difficult work. The hours can be long. Why do so many people choose to leave farming? Why do parents even encourage their kids not to stay in it? Because the job security is poor, and the work is hard.
I find it exceptionally rewarding on the personal side. If you’re not too worried about money, you’re better off.
Certainly, one of the ways the feds and others could help—I’ve always joked that USDA should require all of its employees, every three years, to spend three months as free labor on farms around the country, just so they can see the real people their desk-bound paper-pushing impacts.
I like that the Trump administration wants to push more agencies out into Middle America, but your step goes further.
Sen. McBroom: On the dairy side, the way we price milk in this country is entirely federally controlled. It is federal price-setting, and it does all the things economists know price-setting and price controls do to an economy. Frankly, we’d be far better off with Canada’s quota-based system than we are with this nightmarish system, which started in the 1950s. It’s called the federal milk order system, or milk marketing orders.
What they’re basically trying to do is send market signals about whether we should make more milk or not by setting the price. If the feds believe there’s too much milk, they drop our price. But then the farmer says, well, I’ve still got bills to pay, so I need to make more milk. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually some farmers go under because they can’t survive the downturn. Then prices rocket back up, there aren’t enough farms left, and there’s a shortage.
It’s an endless cycle.
Then the other thing I wish the feds—and our state—would help us with is the activist groups that are constantly accusing farmers of torturing cows, or accusing grain farmers of using chemicals that are killing everybody. The Roundup issue is a big trope right now. They find some part per billion out of billions, and then they say, oh, everybody’s being poisoned.
It’s very frustrating these activists go out and misinform people and drive lawsuits and pressure campaigns, as if we could somehow just magically grow all the food people need without modern agriculture. I’ve had people tell me, ‘If we just gave everybody an acre and a half, they could grow their own food. We wouldn’t need farmers anymore.’
And I’m like, well, a lot of people might starve that way too, because growing food is not as easy as you think. The average American garden produces something like 20 pounds of produce per person working that garden. You can’t survive on 20 pounds of produce for a whole year. Even when Michelle Obama had the White House garden—arguably the best-tended garden that ever existed—they still couldn’t even crack 40 pounds per person.
Farmers are doing the hard work of feeding everybody, all the time.
Here’s a crazy example of federal regulation: I toured a farm where the government had built a bird sanctuary next to the field, and then later promulgated rules saying that if a single piece of bird droppings was found on a leaf of lettuce—the whole head had to be thrown away. Yet the feds were the ones who built the bird sanctuary right next door to the field.
I think Pacific Legal Foundation chronicled some of those examples—I don’t remember which group exactly, but there are several that have chronicled some of these crazy regulations, especially the really bad ones from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They’re still out there.
Sen. McBroom: I attended an amazing event at the White House where President Trump signed two executive orders forbidding departments from enforcing expired rules, because that’s what they had been doing. They had 20-year-old rules that had already expired, but since no new rule had been promulgated, the feds just kept enforcing them as if they were still law.
There were two farmers there who were allowed to speak at the event, and they were being fined in the tens of millions of dollars for violating a rule that didn’t even exist anymore.
Yes, and nobody in Congress voted on those administrative rules in the first place. That’s what’s so frustrating to me. In a way, it’s taxation without representation, or in some extreme cases, confiscation of your land.
Sen. McBroom: I have repeatedly told my colleagues in Lansing that we should, at the very least, limit rulemaking authority in both scope and time after we pass a law. Better yet, we ought to force ourselves to write the rules ourselves, because once you start writing the rules for the law you think is such a great idea, you suddenly realize what a mess it could become.
Instead, we pass the law, trust some unelected bureaucrat to write all the rules, and then act surprised when our constituents contact us angry about how those rules are being enforced.
It’s a very special place, but you have to be tough and hardy to live here.
At the very least, that rulemaking authority ought to be limited to a five-or-10-year window. What happens now is that you pass a law, and then 40 or 60 years later they’re still writing new rules under it. By that point, nobody who passed the law is even there to guide the department on what was intended when it was enacted.
I wanted to ask about the kind of people in your community. I know no community is homogeneous, and as any elected official knows, not everyone is going to support you. But what makes the people in your part of the U.P. unique, especially in terms of their character, work ethic, and the way they want to live their lives?
It’s felt like a special place to me. It’s very different, and in many ways unique. You really have to embrace that culture.
Sen. McBroom: Yes, it’s a very special place. I don’t know if you could find another region of the country with so few people who are still so united. We have 15 counties, all with a common identity. We’re the folks of the U.P.
There’s a strong work ethic, strong community ties, and connectedness. It’s bound together somewhat by accent and dialect.
We have a strong hunting culture, a strong mining history, and strong logging traditions, and they are deeply interwoven in our culture. I’ve got friends who have cabins in the woods with no electricity, and they’ll stay there all winter. They’ll chip holes in the ice and take a bath once or twice a month in the wintertime. It’s very independent-minded. Packer fans dominate the countryside, but there are Lions fans too.
I think it’s that strong Scandinavian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, and Polish mix here, with a bit of French-Canadian influence, that really flavors everything. It shapes our traditions and our communities. There are still places where people speak Italian and still places where people speak Finnish. You can go up to Hancock, where it’s so Finnish the street names are in Finnish, but they’ve got an Italian restaurant there run by Finns.
It’s a very special place, but you have to be tough and hardy to live here.
We believe in our schools. There’s still a strong church culture up here as well. That’s why the moniker “Someplace Special” fits the area so well.
One of the things that really sets U.P. people apart is how protective they are of the region’s identity. We’re welcoming to people from outside the area, but there’s always a bit of a chip on the shoulder that says, “if you don’t like it here, don’t stay. Don’t try to change us.”
