Jack Lessenberry

There are a couple of stories today you may have missed that I think are profoundly significant, but which won't get a fraction of the attention they should. The first is that one out of every ten children in Michigan has a parent who is or has been in prison. The Michigan League for Public Policy notes that studies show having an incarcerated parent is, quote, "a traumatic experience that can lead to increased poverty, stress and unstable environments, affecting kids' health and academic performance." We are talking about nearly a quarter of a million children. The league also notes that our state and society does virtually nothing to support such children, or other family members of people, usually men, who are in prison. In many cases, that helps doom these children to continue the vicious circle and lead lives of violence, poverty and crime. This is nothing less than a ticking time bomb aimed squarely at our state and our society's future. If this were anything like a rational society, this would be the lead story today, and our leaders would be convening a summit conference to tackle this problem, which is clearly related to our decision decades ago to dramatically increase how many people we keep behind bars. This, by the way, is a nationwide problem; while Michigan has a higher percentage of such kids than most places, Indiana and Kentucky are worse. When this was reported Monday, Mary King, who runs something called the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency, urged lawmakers to "address this issue from both sides," by which she meant passing reforms to reduce the number of people in jail, and finding "the necessary supports to help these kids through difficult times and connect their parents with the proper job and education training assistance," when they get out of jail. Of course, that's exactly what we should do. That's also exactly what our ideologically bound legislature won't even consider doing. They will instead continue to worry about trying to stop certain bullied kids from using whatever bathroom makes them feel most comfortable. Meanwhile, there's another new report that is also disturbing. The Michigan Association of School Boards says that fewer and fewer people are interested in running for board of education seats in this state. They are trying to recruit some civic-minded people to do so. Well, this is also disheartening, but doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Politicians have been waging war on teachers and public schools for years now. Serving on a school board is hard, time-consuming and unpaid work, and those who do it deserve honor and respect. Yet we have crippled our public schools, destroying many of them by allowing so-called charter schools to drain resources away, trivializing education, tying districts into a funding straitjacket created by Proposal A, and holding the threat of emergency management over them. Fixing public education would not be easy, but is essential, if Detroit and other large cities ever hope to be vibrant again. I've just told you about two vitally important stories that are significantly impacting our future. Neither of which, by the way, will get a tenth of the coverage the media will devote to the fifth day of reaction to the death of the pop star named Prince. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Last month, the State Board of Education did something that was right and courageous — and which I felt certain at the time was bound to be misconstrued. Listen Listening... 3:00 Jack Lessenberry for Monday April 25, 2016 Board President John Austin announced they were considering a new set of voluntary polices to help make gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students feel safe in school. These included the suggestion that transgender students be allowed to use the bathroom in which they felt most comfortable. This wasn't a case of a bunch of out-of-touch bureaucrats imposing their dictates on the helpless population. The board couldn't if they wanted to; they don't have that kind of power. What they were proposing were voluntary guidelines. What's more, they didn't even plan to adopt them until May. What they did was announce they were releasing their suggestions for public comment. Surprisingly, a board member told me that for a week or so, the reaction they received was largely positive. Then the national right-wing media got hold of the story, and reacted pretty much in the way sharks react to blood in the water. Fox TV's Tucker Carlson attacked the guidelines on his blog, and issued a demand for Austin's emails about this issue. Tea Party activists sent out an "action alert" advising members to attack guidelines, and the state board. This was followed by what looks like an orchestrated and well-financed campaign of postcards and luridly obscene robocalls, saying that John Austin wanted to allow male perverts to come into your little daughter's bathroom at school. Republicans in the state Legislature then went after the state board, which now has a Democratic majority. Well, none of this surprises me very much, especially at the legislative level. After Flint and other excesses of the Snyder Administration, Republicans desperately need an issue if they hope to hang on to the lower house of the Legislature this year. But it would be nice if someone were to tell the truth as to what this is all about. This began when Rick Joseph, last year's teacher of the year, came to the board and pleaded with them to do something to help LGBT students learn. Joseph, a middle school teacher in Birmingham, set out to become a lawyer, but went into education because he cared about closing the gap between minority and other students and helping them learn. According to statistics supplied by the state board, such students – who are more than eight percent of all Michigan students --have it worst of all. Their grades suffer. Many miss a lot of school because they feel unsafe. A really shocking 29% tried to commit suicide in the past year. Bullying goes on in high schools, some of which resemble the Lord of the Flies more than anything else; half a century ago I was called a queer and beaten up for the crime of being nonathletic and reading a lot. To make any children's lives a living hell because of sexuality and gender identity makes no more sense than persecuting them if they are Black. The Michigan Board of Education has been trying to do its job and protect children. Sadly, there are others who see kids as only pawns to be used in their political games. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

On this Earth Day eight years ago, General Motors and Detroit were in bad shape and getting worse. Detroit was still suffering under Kwame Kilpatrick, the most corrupt mayor in its history, even as events were beginning to unfold that would send him to prison. Soon, the city was to add a council president would later vanish into thin air after he was accused of trying to seduce a high school boy. Far worse was to come before the year was over. General Motors, which had been losing close to $10 billion a year, would come very close to going out of business, as would Chrysler. Had they been allowed to fail, industry experts said they would have taken hundreds of suppliers with them, and possibly Ford Motor Co. as well. The Center for Automotive Research estimated that would mean a permanent loss of one to three million jobs. Nobody wants to begin to think what that would have meant for Michigan's economy. But the auto companies were saved, largely by the insistence of the nation's first Black President. They and the city itself went through near-death bankruptcy experiences, were cleansed, resurrected and reborn. This week we learned that General Motors posted a staggeringly huge first quarter profit. GM is on pace to make more than $10 billion this year. Chrysler was sold to Fiat, but is doing fine too. Eight years ago, many experts strongly doubted that the mostly white American voters would really elect a black president. What none of them foresaw was a future in which the mostly black voters of Detroit would elect a white mayor, and a woman would be installed as CEO of General Motors. Today, Detroit has evolved into one of the most fascinating places in the nation. A bustling, pushy Irish-American mayor has gotten streetlights on again throughout most of the city. The pension funds have been fixed. The budget is running a surplus. Small and precarious, vulnerable to the least downturn in the economy, but a surplus. Detroit is still losing people, but a trickle, no longer a flood. The city desperately needs jobs, and there are neighborhoods where even the cops don't much like to go. The schools still need fixing, and are the one thing that has gotten worse. But in what's called Midtown, you literally can't find an apartment to rent. There are too many new restaurants for the reviewers to keep up with. Last night I went to see John King, who runs one of the nation's best bookstores, and lives in an exquisite apartment he built on top of his building, close to the Detroit River. We ate dinner at El Barzon, an exquisite Italian-Mexican restaurant in Southwest Detroit, in a neighborhood that's full of deserted warehouse and growing vitality. I felt as safe as in Grand Rapids. This has been a year of grim headlines, poisoned water and poisonous rhetoric, but Detroit and its key industry really have come back. As we head into the weekend, that might be good to remember. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Yesterday, while we were waiting to see who would face criminal charges in the Flint water crisis, I asked a friend if he thought that would be a real, no-holds-barred investigation. "That depends on whether the indictments stop at Hunt, Liddy and the Cubans," he said. If you are a little rusty on your Watergate history, those were the collection of characters who were originally arrested for trying to break in and bug Democratic National Headquarters in that long-ago world of 1972. The White House desperately tried to get the investigation to not go any higher, and as the world now knows, they were unsuccessful. Well, now we have a different kind of crisis, one in which an entire city's water supply was poisoned, one in which, unlike Watergate, people actually died. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced charges against two state Department of Environmental Quality employees and the man who was supervisor of the Flint Water Treatment plant when the water supply was switched to the Flint River and authorities failed to add corrosion control chemicals. I'm not mentioning these men's names here, partly since – let's face it – they've already have been essentially convicted in the press, even when some reporter remembers to add "innocent until proven guilty" to the stories detailing the charges, which include both misdemeanors and one to three felonies in every case. But there seems to be no thought of limiting the investigation. The attorney general said specifically, "these charges are only the beginning. There will be more to come," and later said, "each and every person who (broke) the law will be held responsible ... no one is above the law." Officials also openly invited anyone with further knowledge of what happened to come forward, more than hinting they'd be open to plea bargaining. What took me by surprise was the comment of former FBI agent Andy Arena, who said "This is the biggest case in the history of Michigan," far bigger than the Kwame Kilpatrick mess, on which he also worked, and pointedly added: "Nobody is off limits." Naturally, everyone wondered if that meant the governor will eventually be charged. Based on everything I've seen, that still seems unlikely. Looked at against the prism of presidential scandals, this still seems far more like Iran-Contra, in which unsupervised appointees ran amok while a disengaged President Reagan failed to pay attention. We've seen no evidence of a centrally directed criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is what Richard Nixon did in Watergate. Still, when one reads the emails from Snyder's staff, it is very hard to believe he didn't know more, earlier than he says he did. For now the state has been paying the legal bills of the two MDEQ workers who were charged Wednesday, but the governor said later that afternoon that he thought their department director "would be revisiting the appropriateness of that." Regardless of how you feel about that, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for a governor to say that who is already charging taxpayers at least $1.2 million dollars to pay for his own potential legal and criminal defense in this case. We now know this: the story we could easily call Flint River Watergate will go on for months. Quite possibly, years. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Anyone who knows Ismael Ahmed knows he is one of the most remarkable people in the Detroit area. He co-founded ACCESS, the nation's largest Arab-American private human services organization, while he was still a student at the University of Michigan Dearborn. That was forty-three years ago. Today, ACCESS, which he ran for many years, offers more than ninety programs and reports nearly a million client visits a year. Ahmed, who is also a Vietnam-era veteran, went on to become the director of the Michigan Department of Human Services during the Granholm administration, and then associate provost for community learning at the his alma mater before retiring last year. Very few people anywhere have given as much to their community. But Ahmed, now 68, has proven an utter failure at retirement. He's always been a teacher and an activist, still runs the annual Concert of Colors, and there are those who want him to run this fall for either one of the university boards or the state board of education. His main cause these days, however, is Public Allies, a too little-known AmeriCorps program he believes has the potential to transform Detroit by turning what they call "Opportunity Youth," into community leaders. Opportunity Youth is a euphemism for young people who are mostly without opportunities except potential and hope. These are young people between the ages of 17 and 24 who are neither working nor attending school. There are nearly seven million in the nation, 200,000 in Metropolitan Detroit. They have the long-term potential to either remake societies and cities like Detroit, or to ruin them. Three years ago, Ahmed founded Public Allies of Metropolitan Detroit, which is still housed at the U of M Dearborn. He got some funding and persuaded some nonprofit partners to provide training and apprenticeship programs, and got started with a class of 28 students. Seventy percent of that first class graduated. The next two classes were slightly larger, and a hundred percent of them successfully completed the program. Today, Ahmed told me, nearly all of the alums are still in Detroit. Seventy percent have been inspired to pursue higher education; about a third are working; a quarter are in a second-year, five-month leadership academy in which they work in teams of four on community projects, with organizations like Focus Hope. Ahmed thinks that once enough people see how important Public Allies can be, and if they can get sufficient funding, they could train a hundred folks every year. "If after ten years we could place a thousand young leaders in the city, it could be transformational for Detroit," he said. You might see that as unrealistic, but nobody thought Ahmed would be successful when he founded ACCESS – or when he set out to build the truly magnificent National Arab-American Museum in Dearborn. The Detroit chapter of Public Allies has already won a $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, some of which will be used for an evaluation to determine whether to make a larger, long term commitment. Tracy Hall, who runs the office of metropolitan impact at the U of M Dearborn, said this is all about creating "a just and equitable society, and the diverse leadership to sustain it." That is, after all, exactly what's needed, if Detroit is to survive. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

I have to confess I rolled my eyes when I heard yesterday that Governor Rick Snyder went to a Flint resident's home and drank their filtered tap water in front of two reporters. Publicity pictures were taken, and the governor, who left with several gallons of the stuff, pledged to drink Flint water for the next 30 days. Several nasty thoughts entered my head. One was to wonder if this was one of the houses that didn't have lead pipes. Those were the kind of homes the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was testing last year, when it was pretending there were no problems. I also had the same reaction as an elderly Flint resident with the enchanting name of Elizabeth Taylor. Symbolically drinking the water wasn't enough, she told the Detroit Free Press: "His whole family has to drink it. They have to cook with it and bathe with it." Well, they may not be doing that, but the governor said his wife Sue was on board with drinking Flint water too. The governor has been delinquent in visiting Flint during this crisis. But what he did yesterday was exactly right. One of his most ham-handed moments was signing a bill aiding the city in front of a whole group of white Republicans in, of all places, Grand Rapids. But what he did yesterday was exactly right. The city is now doing what should have been done all along – adding an anti-corrosive solution to the water, which is designed to help build up a protective coating on the pipes. The more people use the water, the faster it is supposed to take effect. Not surprisingly, water usage hasn't returned to anything like normal. People don't trust it, or the government. So what the governor did was symbolically important. And the water he drank yesterday did in fact come from a home that had elevated lead levels. Ideally, for maximum effect, the governor would have drunk the water together with a prominent figure Flint citizens do trust, like Congressman Dan Kildee or better yet, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. But in any event, Snyder deserves credit for doing the right thing, even if it was overdue. Something else yesterday gave me even more hope, however: Michigan State University's annual state of the state survey, led by Professor Charles Ballard, an expert on the state's economy. Not surprisingly, a substantial majority blamed Snyder and his administration for the Flint water crisis. But what was surprising and encouraging is that those surveyed cited the "infrastructure of cities" as the state's most important problem. Flint is the canary on the coal mine, and ignoring its real meaning would be to put us all in great peril. Significantly more people picked that than the next biggest item, jobs and the economy. For years, it's been clear the state and nation's crumbling infrastructure is our biggest ticking time bomb. Now, we've had the first explosion. Before he was elected president, I had a chance to interview Barack Obama, who asked me my first priority would be. I said it would be to establish a National Infrastructure Corps to rebuild America's foundations. He chose to spend his political capital on health care instead. I don't fault him for that, but even if it isn't very sexy, infrastructure now has to be our first priority. Flint is the canary on the coal mine, and ignoring its real meaning would be to put us all in great peril. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Have you ever noticed how often people invoke the Founding Fathers whenever anybody doesn't like anything about government? Yes, they like to claim that the Framers of the Constitution would be spinning in their graves if they only knew that someday the nation they created would become a socialistic welfare state — or a military-industrial complex — et cetera, et cetera. Well, it's easy to claim lots of nonsense when it comes to the founders, since they never weighed in on cruise missiles or telecommunications law. We also avoid talking about them in certain cases where we do know what they thought, including that slavery was legal. But here's something where we know exactly where the founders stood, and where their ideals were the same as ours – at least in theory. The Constitution established two houses of Congress — a somewhat more aristocratic Senate, and a House of Representatives that was supposed to be all about direct, grass-roots democracy. As they saw it, the voters in every district would get together every other November, pick someone in their community they respected, and send him to Washington for a couple years to vote for their neighbors' best interests and those of the nation. This was not supposed to make you rich. When the Constitution was ratified, members of Congress were paid six dollars a day, and then only when they met. They make $174,000 a year today. That's not all that much either, when you include the cost of living in two places. But as a story in the Detroit Free Press Sunday devastatingly illustrated, today's congressmen are anything but normal residents chosen on the basis of merit. Congressional districts today are bought and sold, usually within a single party, since most areas are so gerrymandered the nominee of one party is virtually guaranteed victory. Take the 10th District for example, in Michigan's Thumb. The incumbent is retiring, so the seat is wide open – although everyone knows whomever the Republicans nominate in August will win. So far, the top spender is one Paul Mitchell, who has spent $1.6 million of his own money trying to win the primary. That's nearly 10 times the congressional salary. But now here's the real kicker — he isn't really from the district. Four years ago, he spent $3.5 million of his own cash trying unsuccessfully trying to get the nomination for a district in Saginaw. He doesn't care who he officially represents; he just wants to be in Congress. My own congressman, Sandy Levin, is from his district. I don't know what he has raised so far, but two years ago he spent $1.5 million dollars to win against only token opposition. Levin in fact used to be my state senator ... when I was 12 years old. I'm old enough to collect Social Security now, and he is technically old enough to be my father. He'll be 85 before the election, and he isn't even Michigan's oldest congressman. You can say what you want about this system, but you can't say it does what it was intended to do – send normal citizens to Washington for a term or two. Instead, we have a permanent political class, funded and controlled by competing pools of vast wealth. Good luck convincing anyone that's what James Madison intended. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

What's being called a major battle over the state's prison budget is taking shape in Lansing. To save money, John Proos, the chair of the relevant state senate subcommittee, wants to close two prisons and lease and operate a now private prison in Baldwin. Listen Listening... 3:03 Jack Lessenberry for Friday April, 2016 However, those who run the Department of Corrections don't want to close any of the state's 35 prisons, and say they need them in case the state prison population ever rises again. Michigan had more than 51,000 inmates nine years ago, but that number has declined by almost ten thousand over the last decade. That's largely because violent crime has declined and because we are less willing to sentence people to long prison terms for small amounts of drugs. Who says there isn't any good news? Still, 40,000 prisoners is more than twice as many as 30 years ago – and is a huge drain on state resources, costing us more than $2.2 billion a year, far more than the state spends on higher education. If I wanted to be nasty, I could say that Michigan places a higher priority on locking people up than on educating them. . Naturally, I'd never be the least bit sarcastic about state government. But I would tend to support closing two prisons and using the money saved – about $15 million – to make badly needed repairs in other badly aging prison buildings. On the other hand, I think the legislature is wrong and fundamentally cruel in opposing money the governor has requested for a new drug to cure some cases of Hepatitis C, which is rampant in prisons. However, having said all that, this entire discussion misses the point. Michigan doesn't need to save nickels and dimes in our correction system; we need fundamental sweeping reform. Basically, as any real non-political expert on prisons will tell you, we need to concentrate on locking up, as the saying goes, only those people we are legitimately afraid of, not all the ones we are mad at. Nor do we need to keep inmates locked up who may have been a threat to society in 1957, but who are now running up tremendous costs in geriatric medical care. We are paying far more for corrections than other nearby states, and there are all sorts of reasons why. We sentence inmates to longer terms and make them wait longer for parole. A Bridge Magazine study last year found 11 inmates in the slam just for using marijuana. Locking them up costs us $35,000 each per year. We could send them to college more cheaply. Two years ago, there was a growing bipartisan move for serious prison reform. The Lansing-based group CAPPS, Citizens' Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, put forth a reasonable blueprint for cutting the prison population by another ten thousand inmates. But any efforts are reform were torpedoed by Attorney General Bill Schuette, who wants to run for governor, and evidently feels it important to look tough on crime. Thanks to that attitude, we go on paying tens of millions every year in health care costs for hundreds of inmates in their seventies and eighties, and not properly fixing our roads. There are indeed words for such priorities. But irrational is the only one I can say on the radio. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

I assume there are probably some real issues facing the voters in Michigan's 8th Congressional District, which is anchored by Lansing in the bottom middle of the state. After all, a lot of folks here used to work for Oldsmobile, which was, you may remember, a mighty division of General Motors before going extinct a dozen years ago. Only about 10% of the population is black or Latino, which puts Democrats at a disadvantage, but there are a lot of government workers and suburbanites trying to put their kids through school. Overall the district votes Republican, but not overwhelmingly so. It includes one Democratic county — Ingham — one Republican one — Livingston, and the Republican northern chunk of Oakland. This year, Democrats would dearly love to pick up this seat in Congress. The incumbent is freshman Mike Bishop, was state senate majority leader during the Granholm era. He won a solid victory two years ago, with 55%, but that wasn't nearly as solid as it might have been. That was a huge Republican year, and Bishop had a little-known and underfunded opponent. That won't be the case this year. Democrats have recruited actress Melissa Gilbert, once the child star of Little House on the Prairie, and her Hollywood friends have been kicking in for her campaign, though they haven't come close to matching the contributions Bishop is getting from various Republican-supporting Super PACS. Expect to see millions spent here, in a battle for a two-year seat in Congress. Democrats think their presidential candidate might win Michigan by a million-vote landslide, given the Republican disarray, and privately, Republicans fear they may not be wrong. So there is increased focus on anything resembling swing seats in Congress. Both candidates start with some baggage. Gilbert owes back taxes to the IRS, and may be seen as a glamorous carpetbagger. Bishop, on the other hand, was a symbol of sterile obstructionism during his years in Lansing. There is also a legitimate case to be made that Bishop has been far more interested in doing the bidding of Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun, long one of his major donors, than in looking after his constituents. You might think the major issue in this race would be how best to help the 700,000 people who live in the district. But you'd be wrong. Right now, it's all about remarks Gilbert made on a silly daytime TV talk show seven years ago, when she appeared to question how severely director Roman Polanski should have been punished for having sex with an underage girl 40 years ago. Republicans are screaming this was an outrage and hinting the Democrat supports child rape. For her part, Gilbert has been abjectly apologizing and blaming it on the format of the show. Well, I indeed never thought Roman Polanski would be an issue in a Lansing congressional race, but in the age of Trump, I suppose anything can happen. By the way, someone else has come forward to say Polanski has been punished enough, should be forgiven, and that the event had been blown out of proportion: The now middle-aged girl he had sex with. This campaign has more than half a year to go. I just can't wait to see what great issues come up next. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.

Here's a little secret about those of us who cover news: We don't like to admit it, but to a great extent, we begin what we do by being stenographers for the institutions of society. We tend to divide news into little silos: Police news, political news, business news, sports news, entertainment and society news, etc. Then we divvy up coverage that way. Journalists sometimes have difficulty with stories that don't fit neatly into one silo or another, and sometimes they miss them altogether. Twenty years or so ago I discovered a fascinating man living in Birmingham who was completely off the charts. He had been the last husband of the famous silent film star Gloria Swanson, the singer Billie Holiday's alter ego and the ghostwriter of Lady Sings the Blues, and had written best-sellers under his own name. Once, I went to see him just as Yoko Ono was leaving his house. But since he didn't make much of a splash in local circles, few knew about him. We see other stories as essentially one-dimensional. The Detroit Zoo is one of those. Next week, its biggest project ever is going to open: The Polk Penguin Conservation Center, an utterly breathtaking, 33,000 square foot facility shaped like an iceberg which will be home to more than eighty penguins of four different species. I don't believe there is anything like it in the world. A month ago, I toured it while it was still under construction, and didn't want to leave. Like many little boys, both zoo director Ron Kagan and I had been obsessed by the story of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose ship Endurance had been stuck in the ice. Exactly a century ago, against all odds, with only three small lifeboats, he managed to bring his entire crew across thousands of miles of ice and ocean to safety. Kagan has been to Antarctica five times, and took pains to make this as authentic as possible. There's a replica of part of the Endurance in the new penguin center and a huge Shackleton exhibit. We think of the zoo as sort of a wonderful animal park, one that Kagan has vastly improved in the 23 years he's been there, and that's very true. But that's not really what the zoo is, or the most important thing Kagan does. The first item in the zoo's mission statement calls on it to "demonstrate leadership in wildlife conservation and animal welfare," and under Kagan's leadership, the zoo has become internationally recognized in those fields, and has taken a major role in saving populations of threatened species from the humble local mudpuppy to the Puerto Rican golden frog. Detroit's zoo has been recognized as the area's best-managed non-profit, and as a leader in local science education programs, including some that reach out to inner-city kids. The zoo, incidentally, no longer gets any city or government funding, except for a millage overwhelmingly approved by voters, who were happy to tax themselves to support the zoo. Michigan has a lot of problems, but we also have a zoological society that is both world-class and an example of how public-private partnerships can work. That is, if we are willing to look and think in more innovative ways. Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.