County leaders soon will be asked to engage in a letter-writing campaign to urge the passage of bills creating a dedicated Revenue Sharing Trust Fund, legislation for which has been bottled up in the Michigan Senate for months, MAC’s Deena Bosworth said in the latest episode of Podcast 83.

“The Revenue Sharing Trust Fund bills, just for a reminder for our members, are House Bills 4274-75. They passed out of the House last year by an overwhelming majority, 106-4, and they've been sitting in the Senate Finance Committee ever since. We have been trying and trying and trying to get these bills some movement,” Bosworth explained.

“We know that we have the votes in the Senate to support this and put it on the governor's desk. The hold up is actually getting them up for a vote. … And the stumbling block that we're hearing is that we need the governor to actually ask the Legislature to do this, to make it an item that she would like to see done in the lame duck session.

“So, our strategy at this point is we're going to put together a letter, and we are going to ask all of our county commissioners, our affiliates, everyone to sign this letter and send it back to us. It will be a letter to the governor asking the governor to make this a priority and ask the Legislature to move these bills forward,” Bosworth added.

In other legislative news:

MAC derailed a House vote last week on “minimum staffing” legislation that would cause no end of problems for county members.

“As a reminder for everyone, that's to mandate that minimum staffing be a subject of bargaining for Public Act 312 employees that was initially posted on the House floor agenda for a vote (last) Wednesday,” said Samantha Gibson. “We were able to get that taken off the agenda … on Wednesday, and then again on Thursday, so we were able to avoid a House vote on that. Hopefully, we can continue that into December, but that's a difficult issue.”

A new attempt is being made to usurp local control over aggregate mining operations.

“The aggregate legislation was reintroduced with new sponsors,” said Madeline Fata. “And just to remind you all, it essentially preempts all local control, all zoning for sand and gravel mines, and it would put the permitting authority into the hands of (the state). … (W)hen the original bills were brought up for a hearing, it did not go so well. There was a lot of public pushback, a lot of local government pushback, even environmental pushback on it. So, we were kind of hopeful that the issue was dead, but it's rearing its ugly head again.”