The Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill package Tuesday that sponsors say would give lawmakers more oversight over state departments.
The bills concern how state departments come up with new administrative rules for things like elections, or fertilizer storage.
The current administrative rule process requires all proposed changes to go through the legislative Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, or JCAR, before they can become final. If the panel doesn’t block the changes within a certain number of session days, they automatically go through.
Package cosponsor state Representative Luke Meerman (R-Coopersville) said that’s not enough oversight to avoid government overreach.
“The department that never has anybody looking over its shoulder is the department that just continues to grow,” Meerman said after the House session.
The package would separate rules into major and nonmajor categories. Major rules, among other things, would have a predicted million-dollar annual economic impact on the state.
To go through, major rules would need to get approval from the Legislature via a concurrent resolution. Nonmajor rules would need explicit approval from a new Joint Committee on Regulatory Oversight and Administrative Review to go into effect.
Supporters argued the committee would base its decisions on what state laws allow.
Still, Democrats mostly voted against the package on Tuesday. State Representative Carrie Rheingans (D-Ann Arbor) said she worries lawmakers would be making political decisions instead of experts.
“I understand people think there might be too much administration and red tape and stuff, but out of 110 of us in here, I don’t know a single person who’s a technical expert in wastewater runoff from a farm,” she said.
On Tuesday, the House also approved a bill to consolidate the reports agencies submit to the Legislature. Right now, each department decides how to handle those reports —meaning they can sometimes be hard to find.
State Representative Joseph Aragona (R-Clinton Twp) said posting them together would make it easier for people to see what their government is doing.
“There’s hundreds of reports out there. I mean, yeah, you can do a Google search and you run through a million different results but if you can see, ‘Oh, there’s one where location I can go run searches, search by department, whatever it happens to be,' find that, I think it’ll be a lot easier for everybody,” Aragona said.
Some Democrats voted against the bill, with one saying they believed it was redundant since the reports are already online on each department’s website.
The bill now goes to the Democratic-led Senate, alongside the administrative rules bills.
