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Issues:

• It is more energy efficient to have people living in cities and towns. Our cities need to be made better places to live. We need state zoning regulations which move industry and business back into cities and towns. Our cities and towns should become places where people can walk, bicycle, or take mass transit to work, shop, and entertainments facilities. We need more urban recreation areas, parks, and gardens. The existing city infrastructure must be improved. City income taxes have encouraged people and business to move out of cities. To pay for city improvements we need to extend the city income tax statewide. This would not be a tax increase for many and only a small increase for the rest of us. Returning this money to local community could provide thousands of jobs statewide and improve the quality of life for all of us.

• Our state needs to improve its rural environment. For thousands of years the food for cities and towns was grown locally. It will become more and more expensive to transport food thousands of miles as energy becomes more expensive. We need to encourage local food production and sustainable agricultural. We need to discourage large scale animal feeding operation because they are unhealthy for the animals and have the potential to create large scale pollution problems. We need to move to a graduated property tax system to give small farmers who produce food for local consumption and local food processing plants tax breaks.

• We need to invest in our people by providing better educational opportunities. Our educational system was designed for a much different society. Our school year was designed for an agricultural society, one where children were off in the summer so they could help on the farm. We are no longer a primarily an agricultural society; we are a postindustrial society. We need a school system designed for our present society. We need a longer school year with longer school days. Many of our children live in single parent families. Our schools system needs to operate all day every day, children need to be in school instead of day care when their parents are working. We need to start education at a younger age to make sure all our children are given an equal opportunity to succeed. Many of our people who fail in our educational system end up in our prison system. We have a choice we can make our school system better or we can spend increasing amounts on our prison system.

The Governor of Michigan cannot do this alone he needs help from our Representatives in Washington. Along with electing a Green Governor you need to elect Greens for Congress who believe our powerful military makes us a threat to other countries and that we can increase our national security by reducing our military spending and bringing our troops home. If we bring our troops home there will plenty of money available to bring about needed changes. Check back again for more of my views.