Michigan buries more trash per person than any state in the country. About 1 in 5 tons comes from somewhere else, most of it from Canada, because it’s cheap to dump trash here.

A landfill is sealed, and the waste inside keeps breaking down for decades making methane, liquid and heat.

That matters for the people who live nearby. Even on an ordinary day, landfills release benzene and other chemicals you can’t see. When the heat climbs, those emissions rise with it, and neighbors report headaches, nosebleeds and nausea.

One Michigan landfill in Arbor Hills, just west of Northville, has been running hot since 2019. Last year a well there reached 177 degrees, and the state approved running it hotter still. Now the operator, the Canadian waste company GFL Environmental, wants to add about 90 more acres — on the same side of the landfill where the heat has been concentrated.

A new report from the advocacy group Full Circle Future says that’s the pattern nationwide: when landfills get dangerously hot, companies ask permission to run hotter, and states say yes without asking what is causing it.

Katherine Blauvelt, who runs Full Circle Future, joined Robyn Vincent to explain what’s happening underground, what escapes into the air, and who is supposed to be watching.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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Editor’s Note: After this conversation aired, Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy responded to questions from The Metro.

EGLE said it requires Arbor Hills to measure temperatures deep inside the waste, not just at the wellhead, any time a well passes 165 degrees. The agency also said it reviewed gas data back to 2020, found signs of a separate underground reaction elsewhere on the site, questioned GFL about it, and found no compliance problems. The elevated temperature event at Arbor Hills, EGLE said, “continues to be properly managed.”

When asked whether Michigan is considering rules like Ohio’s and California’s, which require finding the cause before approving higher temperatures, EGLE did not say.

The Metro also contacted GFL Environmental. A company representative said they could not answer The Metro’s questions by our deadline Wednesday morning.

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For more than a decade, a group of Detroiters worked toward something the city was lacking. In a city that’s nearly 80% Black, there were almost no Black-owned grocery stores. So they set out to build one — owned by the people it serves.

In 2024, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op opened on Woodward in the North End.

Two years later, it’s asking for help. The co-op says it’s bringing in close to $3 million a year. Before it opened, it projected about $80,000 a week — more than $4 million. This month it launched a campaign to recruit 500 new owners and asked shoppers to spend $10 more every time they come in.

They named it Mframadan, a symbol from Ghana for a house built to withstand treacherous conditions.

Those conditions are real — food prices keep climbing and the people this store was built for are the ones with the least to spare. U.S. Census Bureau data shows 34% of Detroiters live in poverty.

The co-op’s thought was that Detroiters should own their food system, not just shop within it. Two years in, the question is whether that’s something people can afford to own.

Lanay Gilbert-Williams, president of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op and executive director of the Detroit Food Policy Council, joined Robyn Vincent to talk about why prices are what they are, who’s actually shopping there, and what happens to the store — and to its owners’ money — if this campaign doesn’t work.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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For more than a century, the U.S. government took Native children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools. Students were forced to cut their hair, forbidden from speaking their languages, and abused in an effort to erase their identity. Richard Henry Pratt, the Army officer who founded the first of the so-called schools, said the point was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”

There were hundreds of these schools and Michigan had several. The federal government’s own investigation has documented hundreds of children who died at them, and found the real number is almost certainly far higher, because the records are incomplete or gone.

In 2021, Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau became the Traverse City Record-Eagle’s first full-time Native American reporter. When she started looking into the state’s boarding schools, she found 10 of her own relatives in the enrollment records, including her great-grandfather and his siblings.

“What the Ancestors Say“, out Sept. 29, is what came of the next two years — archives, survivor accounts, and the drive across Michigan to sit with elders who wanted to tell her what happened.

Nadeau, an Odawa Anishinaabe journalist, joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about what she found, how it changed her, and what a state does with a history it has yet to fully acknowledge.

This story originally aired on Sept. 9, 2026

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Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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On Detroit’s east side there’s a two-story brick house that sat empty for a long time. It took three years of fundraising and about $100,000 to fix it up. It’s called the Healing Hub and kids come there to do their laundry, use a computer, get tutored — and sit in a circle and talk about what’s happened to them.

There’s also a refrigerator in the front yard, another one out back, and a deep freezer inside. Those stay stocked around the clock, and people come overnight — some of them with nowhere else to sleep.

Earlier this year, the calls for that food got to be more than four people could handle. Whatever they put out was gone in a day. So they raised money, and about a week later they hosted a free grocery store pop-up.

The group is Detroit Heals Detroit. It started in 2018 as a writing project in a high school English class: some teenagers and their teacher. Now they want to scale their free grocery store popup across Detroit.

Sirrita Darby, co-founder and executive director of Detroit Heals Detroit, joined Robyn Vincent to ponder a big question: How much can be done to make change outside the system, and how much needs to happen within it?

This story originally aired on Sept. 2, 2026.

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Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

 

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At least 19 Michigan cities and townships have voted to pause new data centers — more than in any other state — and power is the common thread.

The data center going up south of Ann Arbor will use more electricity than a million homes, and it will never shut off. DTE says serving that single project raises the company’s demand by a quarter, while insisting customers won’t pay more or lose power — a claim the state attorney general has asked regulators to reexamine, and one that landed differently last week when storms left more than 450,000 homes in the dark for days.

Lansing hasn’t moved. A bipartisan bill that would freeze data center approvals statewide has sat in committee since February.

State Rep. Jennifer Wortz, a Republican from Quincy, is one of its sponsors. She represents Branch and Hillsdale counties along the Indiana border, where she and her husband run a chicken farm. She joined host Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about who gets to say no when a data center comes to town.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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More than 450,000 DTE Energy customers lost power in last week’s storms. Many of them will not see a dollar for it.

Michigan requires DTE to credit customers $42 a day when the lights stay off. But the rule, written by the Michigan Public Service Commission, works on a sliding scale: the bigger the storm, the longer the wait. In the largest outages, nothing starts until day four. Power was back for most customers before then.

The storms produced three tornadoes, including one that tore across Detroit’s east side Thursday with 115 mph winds and kept going into Windsor — the first inside the city since 1997.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who represents Dearborn and part of Detroit, has spent this year pressing both the company and the state regulators who set that rule. In February, a federal judge fined DTE and a subsidiary $100 million for air pollution at Zug Island. Two days later, regulators approved a $242 million rate increase. In April, the company asked for $474 million more.

Her bill, the Make DTE Pay Act, would raise Clean Air Act penalties on utilities that seek rate increases within two years of an environmental fine. 

Tlaib joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the storm, the rule and the regulators who wrote it.

The Metro contacted DTE Energy and did not receive a response by airtime.

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Detroit voters created a board of civilian commissioners in 1974 with the power to investigate their own police department. Eleven members. Its own staff of investigators.

Since May, those investigators can no longer pull body camera video themselves. The cops can edit the footage and decide what’s relevant. 

Victoria Camille represents District Seven on the oversight board. She’s circulating a petition to get that access back. And Thursday afternoon, she was prepared to vote on whether Detroiters can still speak to her board from home.

Commissioner Camille spoke with The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent about what the police oversight board can actually do to hold cops accountable and whether some of its power has weakened.

Editor’s Note: After this segment aired, the motion to limit public comment options to solely in-person attendees was rescinded. 

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In 2022, Michigan voters wrote reproductive rights into the state constitution. Planned Parenthood of Michigan had fourteen health centers then. Today, it has seven.

Planned Parenthood says it sees nearly 60,000 Michiganders a year. Of the three centers that closed at the end of July, none performed procedural abortions.

They closed on a single day. Lansing, Livonia, Warren.

The Ferndale clinic is still open because Oakland County commissioners voted on Aug. 13 to spend up to $1.5 million to keep it operating through 2028.

Ferndale sits in state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s district. McMorrow, the majority whip of the Michigan Senate, spent the past year running for the U.S. Senate — and suspended her campaign a month before the primary.

McMorrow spoke with The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent about the clinics that have closed in her district and across Michigan, what the state did and didn’t do to stop it, and the U.S. Senate campaign she walked away from.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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In 2001, Detroit opened its polls with a big question on the ballot. Twenty-one people were running for mayor. Dennis Archer was stepping aside after two terms, and Detroit was about to pick somebody new.

But that wasn’t the focus for long. Because the day was Tuesday, Sept. 11, and the twin towers came down that morning. So, WDET had to turn east and stay home at the same time: cover the deadliest attack in the country’s history, and cover a city that was still, that same afternoon, quietly choosing who would lead it.

Jerome Vaughn helped run that coverage. It won an award, though the award isn’t the part he remembers. He remembers that the voting didn’t stop — that was the story underneath the story. “Democracy goes on,” Vaughn said.

He joined WDET in January 1992, when he walked into this building as an intern and — apart from one year away at Michigan Radio — never left. He’s run the WDET newsroom since 2007, through stories that defined Detroit: Rosa Parks; Aretha Franklin; Kwame Kilpatrick; a bankruptcy, and a city working to rebuild. Through it all, he was in the room, or he led someone who was.

He also spent those years mentoring generations of Detroit journalists who credit him with their entry into media, and created the Detroit Evening Report so that Detroiters of color would hear about their own city in their own voices

On his last day at WDET, he joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to look at how the city changed over his three decades in journalism, and what he learned along the way.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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In 2011, Highland Park couldn’t pay its electric bill. So DTE took the streetlights off the poles, about 1,400 of them.

When the lights left, residents put some back. On Avalon Street, that was Shamayim Harris. She’d bought a house there for $3,000. It was months after a hit-and-run driver killed her 2-year-old son. 

She kept building. A park in his name. A garden. A house where kids do homework.

The block became Avalon Village. She became a CNN Hero and a USA Today Woman of the Year. But in Highland Park, she’s Mama Shu.

She’s held office here before, but never the one that runs the city. Last week, she asked her neighbors to change that. She finished second, enough to put her on the November ballot, against incumbent Glenda McDonald.

Mama Shu joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to answer a question Highland Park has been living with for a generation: What can neighbors fix, and what needs a government? 

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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You can get to Coriander Kitchen and Farm by car but some people come by boat, down a canal on Detroit’s far east side, past backyards and boathouses. They tie up at a dock beside the striped umbrellas of the restaurant’s new outdoor bar.

The restaurant sits in what people call the Venice of Detroit — a web of canals running inland off the river through the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood.

Now the city is weighing whether to close those canals off.

A fear of flooding

It’s a flood fix. Nearly every parcel in this neighborhood sits inside a federal flood hazard area, and the city has $20 million to change that. A consultant hired to study the options started work in late June.

Residents have been fighting this idea for years. They fended off a version of it in 2022, and “no canal closures” signs have gone up across the neighborhood again this summer. In June, more than 200 people took boats onto the canals in protest. Their alternative: repair the seawalls instead.

The city says nothing has been decided. Detroit Building Authority Director Tyrone Clifton told Fox 2 in June: “We’re going to look at all the options, and one option could be closing canals, but it has to be a factual option we can bring back to the community so they can understand everything behind it and how it affects them too.” The city of Detroit did not respond to The Metro’s request for comment.

Alison Heeres is chef and co-owner of Coriander Kitchen and Farm, built into a fish marina that once sat empty. Traci Rubin chairs the Jefferson Chalmers WATER Project, a residents’ group that’s been working on this flooding for years.

They joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about what the canals mean to the neighborhood — and what it would cost to keep them open.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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Dr. Abdul El-Sayed says he saw it coming.

“When you launch a campaign and you’re trying to get money out of politics,” he told The Metro, “that invites record amounts of spending against you.”

More than $60 million in outside money went into last week’s Michigan Senate primary, most of it aimed at stopping him. The largest single source was AIPAC, whose super PAC spent about $30 million backing U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens — the most the pro-Israel group has ever put into a congressional primary.

El-Sayed won by fewer than 15,000 votes.

He ran health departments in Detroit and Wayne County, and he now faces Republican Mike Rogers for a seat that could decide control of the Senate. If he wins, he would be the first Muslim to serve there.

He sat down with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent — in the same studio where he announced his run in April of last year.

The money that defined the race

El Sayed came back to the spending repeatedly, including when asked why he lost Detroit. “Ask yourself, if there was no outside spending in this campaign, where do we think votes would have gone?”

He won’t stop saying genocide

Did calling the war in Gaza a genocide drown out his message on health care? He said it isn’t a trade he’ll make: “The job’s not worth it. The work is worth it.”

To Jewish voters who hear his criticism of Israel as criticism of them: “Judaism and the Jewish people are a light unto the world. But Judaism and the Jewish people are different than AIPAC and the Israeli government.”

Black Democrats and the ‘uncommitted’ vote

Many Black Democrats in Michigan blame the 2024 “uncommitted” protest vote, which El-Sayed backed, for costing Kamala Harris the state. Keith Williams, who chairs the state party’s Black Caucus, endorsed Stevens and said El-Sayed was with uncommitted only when it suited him.

“Convenience would have been to say nothing and stay quiet,” El-Sayed said. He noted that Harris endorsed him Friday. “I don’t think she thinks I’m the reason that she lost.”

On mistrust between Black and Arab Detroit, he said Arab and Muslim Michiganders can’t object to anti-Arab racism while tolerating racism toward Black Detroiters. “Standing up against racism is about principle. It’s not about tribalism.”

Data centers and health care

El-Sayed said what he’d write into federal law on data centers, after campaigning against the Oracle and OpenAI project in Saline Township: protections for local water, no utility rate increases, guaranteed union jobs, and money held in escrow before construction begins.

On Medicare for All, he acknowledged a freshman senator can’t deliver it alone. “You can’t get it all in one shot. But politics, as all of us know, doesn’t just move linearly.”

The Metro has invited Republican candidate Mike Rogers on the program several times and has not heard back.

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Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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The polls are open in Michigan today. And by tonight, most of us will have done the thing we’re told is our civic duty, or we won’t have. In the last August primary, less than a quarter of Michigan voters turned out.

So here’s the question: if you voted this morning or you dropped your ballot off at a dropbox last week, have you done your part?

Eric Liu has spent years cultivating the answer to this question. He was a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton and later Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He co-founded Citizen University in Seattle. It runs something called Civic Saturdays, a gathering built like a church service, with singing, and readings, and a sermon. 

His forthcoming book is “Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country”. He joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss what it means to be a good citizen after the voting booth closes.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org.

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For the first time, truckers running between Detroit and Windsor have a choice of bridges — and the two crossings are competing for that business.

A semi pays about half as much to cross the new Gordie Howe Bridge as it does the Ambassador: roughly $35, versus $75.

But that’s a toll — what you pay to drive across. It has nothing to do with what is in the truck, and what is in the truck is about to get expensive. 

On Aug. 19, an additional 50% tariff is set to hit a long list of Canadian goods, among them wine, dairy, cement and hockey sticks. In other words, a business might save $40 getting a load across the river, then pay thousands more for the load itself.

So who actually comes out ahead here?

Mark Lee runs The Lee Group, where he has advised small businesses in this region for nearly 20 years. He joins host Robyn Vincent to talk tolls, tariffs, Delray, and whether Canadian visitors are coming back.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org

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