In 2020, 15 Republicans tried to cast Michigan’s electoral votes for President Trump, even through President Biden won the state by 154,000. In this episode of MichMash, WDET’s Cheyna Roth and Gongwer News Service’s Zach Gorchow break down how the legal case against these electors unraveled.

Then, Executive Director of the Michigan Association of Counties Steve Currie joins the show to talk about how the state budget affects local governments.

Subscribe to MichMash on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Detroit Department of Public Works announced a new effort to keep the city clean with a recycling pilot program at bus stops.

The department also unveiled two electric garbage trucks that will be used to collect recycling.   

The pilot program will place 800 new recycling cans at the bus stops.  

Public Works Deputy Director Sam Krassenstein says bottles and cans are the number one thing people throw away when waiting for the bus.  “And that’s what we’re trying to capitalize on by diverting that to keep that out of the landfill and keep that out of the streets.”  

Krassenstein says the pilot aims to increase recycling rates from 45% to nearly 100%.   

The $500,000 investment was funded by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, DTE, and City Council.   

Additional headlines for Thursday, September 11, 2025

Non profit offers free homecoming dress drawing

High school students in southeastern Michigan could get a free homecoming dress this weekend. 

Alison Vaughn is the CEO of Jackets for Jobs.  

She says her non profit and Comerica bank are hosting a homecoming dress giveaway on the lower level of the Samaritan Center in Detroit this weekend.  

“Homecoming is one of the young girls’ biggest moments of high school, and so we wanted to make them feel like Cinderella and the belle of the ball, if you will, and make them feel good and confident. And we know those events are very costly.”  

Vaughn says anyone can come get a free homecoming dress and accessories from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday or from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday at the Samaritan Center on 5555 Conner Street.  

Corewell terminates gender affirming care for minors

Corewell Health is the latest Michigan hospital to end gender affirming care for minors. The hospital announced it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or hormone therapy to minors because of “the serious risk of legal and regulatory action.”

That pressure is coming from the Trump Administration. Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan’s hospital system, announced it will also stop gender affirming care last month.  

Corewell Health made a similar announcement in February this year before backtracking due to protest.

Dearborn improving business exteriors with grant funding

The City of Dearborn is celebrating the completion of the first façade improvement project on Warren Avenue at Nadia’s Pharmacy.

The city’s initiative awards up to $200,000 in Community Development Block grant funding, with a 10% business match to improve the exterior of selected businesses.

The goal of the project is to modernize, enhance, and create a cohesive business aesthetic along Warren Avenue between Lonyo Avenue and Greenfield Rd.

Nadia’s Pharmacy is the first to complete repairs. 

Listen to the latest episode of the “Detroit Evening Report” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

The University of Michigan is ending gender-affirming care for minors, leaving an untold number of families with fewer options and greater uncertainty.

Gender-affirming care for minors is legal in Michigan, and major medical and mental-health associations recognize it as best practice. Research links it to lower depression and suicide risk. 

But a Michigan Medicine spokesperson said in a prepared statement that the risks of offering this care are now too high. This comes after it received a federal subpoena as part of a criminal and civil investigation into gender-affirming care for minors.

“We recognize the gravity and impact of this decision for our patients and our community. We are working closely with all those impacted,” the statement reads.

The announcement represents a profound loss for families. For some young people, it means a place they felt safe and could trust is closing its doors. And the consequences are real: more anxiety, more depression, greater risk of suicide.

Equality Michigan’s Emme Zanotti joined Robyn Vincent to discuss the impacts on Michigan families. Zanotti, a trans woman, also took off her advocate hat to reflect on the personal reverberations she feels at this moment.

Michigan Medicine did not respond to an email request about the number of patients who will be affected and how the hospital plans to assist patients during this transition. 

Editor’s Note: After this conversation aired, Corewell Health, a major healthcare provider in Michigan, also announced the end of its gender-affirming care. 

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As Michigan schools return to classes this week, the uncertainty of the state budget is causing some schools to cut programs just in case there are any issues with funding. In this episode of MichMash, Gongwer News Service’s Zach Gorchow and Alethia Kasben discuss what needs to be done in order for the legislature to make the October 1 deadline.

Then, Robert McCann, Executive Director for the K-12 Alliance of Michigan, joins the show to talk about how the uncertainty of the budget is affecting school districts.

Subscribe to MichMash on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode: 

• How is budget uncertainty affecting schools across Michigan?
• How do educational benchmarks affect school budgets?

In June, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that they wanted to rescind the Roadless Rule, arguing that it created needless obstacles to land management. However, many conservationists say reversing this decision puts millions of forest acreage at risk.

The Roadless Rule, established in 2001, protects about 60 million acres of National Forest land all across the U.S., including Michigan. These areas have no roads, logging, or mining. Outdoors lovers, conservationists, and others value these lands for their natural wilderness. 

When the rule was first proposed, it received over 1.5 million public comments in support, showing strong public backing.

Effects in Michigan

If the Roadless Rule is repealed, 16,000 acres in Michigan could be harmed. Most of Michigan’s roadless areas are in the Upper Peninsula including the Hiawatha National Forest, as well as parts of the Lower Peninsula, in the Manistee National Forest and Ottawa National Forest.

Anna Medema is the Sierra Club’s Associate Director of Legislative and Administrative Advocacy for forests and public land. She says keeping the Roadless Rule in effect is vitally important. “Once you build a road into a forest area it could take decades or centuries if you were to decommission these roads and try to let it regrow wildly,” Medema says. “Those wild characteristics are really rare.”

Trump administration officials say that removing the protections could help reduce wildfires by facilitating forest management. However, research shows that wildfires tend to happen more often in areas with roads because of human activity, negating potential benefits of road access.

In Michigan, wildfires are generally less common and less serious. Additionally, building roads and logging could actually raise the risk of fires.

The public can comment on the Roadless Rule here until September 19. 

This story is part of WDET’s ongoing series, The Detroit Tree Canopy Project.

Visitors sometimes leave stuff behind at Great Lakes beaches. Broken pieces from plastic toys or bits of styrene from coolers can get lost in the sand.  

One of the most common pieces of plastic trash found are cigarette butts. 

Here’s some background on that. 

Four years ago, I interviewed people who volunteered through the Alliance for the Great Lakes Adopt-a-Beach program. They were cleaning up trash at Duck Lake State Park. 

Lake Michigan is connected to Duck Lake by a small channel. When the big lake gets high, plastic trash is pushed into the smaller lake by wind and waves. Then when the water recedes, a lot of the plastic gets caught in the vegetation on either side of that connecting channel. A lot of plastic. 

I visited the Duck Lake State Park beach again two years ago and did another microplastics story, which included information about recovering plastic as a recyclable resources for a line of outdoor wear. 

This year, I went back to Duck Lake for a third time. 

It had been raining earlier in the morning. When I arrived, it was a little cloudy, but there was a nice breeze coming off Lake Michigan. 

My plan was to spend an hour picking up trash along the road adjacent to the beach and on the beach itself. I wanted to see if there was a pattern of a lot of cigarette butts on the beach. 

I had a small bag for cigarette butts. I also took a larger garbage bag, because I figured I’d pick up the other trash I found.  

I was going to compare this beach with another one in the afternoon, so I decided to limit the time to one hour.  

In that time, I picked up 158 cigarette butts.  

I had thought I might find 60. Obviously, my estimate was way off. 

An employee at the park told me some people park their cars next to the beach to enjoy the view of Lake Michigan, and then toss their cigarette butts on the ground while they’re there. There’s a bit of irony there, right? 

The fibers in those cigarette filters can quickly break down into microplastics and that’s not good. 

“Wildlife can be ingesting it. It can end up in our drinking water source for 40 million people. It’s also just, you know, adding to the litter on the beach itself, of course, having impact on the enjoyment of the beach, things like that,” said Olivia Reda. She organizes beach cleanups for the Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

“Eighty-six percent of the pieces that we find in a given season are composed of either partially or fully of plastic. So, cigarette butts, again being part of that problem, you know, breaking down into small pieces, less than 5 millimeters, end up in the Great Lakes, or they can end up in the Great Lakes,” Reda said. 

Back in 2018, I interviewed Mary Kosuth, from Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis. She found microplastics in every municipal water supply her research checked in cities that pull water from the lakes.

She also found microplastics in Great Lakes beer, although the amount didn’t necessarily correspond with the microplastics in the tap water supply. That might be because the grains used in the beer often come in sacks made of woven polypropylene. 

She said even if plastic itself is inert, additives or chemicals absorbed from the environment could be harmful to human health. 

“We found in marine environments, at least, these plastic particles are very good at absorbing chemicals from the water,” Kosuth said, adding “So things like PCB, DDT, brominated flame retardants, things like these can actually form a coating on the outside of the plastic particles, which means that we would be ingesting higher amounts of that.” 

Is that really that much of an issue in the Great Lakes? A study out of the Rochester Institute of Technology estimates 22 million pounds of plastic debris enters the Great Lakes from the U.S. and Canada each year. 

My day on the road was not finished. I still had more trash to pick up. My next stop was Ludington State Park about an hour away. It’s a much bigger beach and has a lot more visitors.  

One of the things that could help is more bins for litter and recycling. That’s what Andrea Densham has found. She’s Senior Policy Advisor for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.  

She says scolding people who smoke for throwing their cigarette butts on the beach doesn’t help much. She says a different approach is better. For example, signs at the park encouraging people to join together to keep the beach clean are helpful. 

“Maybe the best answer is both signage, reminding folks that birds and children enjoy the beaches and that having cigarette butts is really damaging.” 

That is, damaging to both the experience at the beach and to the environment.  

She said having more trash cans at or near beaches would help. 

“There aren’t actually enough in many places, both recycling and litter bins, right by the beaches. And that causes some unnecessary eye-trash, I think.” 

Densham said receptacles for cigarettes and cigars are also needed.  

Overall she said all plastic trash is a major problem and society needs to eliminate single-use plastic products as much as possible. 

After wandering around Ludington State Park’s expansive beach for a while, I only found four cigarette butts. The road to the park runs along the beach for about three miles. There are places to park your car along the way. I found about a half-dozen cigarette butts at each of those places.  

I talked to a guy who’d been walking the beach and he said he only saw a couple of cigarette butts along the way. So, not a lot of that kind of trash compared to what I found at Duck Lake State Park earlier in the day. 

So, I tracked down the Park Manager, Jim Gallie, and asked him about that. 

“At least once per month, we have volunteers that come out to the park and they have segments of the beach that they walk and the pick up litter. They pick up cigarette butts, any debris that they find. Anything that they find that is larger than something they can handle, they report that to us. So, we work closely with the Friends of Ludington State Park on that. And that’s, I think at least one reason why are beaches are in pretty good shape,” he said. 

Not all the state, county, township, and city beaches have that extra help on a regular basis. 

But there are annual cleanups and a Great Lakes-wide effort is coming up. 

On September 20th is International Coastal Cleanup. The Alliance for the Great Lakes expect thousands of its Adopt-a-Beach volunteers to clear the beaches of trash at sites across the Great Lakes. I imagine that will include tens of thousands of cigarette butts. If you want to help, take latex or nitrile gloves with you. Picking up cigarette butts is kind of nasty and smelly. Trust me on that one. 

A couple strolls the beach near the main swimming area at Ludington State Park.

Nearly two months after the original deadline, House Republicans passed a budget giving the legislature a month to negotiate ahead of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1. In this episode of MichMash, WDET’s Cheyna Roth and Gongwer News Service’s Alethia Kasben discuss what was included in this version of the budget. 

Then, they’re joined by Gongwer News Service’s administration reporter Lily Guiney to talk about the new state superintendent and drama within the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. 

Subscribe to MichMash on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode: 

• As the Oct. 1 deadline approaches, how’s the state budget looking?
• Why was Dr. Glenn M. Maleyko chosen to be Michigan’s next state superintendent?
• What’s going on with Michigan DNR leadership?

Apple lovers will have plenty to pick this fall. 

The Michigan Apple Committee estimates growers will harvest about 30 million bushels of fruit in 2025. That’s about 1.2 billion pounds. 

Good weather helps

The committee’s executive director, Diane Smith, says the weather has been perfect for growing apples.

“We’ve had a little hail here and there, but generally that stays localized and doesn’t affect the overall crop,” she says. 

Michigan has more than 850 family-owned apple farms and over 17 million trees covering 38,000 acres. 

Smith says new farming methods have yielded several bumper crops.

“We’ve gone to more high-density planting,” she says. “So instead of having 250 trees to an acre, you can have up to 2,000 trees per acre.”

The future could look different

While the weather has been ideal, Smith says climate change could eventually affect the industry.

“As temperatures continue to rise, we’re seeing less rain at different times during the summer,” she says. “In 10 or 15 years, there could be a shift in some of the varieties that we grow.”

Michigan is one of the top three apple producing states, behind Washington. It competes with New York for second place. 

Smith says the industry also competes with other fruits, and that could take a bite out of sales.

“People aren’t eating as many apples as maybe they used to,” she says. “You go into the grocery store, and you can get different products year-round that maybe before you couldn’t get.”

Labor is another challenge

Smith says most Michigan apple farms rely on migrant workers to pick the fruit in the fall. She says that’s costly, but necessary.

“We just don’t have enough domestic workers that want to do the harvest,” she says. “Not many people just want a job for six weeks.”

Smith says she is not aware of any immigration raids at Michigan apple farms this summer. She also says tariffs have had little impact, though some producers face higher prices for imported chemicals to spray their crops. But she says most growers utilize organic methods.

“They don’t want to spray unless they absolutely have to,” she says.

Last week, the lights went dim on a renewable energy program with big promise for the planet and your pocketbook. 

Michigan was set to receive $156 million from Solar for All. 

The money would have helped low-income households add rooftop or community solar, paid for battery storage and basic upgrades like panels, wiring, or roof work, and funded workforce training and community outreach. Households were projected to save about 20% on electric bills—roughly $400 annually. 

The Environmental Protection Agency terminated the $7 billion program after Congress rescinded the funds via President Trump’s new tax-and-spending law. Lawmakers are contesting the move, but for now, projects are paused, and families who expected relief from high energy bills will keep waiting. 

Oakland County Commission Chair Dave Woodward has supported local solutions that lower residents’ costs and give businesses tools to adopt renewable energy. He joined Robyn Vincent to discuss what a real path forward could look like in the absence of federal support.

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Picture this: you’re on Mackinac Island having a grand old time at the Grand Hotel, and then boom, a mystery is a foot.

Someone has been murdered during the Mackinac Policy Conference and treachery begins—and if you’re familiar with Mackinac Island, you know you’re not leaving unless it’s by boat or ferry.  

That’s the premise of a new book called “The Grand Secret” that depicts schemes, betrayal, and, of course, a high profile murder. The book also highlights the beauty of Michigan and its landmarks while going through the twists and turns of a murder-mystery.

“The Grand Secret” is the work of author Ed McKenna. The Downriver native and Michigan State Graduate has been writing for more than 20 years. 

The father of two joined The Metro to talk more about “The Grand Secret” and why writing matters.

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