The fallout from Detroit’s toxic demolition dirt scandal continues to grow months after former Mayor Mike Duggan left office, with the city now testing more than 650 sites and spending millions more to measure the scope of a crisis that was announced during the final days of his administration.
A new poll of likely Democratic primary voters in Michigan shows the race for U.S. Senate remains wide open, with Abdul El-Sayed, Haley Stevens, and Mallory McMorrow effectively tied and a large share of voters still undecided.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson is rolling out a plan to impose strict new safeguards on data centers in Michigan to address concerns over rising energy costs, environmental impacts, and transparency. As artificial intelligence increases the demand for massive, energy-devouring facilities, many residents across the state are pushing back, saying the projects will harm communities […]
Michigan Democrats are launching their first digital ad of the 2026 U.S. Senate race, targeting Republican candidate Mike Rogers for supporting efforts to block the Gordie Howe International Bridge
As Mike Duggan works to win over union voters in his independent bid for governor, records show he oversaw the layoffs of union hospital workers while becoming a millionaire at the Detroit Medical Center.
For years, the billionaire Moroun family fought to stop the publicly owned Gordie Howe International Bridge from breaking their monopoly at the Detroit-Windsor border.
A new statewide poll shows Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson opening up a narrow lead in Michigan’s 2026 governor’s race, while independent candidate Mike Duggan is losing ground, even after allies and pro-Trumpers poured seven figures into boosting his campaign.
If you live in southeast Michigan, chances are you have a DTE story — the kind where your food spoiled during an outage, your pipes froze while you waited for power, or the number on your energy bill last month spurred disbelief.
The data backs up that frustration. According to a report from the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, the state ranked last in 2023 for average time to restore power after an outage, taking roughly 12 hours per incident —more than double that of any neighboring state.
Now, a grassroots effort in Ann Arbor is trying to change the equation.
The group Ann Arbor for Public Power has launched a petition drive to put a question on the November 2026 ballot: whether to establish a governing board for a future city-owned electric utility. The group needs approximately 6,500 signatures to qualify for the ballot.
What happens next
If approved by voters, the measure would not immediately purchase DTE’s infrastructure. Instead, it would create a nine-member public utility board to lay the groundwork for an eventual transition away from the investor-owned utility. A separate vote would be required in the future to authorize the actual acquisition of DTE’s poles and wires.
Michigan already has roughly 40 municipal utilities in cities like Lansing, Traverse City, Holland, and Wyandotte. But none of them were formed by acquiring infrastructure from a private utility. Ann Arbor would be the first city in the state to attempt it. Organizers believe success there could open the door for other Michigan cities, including Detroit, to follow.
Sean Higgins, president of Ann Arbor for Public Power, joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss why his group believes public ownership is the path to cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable energy for Ann Arbor residents.
DTE Energy has not responded to WDET’s request for comment about this effort.
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.
WDET strives to cover what’s happening in your community. As a public media institution, we maintain our ability to explore the music and culture of our region through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
The three Democrats vying for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat agree that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has grown increasingly brutal under President Donald Trump, but they are sharply divided over whether the agency can be fixed at all.
President Trump is continuing to push lies about the 2020 presidential election in Detroit, and using his unsupported claims of fraud to push for federal oversight of midterms.
During an executive order signing to end the government shutdown, Trump told reporters he thinks Republicans should take election rights away from some states that the president did not win in 2020. He used three prominent swing states as examples.
“Take a look at Detroit… take a look at Pennsylvania… take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that… horrible corruption on elections.”
Prominent Republican strategist and Trump-ally Steve Bannon has said ICE agents would be sent to polling places in this year’s midterm elections.
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey says any attempt to take over voting would be partisan politics at its worst. Winfrey says the results were fair and transparent then and subsequent elections have been, too. The U.S. Constitution says states decide how to conduct elections. Congress can enact some regulations, but the president has no control over elections.
Sheffield signed an order last week aimed at improving transparency in the city’s assessment process and requiring the office to meet national standards.
Professor Bernadette Athutahene says the order does not specify how to conduct an assessment ratio study, which is required by the property tax reform ordinance.
“We thought that the executive order would say, you know, to do a mass appraisal report, and those two things are different. The mass appraisal report, you can’t apply Iao standards to a mass appraisal report.”
The coalition did praise Sheffield for requiring the office follow the ratio standards of the International Association of Assessing Officers. The coalition published a revised version of the executive order with more parameter specifics for a property assessment.
ICE detention facility proposed in Romulus
A 500 bed ICE detention facility has been proposed for Romulus, but officials say it’s not set in stone. Romulus was among 23 locations nationwide identified in a recent Bloomberg report detailing the Trump administration’s plan to buy warehouses and convert them into ICE detention centers.
The Washington Post reported in December that a warehouse in Highland Park was being looked at as a potential location. The Mayor of Highland Park has recently said the city was not interested at all and the city lacks the space for such a plan.
Listen to the latest episode of the “Detroit Evening Report” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
Support local journalism.
WDET strives to cover what’s happening in your community. As a public media institution, we maintain our ability to explore the music and culture of our region through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who is running as an independent gubernatorial candidate, is refusing to say how he would handle federal immigration enforcement if elected governor, even as public opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement is surging nationwide.
Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican running for U.S. Senate, is again facing accusations that he’s more of a Florida resident than a Michigan one, after resuming campaign activity from his Cape Coral home for more than a week in November and recently joking on a right-wing radio show that he would rather be “on the beach in Florida” as Michigan braced for a winter storm.
The University of Michigan will partly finance faculty research projects amid cuts to federal research funding, the university said.
The research funding program will begin this month and support projects across all three UM campuses — Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint, according to the announcement Friday in the University Record, a university-run faculty-staff news source. The program is meant to provide short-term support to help maintain research continuity, support research staff and remain competitive for future outside funding, UM said in the article.
A similar but separate program will be run through the university’s medical school.
“This program is not intended to replace federal funding or create a long-term safety net,” said Arthur Lupia, vice president for research and innovation in the article. “It is a targeted, one-time investment to help outstanding U-M researchers transition in a time of change and continue to do important work that serves the people of Michigan and the world.”
Researchers in charge of projects, known as principal investigators, can request up to one year of partial support under the program, the university said. Researchers can apply for up to 35% of the average annual direct cost that was originally requested in the researcher’s federal proposal, with a maximum of $150,000 per year. Central university support will cover up to half of the research cost, with the rest covered by the researcher’s school, college or unit.
All money must be spent at UM, the university said.
UM is among the nation’s top public universities in research spending. In 2024, UM’s annual research expenditures reached a record $2.04 billion — of that amount, federal funding accounted for $1.17 billion, for over half of the university’s total.
UM anticipates receiving $163 million less from the federal government through fiscal year 2026, budget projections approved by the Board of Regents in June show.
Michigan State University announced a similar funding program last April, called the Jenison Fund. The fund would provide strategic, targeted, time-limited assistance to graduate students who have lost funding and to faculty members experiencing disruptions in research funding, according to MSU.
Michigan State President Kevin Guskiewicz said a total of up to $5 million annually for the next three years would be allocated to the fund.
To date, the fund has awarded resources to 35 projects, MSU spokesperson Amber McCann said.
In October, Guskiewicz announced that 74 federally funded projects at MSU were ended by the federal government, with a multiyear impact estimated at $104 million. At the time, 86 projects were paused or affected by stop-work orders.
A flag blows in the wind atop the Michigan Union on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Mich., Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Emily Elconin)
With proposals of large-scale data centers spreading across Michigan, U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Thursday released what he called “terms of engagement” aimed at protecting communities from higher utility bills, grid strain, and environmental harm.
Mary Sheffield, a political phenom whose rise began when she was elected to Detroit City Council at age 26, made history Sunday when she was sworn in as the city’s first woman mayor.
U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers has assembled a campaign team of extremist pastors and activists who have long opposed LGBTQ+ rights and promoted false claims about election fraud, a Metro Times’s review shows.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan had an opportunity this weekend to say whether he thinks President Donald Trump’s threats of jailing and executing political opponents has gone too far.
Months after federal officials demanded voter data from Colorado and several other states, Secretary of State Jena Griswold and several peers are trying to determine what exactly the Trump administration is doing with the data.
“As Secretaries of State and chief election officials of our respective states, we write to express our immense concern with recent reporting that the Department of Justice has shared voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, and to seek clarity on whether DOJ and DHS actively misled election officials regarding the uses of voter data,” Griswold and nine other secretaries of state wrote in a letter sent Tuesday morning.
It was addressed to Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.
Bondi’s Justice Department sent letters to Colorado and other states in the spring asking for voter rolls and, in some cases, it has sought more detailed data, including partial social security numbers and birth dates.
The state officials’ new letter asks Bondi and Noem whether the voter rolls were shared with Noem’s department, which has served as the tip of the spear in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, or any others. The secretaries of state who signed on are all Democrats.
Colorado provided some of the information requested by the Justice Department as required by law, Griswold said in an interview Monday. Other states, particularly those tasked with turning over more extensive voter data, refused; six of them have since been sued by the federal government.
Griswold said federal officials had provided shifting answers on whether the Homeland Security Department had been given access to the data that had been turned over to the DOJ, including from Colorado.
Heather Honey, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told the secretaries of state in September that DHS hadn’t received or asked for the data, according to the secretaries’ letter. But the next day, the agency confirmed to Stateline that it was collaborating with the Justice Department to “scrub aliens from voter rolls.”
Six weeks later, on Halloween, the agency posted an administrative update indicating it was expanding a tool — used previously to ensure federal benefits don’t go to immigrants without proper legal status — to check voting rolls.
“We would like the attorney general and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to explain what they’re doing collecting mass voter data on American voters,” Griswold said. “It also looks like the DOJ or DHS misled secretaries of state.”
Attempts to reach both federal departments for comment Tuesday were not successful.
Griswold said some of her staff members also had a brief conversation with officials from the Justice Department’s criminal division earlier this summer. The federal officials asked if Colorado election officials had a way to report election crimes to the state attorney general, Griswold’s office said. State officials replied that they did, and the conversation ended.
The state officials request a response from Bondi and Noem by Dec. 1.
In addition to Colorado, the secretaries of state from California, Minnesota, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Maine, Vermont, Oregon and Washington also signed the letter.
Two-year-old Alessandra Caffa holds her toy bunny while watching her father Juan Pablo Caffa vote for the first time after recently becoming an American citizen, at a voting center in the McNichols Civic Center Building in downtown Denver on Nov. 4, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Login
