DBusiness Magazine
System Failure
The mission of senior care facilities to ease residents’ twilight years turned into a nightmare after state leaders failed to adequately separate COVID-19 patients from healthy individuals.
When COVID-19 started roiling through nursing homes last winter, Cecelia Payne had more
at stake than most. And her worst fears soon became reality. Her husband, Arnold Brown, 78, died of COVID-19 on April 24, 2020, at McLaren Macomb Hospital in Mt. Clemens after being transferred there from the Martha T. Berry Medical Care Facility.
Brown, a former manufacturing tooling engineer before a stroke disabled him, had been in the Mt. Clemens skilled nursing facility since 2006. His roommate at the medical care facility died, as well. “I really do feel that he got it from a staff member,” Payne, of Macomb Township, says of her husband’s illness. “Especially when I learned his roommate had it, too.”
Who’s new in the Michigan House of Representatives
Updated Jan 05, 2021;
Posted Jan 05, 2021
The House Chamber pictured at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing on Thursday, April 25, 2019.Neil Blake
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The new legislative session brings with it substantial turnover for the Michigan House of Representatives, which will have 28 new lawmakers serving their first full terms in office.
Most of the freshman class will fill House seats vacated by members who hit their six-year term limit serving in the state House, although some defeated incumbents or are replacing members who sought other offices last fall.
Speaker-elect Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, and Democratic Leader-elect Donna Lasinski, D-Scio Township, will fill the leadership slots left open by the departures of former Reps. Lee Chatfield and Christine Greig.
LANSING Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she is “skeptical” of legislation passed with bipartisan support during the Legislature’s lame duck session aimed at giving significant tax breaks to Grand Rapids-based grocer Meijer for the purchase and retention of automation equipment.
Whitmer must decide whether to sign Senate Bills 1149, 1150 and 1153, which remove sales tax from the purchase of automated material handling systems and remove personal property tax from such systems, once installed.
The bills have reached Whitmer s desk as the state is facing declining revenues and increased costs during the coronavirus pandemic, and as Michigan grocers are seeing sharply increased profits. Still, the bills have support from what many would consider an unlikely source the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that represents tens of thousands of grocery workers in Michigan.