I was there. Quite a likable and believable guy. The Business School hosted the event, but moved it to a larger auditorium on campus b/c of a huge RSVP response. I was running a bit late but when I got there an usher showed me to all the way in the front in the second row! Article from the Detroit Free Press follows:
I was there. Quite a likable and believable guy. The Business School hosted the event, but moved it to a larger auditorium on campus b/c of a huge RSVP response. I was running a bit late but when I got there an usher showed me to all the way in the front in the second row!
The bar is set pretty low for Michigan, Gov.-elect Rick Snyder learned recently when he attended a new governors conference hosted by the National Governors Association.
There, he was handed a briefing book on how his state stacked up nationally, including a forecast by the bond rating agency Moody’s which suggested Michigan job growth over the next four years would rank 50th (out of 53 or 54; Snyder said it included Puerto Rico and a few other territories).
“I looked at that …to me this is a piece of fiction,” he said this afternoon in an address to business students at Wayne State University. “This is not going to happen.”
Instead, Snyder said, “We’re going to change those numbers.” The Moody’s forecast is going to be posted on the wall in his new office as “a benchmark to beat.”
The governor-elect gave few hints, however, about how he plans to turn things around.
We have to change our attitudes, Snyder said, raise our expectations and stop “fighting with each other. It’s time to say as Michiganders, we can win together.”
In Lansing, state government has to stop focusing on how to pay for what it’s doing and has always done, and figure out whether what’s being done is needed and effective.
That’s going to mean change and a commitment to measuring results, he said.
Snyder, the first CPA elected governor in Michigan, asked the WSU students to stick around and help make it happen, and to prove Moody’s wrong.
Contact Dawson Bell at 517-372-8661 or dbell@freepress.com
