Gov. Whitmer signed a bill July 21 that authorizes $1.6 billion in new subsidies for developers. The bill has been added to the Mackinac Center’s Michigan business subsidy scorecard.
The state operates a program that awards select developers money to construct their buildings. The developer receives money from state taxes that would otherwise be collected by the state. This includes the income taxes paid by employees that construct the site, sales taxes collected from retail operations in the building, income taxes of people working in the building, and income taxes of people living in the building. A deal can deliver this money to a developer for up to 20 years.
Money authorized for the program was initially capped at $1.6 billion, but lawmakers raised this to $3.2 billion.
Legislators started this program in 2017 and expanded it in 2023. Both actions are already included in the business subsidy scorecard.
Lawmakers are not expanding the program because it’s successful. Indeed, it failed to deliver what lawmakers promised when they began the program. Legislative sponsors promised that the program would grow jobs and increase wages across the state without costing taxpayers anything. It’s clearly fallen short. No, the buildings have not transformed the areas that got them. And when companies move their employees from location in a city to another one in the same city — as they did in Detroit — there are clear taxpayer costs.
Despite what seemed to be clear statutory language in the original law that payments to developers would be public information, the data is not available. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation is representing the Detroit Free Press in order to obtain this information.
The new legislation again requires this information and more to be shared with the public and posted online.
The bill was approved 82-26 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate on July 3, with bipartisan opposition in the House and Republican opposition in the Senate.
This is the first bill added to the Michigan business subsidy scorecard since December 2024. Lawmakers had gone through all of 2025 without authorizing new business subsidies. This was the only year in the 25-year history of the scorecard that lawmakers did not add any business subsidies. So far, $8.6 billion has been authorized during Whitmer’s tenure, up from $2.5 billion authorized by her predecessor, Gov. Rick Snyder.
