Kurt Heise
Congressman, Michigan House of Representatives
Background:
I’m 48 years old. I’m a State Representative for the 20th House District which is Plymouth, Northville and Eastern Canton in Wayne County, Michigan. I’ve lived in Wayne County all of my life. I was born in Dearborn and then I wanted to become an attorney. So I went to the University of Michigan and studied political science and went to Wayne State Law School. I wanted to be a municipal lawyer, a city attorney, or work in local or county government. I actually went back to law school and picked up an additional law degree in Labor Law. So I had no intention of getting involved in environmental law or policy but one of my first clients was the city of Dearborn Heights which is a city that has a variety of environmental issues including water and sewer issues.
In addition to that, we had an in incinerator, so we had air quality problems.We had landfill issues, we had land resource issues, we had storm water management problems, and we had flooding. We were in the Rouge River watershed which is the largest watershed in Michigan in terms of population and in terms of storm water runoff, with sewage entering the waterways. I became involved in environmental issues only 2 years after I got out of law school. I started with labor work and negotiated labor contracts but I was getting more and more into the environmental scene.
I then became the Mayor’s Deputy in Dearborn Heights and I served in that role for 5 years. During that time, I became heavily involved in a variety of environmental issues in Southeast Michigan. Among them was the development of the storm water management plan in the Rouge River watershed, which was being mandated at that time by the EPA and the Federal Judge John Feikens. I represented the city as their attorney, policy maker and mayor deputy.
In 2003 I left the city, and became the Environment Director for Wayne County. I had developed a good reputation as somebody who was a go-getter. I knew the issues, I knew the law and I was able to work very well with my neighboring communities. I was a very strong advocate for representing the interests of local governments in these many different environmental issues that we have, and so I made a name for myself in that area. I was hired by Bob Ficano, who is the soon to be former CEO of Wayne County and I worked for him for 6 and a half years.
Because of the politics of Wayne County, I eventually lost my job. I think I rubbed too many people the wrong way after a while. I went back into the law practice and within a matter of a year became State Representative for the 20th House District. So really I’ve been practicing law now for almost 25 years and most of that has been spent in the environmental policy field. I also taught at the University of Michigan Dearborn and I still teach part time at Wayne State University and Eastern Michigan University. I created a class called “Environmental Politics and Policy of Southeast Michigan” which is basically a graduate level class that focuses a lot on water policy and the political and legal aspects of environmental public policy in Southeast Michigan. I have tried, even as a State Rep. to be active in environmental issues usually involving the Detroit Water and Sewer Department but also things like the Pet Coke controversy which has been very big in our area, storm water management issues and water quality. So it’s been a pretty interesting ride since I got out of law school in 1991.
Can you explain the Pet Coke controversy?
Right now in Southeast Michigan we have this issue involving “Pet Coke.” Its short for petroleum coke and it is a byproduct of the oil and shale industry. Oil and shale is mined in Canada and the Northern US and then is sent to Michigan. There’s an oil refinery in Southwest Detroit that turns this into oil. But there’s a byproduct, and the byproduct is a very dusty, rocky substance kind of like coal, except it’s more of a powder. The way it’s being stored and the way it’s being handled around here is totally unregulated. I worked with some of my colleagues to write a bill that would provide some common sense storage and handling rules. I introduced that bill about 4 months ago, but we’re at the end of our legislative session right now so it’s something I might want to pick up again next year.
How do you people react to your training as an environmental lawyer and alignment as a Republican?
It’s totally baffling to people because Republicans unfortunately do not embrace the environment as a leading issue politically. We run away from it, we don’t get it and we should really own it. Teddy Roosevelt was probably one of the greatest pro-environment, pro-conservation, pro-national resource presidents that we ever had and obviously he was a Republican. We’ve just kind of lost sight of that over the years and I think especially in a state like Michigan with our emphasis on “Pure Michigan” and the Great Lakes, tourism and agriculture, water is the common denominator and environmental protection is as well. We aren’t going to agree with our Democratic colleagues on everything but I think we concede way too much to them. I think I’ve demonstrated through my career that I’ve worked out bipartisan policies at the local, county and state levels. I worked for a democrat CEO for 6 and a half years. I worked for a Democrat Mayor and there’s ways of protecting the environment in a common sense way. I think that I demonstrated that there are reasonable regulations and initiatives. For example, even before I got elected, I helped create the Watershed Alliance Act of 2005. That was a law that allows communities to work together to share resources, save money, and develop common water resource plans for a region with the approval of government, so that we’re not having to reinvent the wheel around the state when it comes to water quality protection. You have to be creative and you have to have an open mind.
What environmental accomplishment are you most proud of?
As a legislator right now, I’ve started a lot of different initiatives. I wrote a bill to create a regional water authority for the Detroit Sewer and Water department. Many of those ideas were taken by the Federal court system and they created their own authority without the legislature. But, I still see some elements of my handiwork in those plans. The Pet Coke issue I think will be a law at some point, I just ran out of time. But some of my best environmental work was done before I became a legislator. I told you about the Watershed Alliance Act. I also worked with legislators to pass some bills to amend the Michigan Drain Code. Long before I became a legislator, I was also the co-chair of the Michigan Groundwater Conservation Advisory Council. We wrote all of the rules and regulations for groundwater withdrawal. We also dealt with the whole issue of stealing the Great Lake’s water. I had a major hand in developing Michigan’s policy on that issue which was ultimately incorporated into Federal and international law.
What is the current state of groundwater removal in Michigan? Are we selling our water to other states?
We are not giving our water to Arizona. However in a few very limited cases, mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois, we are allowing water withdrawals from the Great Lakes to benefit local communities in the Lake Michigan watershed. So they are taking water out of the traditional watershed. It’s not the end of the world, but it does create a precedent that I know some people are weary of. But the good news is that the United States and Canada, the provinces of Ontario, Quebec and the Great Lakes states, we have formed a compact, a signed agreement between these governmental entities. We now have a common set of standards for water withdrawal from the state of Michigan. And number one, it has to be done within our boundaries, you can still allow for things like bottled water. That’s how this whole thing started, the controversy over water withdrawal started with Nestle. They opened a water bottling plant in Michigan and they started taking water out of the groundwater supply and that’s really when all hell broke loose. Then they wanted the state to start developing some policies.
So, again the good news is, other state’s aren’t stealing our water, and what people also need to understand is that water, unlike oil and gas and fossil fuels is a renewable resource. Water is an economic asset for the Great Lakes region if it is used in a responsible way. I think what we’ve demonstrated there is that you can strike a balance between reasonable use for people, industry and agriculture and still protect the resource. Now, it’s kind of funny, back when I was on this commission, everyone thought the Great Lakes were drying up, but after one bad winter, now we’re worried that the lakes are going to overflow with all of the high water we are getting now. It just goes to show that groundwater is a renewable resource, it does recharge. Water does replace itself. We cannot abuse it, but we can work together to come up with some good regulations that are now the international standards for the Great Lakes. I believe that Nestle is still bottling water, but they are doing it within guidelines. And they aren’t the only water bottling company in Michigan. It’s just that what made them controversial was that they came in, they were new, and they foreign. Nestle is a French company. That bothered a lot of people and so there was this concern about an international company coming in and stealing our water and putting it in bottle, even though companies like Absopure and others have been doing this in Michigan for decades, but they didn’t really pay attention to that I guess.
What are some of the environmental issues facing Southeast Michigan?
The Rouge is a very diverse watershed. For most of us in the Northwest portions of Wayne County, the water quality is actually pretty good. I have creeks in my neighborhood and a couple of years ago I would go out with my daughters and play in the creek and we would be grabbing crayfish and seeing little minnows and stuff like that. We can measure the health of the watershed through continuous water quality monitoring and through frog listening. There’s the annual frog and toad survey where we have volunteers go out and listen for various type of frogs of toads. In the winter time, Friends of the Rouge goes out and collects stone flies, which are these embryonic flies that are kind of like dragonflies that hibernate in the water during the winter. We do that because flies, minnows and frog noise are indicators of the circle of life that’s in the watershed. If you can’t find these little critters and listen to the frogs, that means that they aren’t alive. If they aren’t alive, that means that fish, bigger fish, birds, ducks, geese, coyotes aren’t going to survive either because that’s the food chain.
What we’ve found currently and we’ve shared these data with the EPA and others, is that the water quality in the Rouge river, overall, from Detroit out to Plymouth and all the way north into Birmingham is definitely better than it was 10 years ago and way better than it was even 20 years ago. That’s more of a result of storm water management, getting more pesticides out of the water and identifying and cleaning up what’s known as illicit discharges. That’s basically a fancy word for sewer pipes that are broken that are discharging waste into the river.
But we still have some big problems. A lot of those problems are further downstream where you have places like Detroit, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Inkster and Redford, where you have combined sewer flows. This is where the sewer system mixes with storm water during rainy events and all of that combined sewage and storm water goes into the Rouge River. So that’s a major problem. We’ve spent at least a billion dollars cleaning up a lot of these areas. But many CSO/SSO areas still remain, mostly west Detroit, some areas of Dearborn and some of those other communities.
Again, a lot of progress has been made since 1992, but a lot of it goes back to the financial condition of Detroit and these other communities. They simply haven’t had the money to make some of these changes, even though the federal government has given us over a billion dollars over the last 15 years to correct some of these problems. There’s still a lot more work that needs to be done. While there are bright spots in the Rouge River, and there’s definitely been an improvement in water quality, there are still a lot of infrastructure problems that remain, basically old pipes that are leaking sewage into the river. In other cases we’ve had sewer systems that were designed in the 1940s and the 1950s that were unfortunately designed to put sewage into the river. The attitude was that the river was a conveyance system for sewage and that when the sewage goes out into the Detroit River, it gets flushed away, and it goes somewhere else, and we never have to see it again. But as we know, it just doesn’t magically go away and that’s why we have so many problems in Lake Erie, which is downstream of Detroit. That’s the main reason why the federal government intervened in the early 1970s with the Clean Water Act. It was in response to problems like these that you had around the country.
How do you engage the public on these water issues?
We were ordered to do it by a federal judge and the EPA because we were the first people in the state to engage in stormwater management. Part of stormwater management is public education which we do in a variety of ways, but number one it costs money. Number two we have to make sure we have a message that is consistent over communities and consistent over time. So what we try to do is emphasize the importance of educating people on what a watershed is, what storm water is, what happens when you send your stormwater into the sewer system, that’s bad, we don’t want that. What we started doing to educate people was disconnecting the downspout from their house so that it drains into the ground or even into the street because that’s still better than going into the sewer system.
We now have voluntary classes where we teach people how to build rain gardens in the backyards so they channel storm water that runs off of their roof or their driveway into ponds and basins in their backyard. We sell rain barrels so people can store storm water and reuse it. That saves them money on their water bill, plus it takes the storm water out of the system. We teach people how to use the correct fertilizers, the correct ways of washing their cars, no dumping chemicals, paint, cement or trash in the storm drains in the streets. We have household hazardous waste collection days so that paint waste or turpentine doesn’t get thrown down the drain. If you offer recycling programs, it doesn’t go into the waste stream. There are simple silly things like picking up the poop from your dogs and cats so it doesn’t go into the system.
It also goes beyond water in many cases into just normal trash and recycling. We also have mandates for new homes and businesses that require that new buffers are put in place if you are near a river or stream to prevent erosion in the river and to stop debris and chemicals that they are using on the construction site from getting into the river. It’s a lot of little things and it doesn’t happen quickly, but you can see results of storm water management that really just begins with public education. It’s designed with the best case scenario to follow people from cradle to grave, so that they understand that storm drains aren’t garbage cans. We develop thousands of flyers ever year and pass those out in schools so that people understand our water is not just a throw-away resource and that what you put into a river really does impact the environment around you. It’s a good message and ultimately, the final product is cleaner water and a healthier environment for people and animals. Again, looking at it as a politician right now, if I have a clean environment, clean water, more animals, and a better quality of life, people are going to want to stay in Michigan and live here. They are going to want to vacation here, and we’ll make money off of them frankly. I look at the environment just like tourism, or agriculture or the automotive industry in the state. Tt’s an economic asset for our state that we need to take care of.
What is your biggest challenge and greatest success?
Government moves very slowly, and a lot of that is designed by our founders so that we move deliberately. I find it sometimes frustrating because people may not get it as fast as I do, or may not have the same vision. Especially when it comes to environmental protection and we’ve discussed some of that already. In government you have to build partnerships with people and the best way to do that is if you either have a common goal, or maybe even a common enemy. You have to find people who somehow share that kind of common objective with you. It’s a lot more difficult to drag somebody along in your effort that either doesn’t get it or doesn’t want to get it and there a lot of people like that. So you have to identify partners and then develop a common vision, a common plan and then try to turn that plan into legislative action. I think generally I’ve been pretty successful. Maybe not as much as a legislator, actually sitting in that seat, but I’ve had a lot more success sitting in the sidelines working with other legislators or in some of my other roles in local and county government. I probably had my greatest successes in county government because I was really given great freedom to do what I wanted to do. I was in the executive branch of government which meant I could do what I wanted to. I didn’t always have to get 56 votes to do it all the time, like you need in the legislature. So I was able to be a lot more innovative, creative, and collaborative. When I was at the county level I moved faster because I didn’t have the normal bureaucracy to deal with.
How has being a Republican impacted your ability to get environmental legislation passed?
It’s relatively easy for me to get Democrat support for what I’m doing, although they don’t always agree with me because I do have my limits. I don’t believe that corporations are the enemies. I don’t think that industry is always the enemy. I think they screw up, and that’s what regulations are for. I’m always about trying to strike a balance between industry, job creation, and environmental protection. I think on things like Detroit Water and Sewer, the Pet Coke issue, there’s more support from my colleagues. I think also especially from the Governor’s office. Governor Snyder here in Michigan has been a lot more open to environmental suggestions. He has some people on his staff that I used to work with at the county level. I think the Governor has been a lot more receptive. We don’t get everything we want, you never do in government, but I always feel like they have been very supportive of what I’m trying to do and that I’ve been able to work very well with his office and his staff.
What kind of environmental issues would you like the Governor to address?
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next four years. I would like to see for the state of Michigan a more comprehensive water monitoring program for the Great Lakes. I wrote a bill for that a few years ago that would have at least gotten that process started but it didn’t really get a lot of traction. The Governor’s staff liked it, but I had a really hard time getting some legislators and some county leaders on board. We need to take a look at our groundwater withdrawal rules again. The Pet Coke issues is a big one, but it’s not as far reaching as some of the water quality issues. Fracking has been going on in our state for decades. It’s not a new thing. I think it would be good if we adopted some common sense regulations that strike a balance between energy production and safe removal, and there is such a thing. It would be good for the Governor to take the lead on some of those issues. And just to make sure that Michigan makes the best use of encouraging good storm water management, finding money, doing some financial bonding to help local governments to fix some of their old leaky sewers, and then just to continue to market this concept of the blue economy. Beyond the bottled water companies, many industries rely heavily on water for their production and Michigan is a very attractive state for companies that may need a regular, relatively inexpensive source of water for their manufacturing operations. There’s a lot of different environmental protection, public information and regulatory work that I think this governor can do over the next 4 years.
Are nuclear energy and invasive species environmental concerns that you’ve heard about recently?
I haven’t seen much about nuclear power. I think the plant that you are referring to was one of the first small scale nuclear power plants in the United States back in the day. I know that there’s been some controversy about that one. I also know that Detroit Edison has been looking to build another reactor in Monroe County. This is where a lot of liberals are going to disagree with me, but I don’t have a problem with that. If it’s done in a properly regulated framework, I’m ok with that. Invasive species is an easy issue to get behind; we can always get bipartisan support for it. The whole issue of the Asian carp making their way into the Mississippi river into the Great Lakes is not fictional, it may happen. They are very close to finding their way into the Great Lakes. We have to do everything in our power to stop that from happening. If these fish get into the Great Lakes they are literally going to devour all of the native fish and they could easily take out all life forms in the Great Lakes. It’s a huge concern not only for our ecosystem but also to our tourism industry. Fishing is a multibillion dollar industry from people who travel here to fish to fisherman who catch fish for public consumption to sport fisherman, it’s a big deal. We make a lot of money in this state from fishing. From a tourism standpoint and an economic survival standpoint we don’t want those Asian carp coming in here.
There’s no easy way of stopping a fish from getting into the Great Lakes so we are using a combination of scientific means, basically trying to zap them in the Mississippi river with electricity to trying to stop them from coming out of the Chicago area. The Chicago Lake Michigan water does flow into the city. A lot of people think that the Mississippi river and the Chicago River flow outwards into lake Michigan, but it’s actually backwards. With a backwards flow like that, you still run the risk of having these fish swim upstream and finding their way to the Great Lakes. It’s something that we are very concerned about. The zebra mussel issue we are still battling. It’s not as bad as it was a few years ago. Zebra mussels get their way into the Great Lakes through ballast water in the tanks of international ships so there’s been a lot of federal and Canadian law regulating the dumping of ballast water into the Great Lakes. We at the state level have tried to do some things over the years, but this becomes a conflict of laws issue. The zebra mussel issue is ultimately a federal, Canadian and international issue. At the state government level, all that we can do is testing and provide money for people to fight zebra mussels at the local level. From a regulatory standpoint, almost anything that we try to do is going to be pre-empted by federal law.
Do you believe in human caused climate change?
I believe in climate change but am unsure that people are at fault. I think we can all demonstrate empirically that the climate of the world has changed several times over the years. I live in Michigan and at one point where I am right now was probably two miles under a glacier. Maybe 10 million years from now this will be a desert. But the climate of the earth changes, it has always changed. The climate of other planets also changes. We’ve pretty much shown that Mars at one point was not the way it is right now. Now, human caused climate change, I don’t see it. I believe in pollution. I’ve been to China a few times and other countries around the world and I’ve seen water pollution and air pollution. I’ve seen deforestation and many other elements of human caused environmental degradation. You can see it here in Southeast Michigan with the Rouge River. So clearly those are areas where you don’t want that trend to continue. It’s not good for people in China to not be able to see the sky for days on end. I was there 2 years ago, where the sky was silver. It was unnatural and that’s because they don’t have air quality standards. Clearly things like environmental degradation, air pollution, water pollution, land resource management problems, these are all things people have control over and I think we have a responsibility to do the best we can to eliminate and control those forms of pollution and degradation as much as possible. Whether or not that’s going to lead to long term human climate change, I don’t know. In the short term, it’s just common sense to clean up your act and basically leave the place better than the way you found it and improve the quality of life for your residents whether you are in Detroit or Beijing.
Why do you think climate change has become such a politicized issue?
Ultimately in politics, there are a lot of politicians that like to control the way you live. You can do that through a variety of means. I think that you have people around the world historically who have tried to dictate the freedom of individuals. Environmental policy can be taken to an extreme and used in an anti-liberty and anti-freedom sort of way. You can use environmental policy and big government to control people. Environmental policy can be used to control what you eat, how much energy you use, where you live, what job you’re going to have, where you can travel. Excess regulation and governmental interference is a road that you never want to go down.
What advice would you give to a student interested in pursuing a career in environmental policy?
I think a good understanding of the law is helpful. I’m not recommending people nowadays to become lawyers but going to law school and understanding the underpinnings of American law, juris prudence and how legislation is made is very helpful. Ultimately, that’s the groundwork by which all public policy rests. Get involved in politics, not so much run for office; you don’t have to get involved in the Occupy Wall street world either. Get involved by doing an internship, start working for a representative or a senator. Get involved in an advocacy group, preferably one that is less militant whether it’s for the Right or the Left. You really want to get a well-balanced public policy type of advocacy role that will expose you to a lot of different issues and more importantly show you how issues become policy and work within the system. Try to stay within the lines because ultimately I see too many people jump out of the lines and they come irrelevant because they might grab some headlines for a while and make a lot of noise but in the end, it’s going to be short lived and you’re not going to be able to accomplish your long term objectives. I’ve learned that by being in the system for many years and by working with people who are real hardcore environmentalists who know how to work within the system and also people within industry. Corporate folks and environmental lawyers who represent industry aren’t bad guys, they are just asking for some direction. But let’s do it in a calm, reasonable, responsible manner that recognizes that all sides have a right to exist and that we have to work together to achieve common objectives in a sustainable way. There’s so many internship opportunities, jobs available for people out of college that can give you a lot of exposure in a very short period of time. Probably won’t pay very well, but it will give you a lot of great experiences.
Is there anything you would like to add?
You always have to remember that you aren’t going to win every battle. I think that’s very important. You win some and you lose some. In the environmental field, you probably lose more than you win. But I think that you have to be willing to work with others, to understand that politics is the art of compromise and that you have to bring people on board as much as possible that share common goals and objectives. Maybe we don’t know how to get there every time, but play nice with others in order to achieve the results that you want.
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