Today I would like to speak about an issue talked about nearly a year ago, and that was about the different Secretary of State offices across the state of Michigan. Just today, after weeks of trying to get an answer from the Secretary of State’s office about whether our branch office in Fenton would close, we were notified by a press release that once again the Secretary of State was going to close an office, inconvenience the customers, taxpayers, and citizens of the state of Michigan by closing another neighborhood branch office.

When you look at the Fenton site, over 104,000 transactions took place in a year. Nearly $11 million in transactions occurred at that site. Our Secretary of State had little concern about that small little town in mid-Michigan. She didn’t notify the local business community that they would be impacted by not having the infusion of local traffic going to utilize that branch office. She didn’t have the common decency, actually, to let the Representative of that community know, even though we tried nearly daily for the past few weeks to get information on whether or not they would close that office.

Those are concerns of mine, but not the biggest. One year ago, this chamber took a vote to keep the Secretary of State offices open so the convenience of local branch offices could remain open for transactions for the state government entity and local citizens. Just unilaterally our Secretary of State said, “No, we are not going to do that. I will determine what locations stay open across this state.” So now she adds to the list of the numerous sites across the state she has closed.

In these troubled times when people have lost their jobs and in these troubled times as we have seen in recent days the price of gasoline exceed $4 a gallon, she said we will close that office and we will consolidate with one 22 miles away. That is a lot of gas money for hard-hit Michigan families. We can do better with this, and at the minimum, we can communicate better with the communities that we are going to impact in such a negative fashion.

So I would ask the Secretary of State to consider our voices—those representatives of the people—when she makes a decision in the future. When you look at the numbers that Secretary Land is competing against with common sense—$11 million in transactions were performed there in a year—her consolidation plan, her numbers about the savings to Michigan taxpayers is $28,000 compared to $11 million taken in at that site. Nobody would make such a business decision, and it doesn’t seem likely that anyone would make such a political or governmental decision as well.

So I am terribly disturbed that once again we don’t see the collaboration and communication that is required between not only different agencies, but different branches of government.