Tagged: lansing

Lansing’s mayor plans to celebrate the city’s recent growth in manufacturing in his State of the City address tonight night.   

But the city’s lingering financial problems will also be on the agenda.

Lansing mayor Virg Bernero has used his previous seven State of the City addresses to highlight positive economic news in the capitol city. He’ll do the same thing this year.

Bernero says he plans to talk about expanding auto production in the Lansing area as well as mention other downtown development projects.

A federal judge in Grand Rapids will hear arguments Wednesday in a case that may determine if Lansing will get a downtown casino.

A year ago, the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians announced plans to build a casino that would wrap around Lansing’s downtown convention center.   The plan included the construction of a temporary casino along Michigan Ave.  

Low income families in Lansing will soon have access to a special financial counseling program.

The city is getting a $1.5 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Living Cities-Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund to underwrite the three year program.

The Lansing city council chose a longtime critic of the capitol city’s mayor as its next leader.

Carol Wood was selected as the city council’s new president at a meeting today.

Wood has frequently criticized the way Mayor Virg Bernero has run Lansing’s city government, both as a councilwoman and when she ran against him in 2009’s mayoral election.

Wood says she wants to “start on the right foot” with the mayor this year.

The Lansing City Council received a report last night looking at serious problems with Ingham County’s 911 system.

The new 911 center opened last summer. It dispatches fire and EMS crews for Lansing and East Lansing, as well as Ingham County.

But the system has trouble pinpointing mobile phone calls, and that’s led to dispatching mistakes and slow response times. A new report suggests three deaths may be connected to problems with the 911 system.

Over the past decade, the number of Michigan state government workers has shrunk, and that's left some state-owned buildings with lots of vacant space.

Now the state is hoping to fill in those gaps and save money at the same time.

The idea is to move some workers from leased offices across Lansing into Constitution Hall and the Mason Building.  Both of those state-owned buildings will undergo renovations to prepare the new workspace.

Kurt Weiss is with the state. He says Constitution Hall is 30 percent vacant.

"So as you can imagine, as you're walking down some of those hallways, there's a lot of empty cubicles," he said.

With Michigan poised to become the country’s 24th so-called "right-to-work" state, thousands of protestors have flooded the State Capital today to demonstrate against the legislation. Michigan Radio's Jennifer White talks with Katie Oppenheim, a registered nurse, and president of the University of Michigan Nurses Union. Oppenheim is also affiliated with the Michigan Nurses Association.