LANSING – More responsiveness to the needs of struggling Michigan businesses and greater transparency were calls Republican lawmakers made to Michigan Economic Development Corporation officials on Tuesday.

With the state struggling economically over the past 10 years, Rep. Jeff Farrington (R-Utica) put it straight to the new CEO Michael Finney by asking what the MEDC is going to do differently than it has in the past four to eight years (when Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm was in charge).

Testifying before the House Commerce Committee, Finney said the MEDC does intend to operate at a higher level of transparency and allow stakeholders to engage in what’s going on at the MEDC more.

Engaging local economic development partners, as Governor Rick Snyder discussed last month, will also be new. Finney, the former head of Ann Arbor SPARK, and a former MEDC vice president, said in his prior role he often felt the MEDC didn’t get input from local partners in developing its strategies.

“I really didn’t feel connected. Not that they were bad strategies, it (just) would have been nice to understand them upfront),” Finney said.

Rep. Sharon Tyler (R-Niles) said improving the retention call system is desperately needed. Often a local company participates in the MEDC’s retention call as a favor to local economic development groups, but the state doesn’t really use that time as an opportunity to learn what a company needs or ask how it could help bring some of its subcontractors to Michigan, she said.

Finney said he often found multiple state agencies, as well as the locals, are making retention calls to businesses and that’s a duplication of efforts. He said the MEDC wants to use the retention calls as an economic gardening tool to understand what assistance companies may need to grow, so those efforts are being refined.

Rep. Mike Shirkey (R-Clark Lake) and Farrington both called on the MEDC to be more transparent with its economic development figures and use a more effective system of measuring results since it often seems like the focus is simply on retained or new jobs and how much investment the company is making in Michigan.

Farrington said he encountered a situation where a business seeking assistance from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority was told it could only have state aid if company officials told their employees they were going out of business. That way, the state could swoop in and help and count that as “retained jobs,” Farrington said.

Those kinds of interactions with businesses have discredited the MEDC’s reputation, he said.

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