MIDLAND DAILY NEWS: Governor, State Senate candidate hold affordability roundtable in Saginaw
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic State Senate candidate Chedrick Greene met with community members for a roundtable discussion about affordability in Saginaw’s SVRC Marketplace Wednesday afternoon.
“The cost of everything’s gone up,” Whitmer said at one point in the discussion. “So even if the cost of pay goes up, but it doesn’t keep track with (other costs), you know, it’s a huge burden on folks.”
Roundtable participants included Ben Ritter, farmer and Central Michigan University lecturer; Marlana Cork, grants and projects manager at Great Lakes Bay Health Centers; Erika Wilson, early childhood assistant site administrator at Bay City YMCA; and Ciera Crudup, owner of businesses including Delicious Sweets Bakeshop in the SVRC.
Whitmer asked the panelists about the challenges they saw in their various jobs, with discussion covering rising costs of childcare, gas and business expenses; and about investments in Saginaw such as the Medical Diamond. Often, the Trump administration’s tariffs and the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran were cited as causes for increasing costs.
As a business owner, Crudup said it’s been especially challenging to cover all the costs of running her businesses while trying to avoid raising prices to levels that customers can’t afford or aren’t willing to spend.
“I think this is probably the toughest time that I’ve experienced in my 14 years as a business owner, because everything has gone up,” Crudup said.
Greene said he believes bringing quality jobs to the Great Lakes Bay Region will help small businesses because customers will have money to spend on their products.
“Having quality jobs here, good paying jobs, good benefits and good retirement programs, allows a small business to thrive,” Greene said. “We have way more small businesses than we have big businesses.”
Ritter said that as a farmer, he’s seen the price of nitrogen, which is used to fertilize corn crops, increase drastically since the U.S. and Israel began the war in Iran on Feb. 28.
“It’s so crazy that we’re living in such a partisan time that there are people on one side saying, ‘Nope. Nothing to see here,’ but nitrogen costs increase 40% overnight,” he said.
Greene added that he had talked with sugar beet farmers who said they could not sustain another year like the current one.
Whitmer said free school meals for all, repealing the retirement tax and making education affordable are things that politicians at the state level can do to address affordability, even if they don’t have control over policy at the national level.
“A person in Lansing, whether you’re the governor or a state senator, can’t undo the tariff chaos that’s coming out of Washington, DC, can’t unilaterally prevent decisions that are impacting international gas prices,” Whitmer said. “But what we can do is deliver some relief to folks.”