City of Lansing wins 2025 election projects – Michigan Capitol Confidential

News article

Budget finances city elections, entertainment, infrastructure projects

Shutterstock | Gordon Satoh

The city of Lansing hit the jackpot in the 2025 state budget, receiving more than $25 million in special grants.

Millions of tax dollars are used through improvement grants in the annual budget to finance city elections, infrastructure and entertainment.

Critics of the subsidies complain that they lack transparency and competition and that taxpayers are left in the dark about the annual allocations amounting to tens of millions.

Michigan’s capital city received $1 million to conduct election activities. The budget states that the money will “help conduct election activities, including but not limited to the storage of voting equipment, secure spaces for counting or processing ballots, and training of poll workers.”

Lansing will receive an additional $1 million for local infrastructure and municipal services and $2.5 million for school infrastructure.

An additional $11 million will go toward Lansing’s entertainment and recreational facilities. The city’s minor league baseball team, the Lansing Lugnuts, received $1 million for infrastructure improvements at Jackson Field.

According to local news reports, the money will be used to finance improvements to playing fields and locker rooms.

The Lansing Entertainment and Public Facilities Authority manages Jackson Field. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Potter Park Zoo is owned by Lansing and operated by Ingham County. The recent state budget allocated $10 million to the zoo. The money will be used to restore the historic cat and primate building, the zoo said in a June 27 Facebook post.

The budget does not list the sponsors of the special expenses by name, but the zoo’s Facebook post attributes the new expenses to Senator Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) and Representative Angela Witwer (D-D) of Delta Township.

“Legislators are given broad discretion to spend public money for the public good,” James Hohman, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, told Michigan Capitol Confidential. He said district grants would not accomplish that.

“If they thought the state needed more swimming pools, they would have started a program, set criteria and selected the best swimming pool projects,” he said. Instead, lawmakers are pursuing their own political interests by using the earmarks process to put their pet projects first.