A tiny butterfly species native to the Midwest has been brought back from the brink of extinction, researchers say.

The poweshiek skipperling — an inch-long fuzzy species, brown with orange highlights — used to be found in several Midwestern states and Canadian provinces but by 2022 researchers only found nine of them in the U.S.

Nick Haddad, a professor of integrated biology at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station, is on a team that's raising the butterflies in captivity at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids for release into the wild. He said Michigan is a hotspot for rare butterflies.

“Our work is to preserve and restore and recover the species that have been in rapid decline,” Haddad said. “As areas are restored where they used to be, we can release them back out.”

This effort combines biology scientists and conservation specialists who have worked with the zoo to create a space accommodating of the species. Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, the Minnesota Zoo, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are also involved.

The project began in 2021 and brought those nine known wild skipperlings up to 1,300 and counting.

“Through that partnership we’ve been able to not just just keep butterflies in captivity, but grow captive populations at an enormous rate,” he said. “That’s not an easy task, to have butterflies in a cage, male and female, and actually get them to breed.”

Because the project has been able to raise reproduction rates so much, it had a captive population breeding while they release others into the wild. The wild butterflies also lay eggs so the population grows in both groups. Recently, the wild butterfly populations finally exceeded those in captivity.

“Just to put this in context, in nature, a population that is sustaining, we’d expect one male and female that are reproducing to create around one male and one female,” he said. “That’s a sustaining population, it’s not growing or shrinking. But in captivity we don’t have natural, harsh environmental conditions. We can produce thousands of new adults with a couple dozen adults.”

He said the tiny butterflies used to have hundreds of populations, but by the start of the project, there were only three: One in Manitoba, Canada and two in Southeast Michigan.

“My suspicion is mainly because of new classes and uses of toxic insecticides,” he said, but habitat loss is another main reason for their decline.

He said reduced use of those insecticides is necessary for the program to continue working.

“We have now established the restoration sites and context where we can be successful,” he said. “But that is still just a limited part of the butterflies former range. We have the tools to act both by reducing insecticides and then by doing the conservation of habitat. I do think it can be done.”

Butterfly populations across the board have decreased 25% in the last 20 years. Other pollinators have also seen decreased populations.

Butterflies are important in keeping plant communities alive, helping them reproduce through pollination.

Haddad said there is also a moral cost of driving a species out of existence.

“There is an ethical obligation, and I think others agree, that we shouldn’t be the cause of their total loss, their extinction,” he said. “So we’re putting in the efforts for conservation.”

The group is looking to do the same kind of work for another endangered butterfly species, the Mitchell's Satyr butterfly, and more after that.

He said the program does show how putting the effort in can make a huge difference.

“If we think about the time span of 25 years to see this rapid decline to near extinction, well, to get them on the right track even at a low level after five years is really encouraging,” he said. “And so hopefully a decade from now or two decades from now, we'll see the population thriving across the landscape.”

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has detected invasive carp in the Illinois River only 80 miles from Lake Michigan. That's the closest the fish are known to have gotten to the Great Lakes and hundreds were detected.

Officials from the department also suspect there could be spawning grounds closer to the Great Lake and are monitoring the area further. They say floods and water temperatures made great conditions for carp spawning.

Andrea Densham, the Director of Regional Government Affairs at Alliance for the Great Lakes, said the invasive carp would be detrimental to Great Lakes ecosystems. She said there was supposed to be a bi-partisan construction project to stop the spread of the carp happening this summer, but the US Army Corp of Engineers ordered a stop work order without explanation.

“We’ve been working with the states and federal government for years to advance this project,” she said. “One thing we would love is some more transparency and clarity on why it has paused. If there are identified challenges, it’s always helpful for any entity that’s pausing a really critically important project like this to share those. There’s been no explanation for the pause.”

Planning of the project has been going on for years. Construction on the project is seasonal and began in July but earlier this month it was paused. Those involved with the project don’t know when it will be resumed and workers on the project are stuck in limbo.

“We’re hoping they allow the hardworking workers on site to get back to work,” she said. “This is very much a seasonal project so any delays absolutely delays the extent to which the solution to prevent the carp from entering the Great Lakes can advance.”

The project uses a variety of deterrents including electrical, acoustic, and even bubble deterrents to stop the carp from moving any further upriver.

Electrical grids have been used before to keep out fish species but were found to be only part of the solution. The mix of deterrents will help increase its reliability.

The project was allotted $274 million in federal funding and $114 million in state funding to begin the first phase of construction. The project’s total cost will be around $1.15 billion dollars but the region’s fisheries are also economically important, valuing over $4 billion per year.

Densham said delaying this project puts the sensitive fisheries at risk, especially for struggling species like whitefish. Michigan’s state budget included emergency one-time funding for whitefish restoration earlier this year because the species is in a crisis situation.

“The challenges to whitefish and the fear that the whitefish might be threatened in Lake Michigan is of even greater concern when there might be the introduction of invasive carp,” she said. “We need to prevent that from happening.”

Quagga mussels, zebra mussels, and sea lamprey have already contributed to the decline of the whitefish. She said carp will eat its way up the food chain.

While grass carp have already been introduced to the Great Lakes to control algae and for nuisance plant control, only sterile grass carp can be stocked but bighead, silver, and black carp are spreading in the Mississippi River and Illinois River. These carp will threaten walleye, yellow perch, and whitefish specifically but can also change the entire ecosystem overall.

Densham said the fish also pose risks to humans.

“They’re even dangerous for anglers and families being near lakes or rivers where they are.” she said. “They’re very large, they’re very aggressive, and they can jump out of the bodies of water they’re in. They’ve been known to jump in boats.”

Densham said none of the partners on the project received any explanation or answers on why it was halted.

“We are working to understand the reasons construction has been halted on the Brandon Road Interbasin Project for federal administrative review,” Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources stated in an email. “Michigan continues to remain committed to supporting the completion of the project to protect the Great Lakes and inland lakes and streams throughout the basin from invasive carp.”

Michigan, Illinois, and the federal government all dedicated money to the project and President Trump even directed agencies to construct the project with speed and efficiency.

“What’s most frustrating is that we have no clarity for why this happened,” she said. “The workers are out there. There’s a very short window of time for us to do this kind of work and as we’re seeing more spawning events continue to happen the urgency continues to grow.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel plans to file a sixth request for rehearing with the United States Department of Energy over a coal-fired power plant near Lake Michigan operated by Consumers Energy.

“After six so-called emergency orders, it is clear that DOE intends to stretch Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to force an aging, obsolete plant to operate indefinitely,” Nessel said.

The J.H. Campbell power plant was scheduled to close in May 2025 but has been forced to remain open after the federal department issued six consecutive orders lasting over a year after President Donald Trump stated there was an energy emergency.

The request for rehearing is a necessary administrative step before the order can be challenged in court.

Gavin McCabe, senior litigating counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright upheld the emergency orders after the first five rehearings.

The first federal emergency order from May 2025 is now being challenged in an active lawsuit that already had some oral arguments, McCabe said.

“We are anticipating a decision anytime,” he said. “The court doesn’t have a deadline to decide, but roughly it takes three to six months.”

He said if the plant is allowed to close after the court’s decision, the other challenges will potentially become moot so those cases have been put on hold.

“In some way they are all connected even though they are issued separately and have different numbers on them, but we are challenging each of them,” he said.

Ted Kelly, the director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the plant is unnecessary and there is no energy emergency.

“They never had proof there’s an energy emergency,” Kelly said. “The retirement of the Campbell plant was part of a careful plan by the utility Consumers Energy, the state of Michigan, and the grid operator where they brought other generation online to replace this coal plant. They replaced it with cleaner, cheaper resources.”

He said a provision of the Federal Power Act is supposed to be used for taking immediate action in situations like war or weather events, and that’s how it’s been used in the past until now.

“There was no need for this,” Kelly said. “That’s been reflected in a number of reviews by the grid operator and by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which reviews reliability nationwide. They found the system was reliable and did not have a need for any emergency action.”

The U.S. Department of Energy said in a statement that the Energy Reliability Corporation’s 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment supports keeping the plant open. The department quoted the long-term assessment in one of its justifications for the emergency order: “Projected resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and announced generator retirements.”

The Electric Reliability Corporation also released a statement in April which said if additional power plants are built without delay, the region’s risk of power outages would be “elevated” until 2027 but then fall to “normal” risk in later years.

McCabe said he believes the court will find the statute is being used illegally, but there is always a chance it rules the other way.

Running the plant is costly.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Consumers Energy's request to charge operating costs of the plant to residents within the north and central regions of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator — the organization that operates the power grid in Michigan and several other states and a Canadian province.

“Causing it to run unnecessarily just imposes those costs on people who shouldn’t be having to pay for it,” said McCabe, with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That is in addition to the fact that the Campbell plant is a large source of air pollution and water pollution.”

He said the statute the federal government is using to compel Consumers to keep the plant operational means ratepayers, not the government, pay the cost of running the power plant.

The energy sources that were supposed to replace the plant included natural gas, battery storage, and solar energy, all of which would cost less for residents and be better for the environment overall, Kelly said. He argued that operating the plant has the potential for especially devastating environmental consequences because it sits less than a mile from Lake Michigan.

One report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies, commissioned by several environmental advocacy groups, found the J.H. Campbell plant could cost ratepayers in the MISO region $139 million dollars per year due to the federal mandates, and Nessel said Consumers Energy has reported $295 million dollars in costs associated with the plant since May 2025.

This comes after unrelated price hikes earlier this summer from Consumers Energy.

Nessel said the cost of operating the plant beyond its planned retirement should not be falling on Michiganders.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary costs are stacking up and Michigan families will be forced to foot the bill to keep online a plant that should have been retired more than a year ago," she said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright previously stated the Energy Department was keeping the plant open to mitigate the risk of power outages for American families.

“Americans deserve access to affordable, reliable, and secure electricity regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” he said.

The Department of Energy did not respond to our request for comment.

Editor's note: Consumers Energy is among Michigan Public's corporate sponsors.

Algae can be used for sustainable products, but you need enough of it — enough biomass — to do so. Researchers at Michigan State University say they've developed a way to more evenly distribute sunlight in algae cultivation systems, which leads to more algae growth.

Xinyue Liu is a co-author on a paper on the topic and an assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University. She said as the algae thickens, lower layers will not receive sunlight, so they can’t photosynthesize and will not grow. The outer layers receive more sunlight than necessary.

“But when the algae is growing more and more, it’s becoming denser,” she said. “The sunlight, used to perform this kind of energy conversion, is a critical ingredient that can only reach a very thin layer near the surface.”

Growing algae may seem like an odd goal, especially as other projects attempt to reduce algae, but she said this type of algae is not toxic. She said this algae can be used for sustainable products.

“In this case, algae can be beneficial,” she said. “They are intentionally created to manufacture some new products, like proteins, food ingredients, omega-3, and lipids.”

Once algae begins to photosynthesize, some nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus accumulate, which helps turn the sunlight, water, and air into proteins and carbohydrates. In the MSU experiments, these have been used to feed farm animals, like chickens.

Currently, LED lighting is used to increase algal biomass because it can spread the light needed for photosynthesis further into the layers, but that takes power.

“LED is indeed powerful in terms of generating higher biomass, but it also has a very high energy consumption,” she said.

The team chose to test how hydrogel optical fibers can be used to distribute natural sunlight. The fibers scatter the light further into the algae, instead of only on the surface layers. The researchers found it can increase the photosynthetic capability by up to six times.

“Basically, we do not consume any external energy,” Liu said. “Practically speaking, we do need to consider whether this system automatically generates a net carbon removal.”

Algae uses large amounts of carbon dioxide in its photosynthesis process, but Liu said they won't know if increasing the biomass capability will overall capture more carbon.

“It depends on the life cycles, how the algae is processed, how the products are made, and also how much energy is consumed throughout the entire process,” she said. But the process still removes the energy used from the LED lights, making it more sustainable than before, and that’s a good first step, she said.

Using the hydrogel optical fibers to scatter natural sunlight was also more effective. The energy efficiency of light to chemical energy was higher with the optical fibers than it was with the LED lights.

She said the optical fibers look like cords, and when the sunlight enters one side of the cord it doesn’t just exit the other end like traditional fibers. Instead, they designed them so light will exit multiple areas after entering, scattering them enough to permeate deeper layers of the algae.

Wei Liao, a professor in the department of biosystems and agricultural engineering at Michigan State University, was also involved in the study. He said algae is important globally.

“If you look at the global carbon cycle, algae play an important role in sequestering carbon on the front end,” he said. And on the back end, the algae can then be turned into sustainable products.

He said the research team can also use it for animal feed.

“We did feed chickens on Michigan State’s campus and they love it,” he said. “They love the fishy smell of the algae.”

He said lipids can be extracted from algae and used in biodiesel.

Liao said if the process becomes more efficient, the algae can capture more carbon while providing more sustainable products.

Liu said there are several next steps they can take with this research. She said they can use some of the carbon dioxide produced from MSU’s power plant to enhance biomass production. They can also scale up the production.

“Right now it’s lab scale products, about one-liter reactors in total size, which is fine for lab validation, proof of concept validation,” she said. “But maybe people want to see more in terms of scaling up and how it can benefit agricultural products. I think that’s scaling up into hundreds of liters or even larger than that.”

Algae has also been used to make plastics, pharmaceuticals and other products.

Three wasp species were released this summer to help control scarlet lily beetles in Michigan. The invasive species defoliates the stems, flowers, and leaves of the lilies.

The red beetles’ population has grown since their introduction to Michigan, becoming a pest for gardeners.

Marianna Szűcs, an associate professor in the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University, pushed for the biological control program in the state.

“The reason it's good to implement this biocontrol in Michigan is because it looks like Michigan is the westward front that they are spreading through,” she said. “We just want to prevent them from reaching more states, essentially.”

She said the beetles are likely coming from Ontario and will move to other states if they're not stopped in Michigan.

After years of permit approvals and some setbacks, during the 2026 field season, over 4,400 parasitoid wasps were released. These wasps lay their eggs in lily beetle larvae and after they hatch, eat the larvae from within. All three species were tested in previous studies and are not expected to prey on any other insects.

Szűcs said if the beetles die out from the predation, it's likely the wasps will follow after.

“That sometimes happens in biocontrol,” she said. “If they consume all the hosts, their population will crash.”

She said the wasps are very small species, but two of them are large enough to be seen. She said gardeners may start seeing the wasps if they grow lilies.

“If they squat and look at those feces-covered lily beetle larvae and they see a wasp probing it, they might have the biocontrol agent in their backyard,” she said. “In that case, it would be better not to spray or kill it but let them build up their populations.”

The program started in Europe, where the three wasp species were identified, and once the lily beetle was introduced into Massachusetts in 1992, the wasps were imported.

“Because it was already done there, all the approvals for bringing the insects into the country were already done and that’s a really arduous process,” she said. “So to bring it to Michigan, we didn’t have to go through all that process.”

However, there were still complications. After applying for the permits and notifying Michigan’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, they tried to collect the wasps from New England. When they went looking for the lily beetle’s larvae where they would find the parasitoids' eggs, they found the program had worked so well that locating them was too difficult.

The wasps then had to be shipped from Europe and put through a quarantine process. After several years, they finally had enough wasps to release them.

The North American Lily Society funded some parasitoid collections and helped gather volunteers for their release. Lily gardeners had to have large lily beds or plant them to participate. Some lily beds were also planted at the MSU research farm, she said.

After years, the release was successful and it is only a one-time release for now. She said it may take up to fifteen years to fully know if it's a success.

“Once they reach the point and they start to provide control, we don't have to do anything,” she said. “You don't have to apply pesticides anymore so that's the most sustainable and long-term solution. Not the immediate solution, but the long-term solution.”

She said research from New England found the parasitoids could clear up to 90% of the beetles.

“There is no specific insecticide that would only kill the lily beetle and insecticides also need to be repeated every year,” she said. “Once these parasitoids establish, they will sustain their population.”

The eastern massasauga rattlesnake is the only native venomous snake in Michigan — but the state Department of Natural Resources says it has not killed anybody here in over a century.

One did, however, bite a man trying to take its photo last month in Oakland County, which resulted in a hospital stay for him, and an uptick of residents searching for the snakes.

Now, the DNR is asking the public to stop harassing the threatened snakes.

Amy Bleisch is an endangered species biologist at the DNR. She said the media attention from the bite has spurred snake enthusiasts to go looking for the species, but not everybody seeking the snake is doing so with good intentions.

“We’ve had some folks tell us that if they ever saw one, they would kill it,” she said. “That is not only illegal, but it’s also, unfortunately, a really great way to get bitten. ”

As a threatened species, killing or harassing the rattlesnakes is against the law. Those found violating the Endangered Species Act could be sentenced to up to a year in prison or could be fined $50,000.

“We’ve had this uptick in interest in eastern massasauga and we’ve been seeing some not-great behaviors from some folks,” she said.

She said some people look for these kinds of species as a hobby, called herping (derived from herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles), but there have been situations where habitats have been trampled and destroyed.

“They’ve also been harassing and interacting with this snake in a way that is very likely to result in another bite if you continue to get in that snake’s space,” Bleisch said.

The snake is a shy species located in Lower Peninsula wetlands, Bois Blanc, and Mackinac Island and it wants nothing to do with humans, she said. They are good at hiding, making surveys to count the species long and difficult.

Eastern massasaugas are usually tan with brown splotches that resemble a bowtie. They have rattles on their tails and can grow to be 18 to 30 inches long.

Bleisch said humans have no natural resistance to their venom.

“They get in this evolutionary arms race with their prey where they make their venom a little more potent and the prey makes its resistance a little more potent,” she said. “People are not part of that equation. We have no natural resistance to that venom and so that venom is more impactful to us.”

While the venom is impactful, it’s also not always used. In so-called dry bites, which happen 25% to 50% of the time, the snake does not deliver any venom, the DNR said.

The species is also declining in population on a global scale due to habitat destruction and poaching. Bleisch said the snakes have a rough time crossing roads and paved paths. When residents leave designated paths to go look for them, they are further degrading their habitats. She said poaching of the species is also too common.

“That poaching can be persecution when folks have chosen to kill a snake because it’s a snake,” she said. “But there’s also poaching by people who are snake enthusiasts and those folks are collecting these snakes and putting them into the illegal pet trade.”

Bleisch said people don’t realize how important the massasauga are. The snakes keep rodent populations down which in turn keeps tick populations down, and that keeps tick-caused sicknesses down.

“They’re playing a critical role in the ecosystem and our natural heritage,” she said. “Anytime you’re interacting with that snake and it feels threatened to the point where it is rattling, that is taking an energetic cost from that snake and it’s making it harder for it to continue surviving on the landscape.”

She said if people do come across the snake, they should keep their distance.

“And we definitely do not want to try to pick them up,” Bleisch said.

This summer,  Michigan had the highest recorded numbers in the country of cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness caused by a parasite. Experts said the high numbers in the state might be due to better surveillance and testing. But nationally, this summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak highlighted safety issues in our food systems.

Cyclospora doesn’t behave like other contaminants that the large scale food system is built to destroy. It isn’t killed by chlorinated water, a common sanitizer used on industrial food. Parasite contamination can also be difficult to track, particularly with a globalized food system and federal government cuts in the U.S.

The mystery of exactly how the outbreak started has yet to be fully solved. But the recalls have been limited to imported lettuce from Taylor Farms, a huge international company. And just last week Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release that stated, “The majority of the contaminated produce is likely no longer available for consumption.”

A boost in lettuce sales — locally

So how are local farms faring under the stress of all of this?

People operating several stands at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market said they were selling unexpectedly high quantities of lettuce and other greens.

Mohinder Singh, the owner of Seva Farms in southeast Michigan, explained that lettuce is one of their main crops.

“A week before this outbreak, I couldn't sell all the lettuce I had. I had ended up calling Food Gatherers. They brought a semi truck out to the farm. We gave them 12 boxes of lettuce and even harvested some out in the field fresh for them because we just had too much. It was getting too big and it just wasn't selling," he said. "And then all of a sudden, the opposite happened. And now I'm completely out. I've been selling it like crazy."

“In the beginning, I don't think we were really aware like how much this was going to change. So we were selling out [at] like 10am, of all our lettuce and then our greens after that, like bunched greens like kale,” said Violet Flores, a farm hand at Green Things Farm Collective, based near Ann Arbor.

But are local farms at a lower risk for contamination, generally speaking?

“There's some sense going around of people being like, well, local’s somehow magically always going to be better. And you can get outbreaks of things on small farms and things like that, but it would be much more contained and much more traceable….So the shorter the distribution chain, just the shorter, fewer hands have touched it,” said Emma Hardy. She has a PhD in the philosophy of food and food systems from the University of Michigan.

Eating local can mean smaller scale production and distribution. Our food is vulnerable to contamination at every step of processing, so more steps, more farms, bigger chains, can mean more opportunities for mistakes.

The other possible benefit of a smaller, local farm can be more transparency.

Flores from Green Things explained it like this, “We’re harvesting the food as well. We’re working in the washing rooms where we wash and sanitize our vegetables. You can come ask us questions about what’s happening to the food you’re buying and you can do that to a lot of different people selling here, and at different markets as well.”

Transparency can benefit the farm workers as well as the consumers.

“So as we're thinking about resiliency, thinking about how do I get my stuff from closer to home as supply chains are more and more likely to be disrupted for all sorts of reasons,” said Amanda Edmonds, the lead of the University of Michigan’s Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. She said smaller food systems can also be more nimble and resilient during a crisis.

Unfortunately, this will not be our last hot contaminated food summer. Cyclospora in particular is a tropical and subtropical organism. It likes warm weather. In the U.S., small summer outbreaks are common.

With climate change heating up or extending summers in some regions, we could see more outbreaks like this one, or extended outbreak seasons. Climate change can also make conditions less predictable for farmers and threaten food security.

“The big industrial food system has infrastructure, right? That takes investment. And so, great that in this time of crisis, we're thinking about this. And how do we make sure that these systems, [this] infrastructure is viable in an ongoing way?” said Edmonds.

Edmonds said the burden of addressing this should not fall just on the consumer, and individual choices.

A report by Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan found that nearly 40% of Michiganders are struggling to afford basic needs.

Amanda Nothaft, the director of data and analysis at Poverty Solutions, said there have not been any dramatic shifts in the poverty rate in Michigan. 13% of residents are below the federal poverty line.

Nothaft said the poverty line is not the entire story though, as 26% of residents above that line still can’t afford basic needs and are not the main focus of government aid programs.

“The poverty line for a family of four is $33,000,” she said. “The ALICE threshold is $67,000 and so, these are people who are struggling to make ends meet, but they’re not considered poor. They don’t qualify for programs and these are people who are often forgotten when we talk about social safety nets.”

The ALICE threshold is an indicator for families who are above the poverty line but are still struggling to afford basic needs based on their local cost of living. It stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.

“Social safety nets like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), food stamps, Medicaid, those are really geared at people who are below the poverty line,” she said.

She said the ALICE threshold is called a "survival budget" because it’s adjusted for local rent costs, geography, and local childcare costs, while the poverty line is a rigid number.

“It tries to get a fuller picture of what it takes to make ends meet,” she said.

Another of the report's findings: one in three children in Wayne County are living in poverty. Nothaft said Wayne County is always high on the list for child poverty, but this year it took second place in the state, overtaking rural Clare and Roscommon counties.

“The poorest counties tend to be more rural, they are often among counties with the highest child poverty,” she said. “What always stands out to me is the rural poverty in the state.”

However, the report found Wayne and Lake counties facing the greatest hardships. Each saw 3% increases in poverty rates since 2021. During the pandemic, poverty rates in these counties actually saw a decrease with government assistance but the numbers have almost reverted back completely.

Lake County is in the western region of the state where medium income actually trends toward the highest in Michigan.

“We see pockets of concentrated poverty, even in regions with relative economic prosperity,” she said. “Focusing additional resources in the areas with the greatest need will improve the quality of life for those local residents as well as the state’s economic well-being overall.”

She said each region in Michigan experiences hardships differently. In the Upper Peninsula region, the poverty rate is 0.53 percentage points higher than the state average, but unemployment rates are also significantly higher. In the East, in the Thumb region, 18% of people live in poverty and higher education rates are well below Michigan’s average.

She said there have been some programs, like statewide free school lunch for children, that can help residents, but more needs to be done in housing, health care, and creating jobs before Michigan can see real change in quality of life.

Thomas Smith, a retired engineer from General Motors, won the Republican primary for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District with just over 50% of the votes. The win comes after Smith suspended his campaign in mid-July and even endorsed another candidate, Al Lemmo.

Smith beat both Lemmo, who finished third in the race, and President Donald Trump-backed candidate Amir Hassan. Trump had previously endorsed Hassan on Truth Social in late June and invited Hassan on stage during his July 27 rally at GM.

Hassan, a Navy veteran, took second place with around 33% of the vote.

Smith had appeared in a video on Facebook endorsing Lemmo and announcing his campaign suspension. Smith had only raised $1,850 by June 30 for his campaign, while Hassan had raised just over $700,000, according to reports filed by the candidates with the Federal Election Commission. Smith filed his by hand after having “no success” logging into the online FEC portal.

After he suspended his campaign, Smith was still listed as an official candidate and his name was not removed from the ballot, because ballots had already been printed. The district includes Flint, Bay City, Saginaw, and Midland.

Smith said he was “humbled and honored that Republicans have chosen me to take the fight to Kristen McDonald Rivet,” in a statement.

Smith is a small business owner of a salsa company. He will now face Democratic U.S. Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet in November. Rivet has raised more than $5 million.