News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Gubernatorial candidate Mike Duggan speaks with Rogers City Mayor Scott McLennan on Wednesday. Duggan is the former mayor of Detroit and is running as an independent.

ROGERS CITY — Gubernatorial candidate Mike Duggan, who is running as an independent, visited with leaders of Rogers City in a small gathering on Wednesday.

Duggan was the mayor of Detroit from 2014 through 2025. He was born and raised in Detroit, and in that time, he witnessed the decay of a once prosperous city.

As mayor, Duggan was on the front lines of putting the city back together after bankruptcy. Detroit also needed financial oversight from the State of Michigan to help it get out of bankruptcy.

“I campaigned in a way nobody had ever seen before,” Duggan said about running for mayor. “I said to people of the city, invite me to your house and I’ll show up.”

“It turns out the politicians were really good at pitting people against each other,” Duggan said, reflecting on those neighborhood visits. “The average person just wanted their problem solved.”

He is employing a similar strategy in his run for governor by visiting towns all over the state including Rogers City.

Duggan was once a member of the Democratic party. When he aided in electing the “democratic trifecta” in 2022, when Michigan’s governor, house, and senate were all majority Democrat, he realized the division both within the party and with Republicans across the aisle caused more harm than good. Democrats were infighting during their lame duck session and didn’t get anything done, Duggan explained.

“I kept saying to the speaker (Joe Tate), you are so much better off dealing with the five most reasonable Republicans then the five most unreasonable Democrats,” Duggan said. “And he says, ‘Mike, you don’t understand how Lansing works, I’d be thrown out as speaker.'”

That experience pushed him to run as an independent for governor.

“There’s nothing inside me that had the desire to be governor if I couldn’t change the direction of this state,” Duggan said.

Duggan pivoted to a discussion with leaders in Rogers City, including Mayor Scott McLennan, former mayor Beach Hall, City Council member Brittany VanderWall, and others, about the concerns they would like to see addressed.

The first topic brought up: the lack of affordable housing.

“Here’s the way I would go at it,” Duggan said. “If you build an apartment and it costs you $1500 a month to rent it out to make any money and folks who are there can only afford a thousand, somebody’s gotta pay that difference. And what I did in Detroit was, I got foundations to put up money, I got federal money, what I never got was any help from the state of Michigan. We need to create a $500 million affordable housing pool at the state, so that if you have a plan here and you’re a few hundred dollars a month away, you can apply for it.”

Local communities need to actively participate and enforce zoning policies and permitting processes that make it easy to build, he said.

Also discussed was the high cost of healthcare.

Duggan plans to address the amount of paperwork it takes for medical centers to work through before billing a patient. He said that different insurance agencies all have completely different portals and forms.

“We are going to have a single port with a single document so the billing manager at the doctor’s office, you can get charged different rates, but the paperwork’s going to be dramatically simplified,” Duggan said. “We’re going to take the costs out of the back. We can’t just keep passing these rate increases on to employers or onto people with copays and the like and the cost of medicare and medicaid keeps rising. It’s ultimately going to squeeze people out.”

Duggan is working with leaders in healthcare to try and cut costs out.

Related to that, the issue with a revolving door of doctors in Northeast Michigan was brought up. While Duggan did not have an immediate answer, he opened the door to brainstorming.

Another hot topic brought to Duggan’s attention is the need for more industry jobs in Rogers City.

“I believe that MEDC (Michigan Economic Development Corporation) and the state should be backing your local vision, not telling you what to do,” Duggan said. “But in a community like this, there is no reason you can’t have a mix of tourism, small business, small manufacturing, and the like. What I want to do is have a team that supports you on your vision and help improve folks here. But this can be done.”

Duggan also spoke about his plan to put more money in vocational training, much needed programs for Presque Isle County where too few people are working in the trades.

“This year, the state of Michigan took $1.3 billion out of the school aid plan and put it into their other pet projects in the state budget,” Duggan said. “And I’m saying I’m going to put it back over five years. Why does that matter? Indiana this year spent $200 million on high school CTE (Career and Technical Education). Michigan spends $40 million.

The final question addressed is what can be done about aging infrastructure, like at the water treatment plant, in Rogers City. The money to fix aging infrastructure is extremely competitive, and cities like Rogers City that work with a small budget have to put their priorities elsewhere.

“I think there should be more support, but I also am going to be looking for communities to say ‘here’s our ideas on how we do it more cost-effectively and can we pair with the neighboring community,'” Duggan said. “I think this is a two way street. And I’d be really interested in figuring out what your ideas are to do it cost effectively and what the state’s idea is.”

“I’m going to partner with the communities first that are most willing to help themselves,” he said.

Duggan addressed the Line 5 tunnel project. The project is a proposed four-mile-long concrete utility tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac. It is currently being challenged in courts by environmental groups for potential environmental risks of building it.

“In light of the court rulings, it seems obvious we’re moving in the direction of the tunnel,” he said. “I think you need to make sure that whatever’s done has a maximum environmental protection…We need to find the right environmental solution for it.”

Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@TheAlpenaNews.com.