Aligned Priorities: Supported Initiatives and Legislative Priorities
Real Policy Packages Advancing Working-Class Rights
A strong Michigan is built on accountability, fair play, and collective action. Anthony Pennock’s legislative agenda is aligned with our state’s leading labor, education, housing, and environmental advocates. Explore the active bills and grassroots movements Anthony is fighting to codify into state law.
Michiganders pay some of the highest energy rates in the Midwest for some of the worst utility service and longest power outages in the country. Our current monopoly system is failing working families while utility executives pull in record corporate profits.
The Plan: Anthony fully backs the Ratepayer Bill of Rights legislative package championed by the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. This framework will cap monopoly utility profits at an 8.2% return on equity, automatically credit consumers for prolonged outages, block energy corporations from using ratepayer dollars to fund political lobbying or executive bonuses, and mandate transparent 5-year third-party grid reliability engineering audits.
The Bottom Line: Anthony believes energy policy should be written by state lawmakers on behalf of the people, not by utility CEOs and corporate lobbyists.
As a veteran public school teacher and local union president, Anthony knows that our classrooms cannot function without the vital workers who keep our buildings safe, running, and fed. Our education support staff have been underpaid, undervalued, and under-protected for far too long.
The Plan: Stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Michigan Education Association (MEA) to champion a dedicated Education Support Staff Bill of Rights to secure living-wage standards, mandate state-level retention bonuses matching those offered to classroom teachers, guarantee robust healthcare benefits, and protect support staff from predatory privatization schemes.
The Bottom Line: Solidarity means standing up for all school workers. If we want to solve the education workforce shortage, we must treat our essential support staff with the professional dignity they deserve.
A healthy community relies on a balanced local economy. While our platform holds predatory corporate monopolies and bad-faith corporate entities accountable, we must simultaneously cut red tape and deliver proactive state support to our independent family farms and Main Street small businesses. They are the true backbone of Michigan’s communities, and our platform guarantees they will never be left behind.
Targeted Reform, Not Compliance Burdens: Anthony is fully committed to ensuring that major structural reforms—such as worker misclassification protections or updated revenue policies—are narrowly tailored to target bad-faith, large-scale corporate entities. Our legislative frameworks explicitly exclude and protect family farms and legitimate small businesses from burdensome compliance red tape, allowing honest local employers to focus on growing their operations.
Expanding the Going PRO Talent Fund: Small businesses need a skilled workforce to compete, but recent, short-sighted state budget cuts slashed Going PRO funding by 42%—leaving thousands of Michigan workers without training opportunities. Anthony champions fully restoring and expanding the Michigan Going PRO Talent Fund. By expanding these employer-driven reimbursement grants, we can help local businesses cover the costs of upskilling their current teams and training new hires without draining their operating budgets.
Incentive-Based Agricultural Conservation: Rather than imposing punitive, heavy-handed environmental mandates that strain family farm budgets, Anthony champions voluntary, incentive-based state grant programs. By partnering directly with the Michigan Association of Conservation Districts (MACD) and supporting farmer-led research initiatives like Michigan SARE, we can provide the financial assistance and technological resources our farmers need to implement sustainable soil health and runoff controls. This protects Michigan's vital aquifers and water tables while keeping local agriculture highly profitable.
The Bottom Line: Real economic stewardship means distinguishing between multi-million dollar corporate conglomerates and the independent neighbors who run our local shops and cultivate our land. In Lansing, Anthony will fight for a fair-play economic system that aggressively defends our local producers and small employers from corporate consolidation and unfair competition.
No Michigander should ever face medical bankruptcy, delay vital treatments, or go without essential care because they cannot afford insurance premiums, deductibles, or co-pays.
The Plan: Anthony aggressively supports the passage of Michigan House Bill 4407 to establish MiCare—a publicly financed, universal healthcare system covering every single resident in our state with zero deductibles or co-pays.
The Funding (A Better Deal for Families): Rather than paying exorbitant premiums to private insurance companies, MiCare will be sustained through a simple, cost-saving payroll contribution framework capped at 2% for employees and 4% for employers (with individual income under $25,000 completely exempt). This modest shift replaces corporate premiums entirely, saving the average Michigan family thousands of dollars a year.
The Bottom Line: Healthcare is a human right. By streamlining administration into a unified public system, we can rein in prescription costs, protect provider autonomy, save billions in wasteful corporate overhead, and ensure every family has access to top-tier medical care.
Unscrupulous employers frequently exploit weak legal definitions to misclassify employees as independent contractors—robbing workers of fair wages, workers' compensation, healthcare access, and union rights while undercutting honest union contractors.
The Plan: Aggressively push to pass Michigan Senate Bill 6 to codify the strict "ABC Test" standard in Michigan law to stop payroll fraud. This framework mandates severe financial penalties for willful corporate violators, creates whistleblower bounty protections, and gives enforcement teeth to the state's Payroll Fraud Enforcement Unit alongside labor allies like the Michigan AFL-CIO.
The Caveat: To ensure absolute fairness, our enforcement framework explicitly protects family farms and legitimate local small businesses from compliance burdens, focusing exclusively on bad-faith corporate and publicly funded entities trying to cheat the system.
The Bottom Line: A strong economy is built on a foundation of respected, secure union labor.
Michigan’s Great Lakes, inland lakes, and vital aquifers are our state's most precious natural resources. Passing aging or risky oil and gas pipelines through our fragile ecosystems without absolute oversight is an environmental threat we cannot afford to take.
The Plan: Anthony supports strict, modern state-level regulatory guardrails for hazardous liquid and gas pipelines—including supporting the active Michigan House Bill 5665 legislative package to update our state's environmental safety rules. This framework mandates comprehensive, independent environmental impact analyses for all pipeline routes and requires energy conglomerates to carry maximum proof of insurance to cover worst-case leak remediation.
The Coalition: We are proud to stand alongside leading Great Lakes protection advocates like the Michigan Environmental Council and FLOW (For Love of Water) to defend our water tables from catastrophic corporate spills and hold bad-faith operators completely accountable.
The Bottom Line: Big oil and gas corporations must be held to the highest standards of financial and environmental safety. We must protect our drinking water, our local tourism economies, and our pristine natural resources from corporate negligence.
Every person deserves to live free from fear, abuse, and systemic vulnerability. While federal funding exists, Michigan must lead by codifying its own comprehensive Violence Against Women Act to permanently secure survivor resources, modernize domestic violence and sexual assault statutes, and systematically address the crisis of missing and murdered individuals.
The Plan: Anthony will champion the creation of a comprehensive Michigan Violence Against Women Act (MIVAWA). This state-level framework will establish permanent, non-lapsing state funds for community-based domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers, guarantee trauma-informed training for local law enforcement, expand access to emergency housing vouchers for survivors fleeing abuse, and eliminate legal loopholes that prevent the aggressive prosecution of non-fatal strangulation and stalking.
Shining a Light on the MMIWR Crisis: Nationally and across our state, Native American women face domestic abuse, sexual assault, and homicide at rates disproportionately higher than the general population. Anthony is committed to expanding legislative support and funding for the active Michigan Attorney General's Missing or Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) Task Force. Our framework will mandate standard data-sharing protocols between state, local, and Tribal law enforcement agencies to eliminate jurisdictional delays during the critical first 72 hours of a missing person report, and establish a permanent state liaison office to support impacted families.
The Coalition: Anthony is proud to stand in solidarity with frontline advocacy groups like Uniting Three Fires Against Violence (UTFAV)—Michigan's statewide Tribal domestic violence and sexual assault coalition—to ensure that state resource allocation is victim-centered, culturally honoring, and built alongside the sovereign Tribal Nations of Michigan.
The Bottom Line: For too long, systemic barriers and jurisdictional gaps have left survivors—particularly Indigenous women, children, and Two-Spirit individuals—invisible to the justice system. Michigan must end this silence. By establishing a robust state VAWA framework and fully backing our Tribal law enforcement partners, we can ensure that every survivor is heard, every victim is searched for, and every community is protected.
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Michigan is facing a serious housing affordability and stability crisis. For too long, our state laws have heavily prioritized corporate landlords over the baseline safety and rights of working tenants.
The Plan: Anthony supports the comprehensive Renters' Bill of Rights legislative package (House Bills 6086–6089) alongside tenant advocacy frameworks outlined by Michigan Legal Help. This sweeping legislation will establish strict 90-day notices for rent increases, cap predatory application fees, provide mandatory relocation assistance for tenants displaced by code violations, and protect the right of tenants to form advocacy unions without fear of retaliation.
The Bottom Line: This is about rebalancing power, holding bad-faith corporate landlords accountable, and ensuring every Michigander has a safe, stable, and affordable place to live.
Every year we wait to level the playing field, Michigan loses world-class creative and technical talent to competing states. We need to build a sustainable pipeline of high-paying careers right here at home.
The Plan: Champion the swift passage of the bipartisan Multimedia Jobs Act (House Bills 5991 and 5992) developed alongside the Michigan Film Industry Association (MiFIA). This fiscally responsible, transferable tax credit framework directly incentives local hiring, requires independent CPA verification, and mandates a 30% incentive credit for hiring qualified Michigan residents.
The Bottom Line: This act ensures that production dollars directly benefit local businesses and union labor, securing strong jobs with protected pension and healthcare paths for behind-the-scenes professionals.
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and tech infrastructure has triggered a massive push to build large-scale, hyperscale data centers across Michigan. While these facilities bring private investment, they demand astronomical amounts of electricity and up to five million gallons of water a day—threatening to strain our power grid, spike utility rates, and bypass community consent.
The Plan (Halting Encroachment): Anthony will aggressively support the active Michigan Data Center Moratorium legislative package (House Bills 5594–5596). This critical legislation places a temporary pause on massive data center permits to give lawmakers time to assess resource strain and, crucially, to ensure that local communities are not blindsided by sudden, large-scale industrial developments.
Restoring Local Control & Resident Voice: True economic stewardship requires community consent. Anthony will champion legislation that explicitly bans the use of corporate non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) between tech developers and municipal officials, which currently keep residents in the dark until deals are finalized. Furthermore, Anthony supports updating the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act to guarantee that local townships maintain full, un-preempted zoning authority over data center placement, mandating transparent public hearings and community impact votes before any project can break ground.
Ratepayer & Resource Protections: We must ensure data center operators pay for 100% of their own electrical grid upgrades rather than shifting infrastructure costs onto everyday families. Anthony stands with regional water-security watchdogs like the Alliance for the Great Lakes to mandate that these facilities implement closed-loop cooling systems, protecting our local drinking water tables and rural agricultural lands from corporate exploitation.
The Bottom Line: We cannot give massive tax breaks to some of the richest tech conglomerates on earth if it means everyday Michiganders are stuck with higher energy bills, depleted water tables, and a silenced voice in their own hometowns. Michigan should welcome innovation, but only when tech companies act as transparent partners who answer directly to the people.