By:Kyle Davidson | MICHIGAN ADVANCE
After meeting weeks earlier to discuss Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed budget for the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy for the upcoming fiscal year, members of the House Subcommittee handling EGLE’s appropriations welcomed the department back on Tuesday to discuss its environmental remediation efforts.
While EGLE makes up 1% of the state budget, Director Phil Roos told members at a previous committee meeting that the department likely has an outsized impact on residents of the state through its work on safe drinking water and air pollution.
In her Fiscal Year 2027 budget proposal, Whitmer once again advocated for an increase to the state’s waste disposal fee from 36 cents per ton to $5, allocating an additional $80 million in revenue from the increase to the Renew Michigan Fund. The proposal aims to bring Michigan on par with what other Midwestern states charge for waste disposal and discourage dumping in the state.
65% of those funds would support environmental clean up and redevelopment alongside the state’s brownfield redevelopment program and its emergency contamination response, according to the State Budget Office. 17% would go toward waste diversion initiatives, while 13% would be used to expand programs that conduct landfill oversight, monitoring, closures and corrective actions.
Testifying before the House Environment, Great Lakes and Energy Appropriations Subcommittee, Mike Neller, the director of EGLE’s Remediation and Redevelopment division discussed their responsibilities and how funding impacts their ability to address environmental contamination.
The Remediation and Redevelopment division oversees four programs: the state’s environmental remediation program, the leaking underground storage tank program, the brownfield redevelopment program and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act or Superfund program, which EGLE manages in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
According to EGLE’s 2025 year end report, there are more than 27,000 contaminated sites in the state. Neller said more than 7,000 of those sites are contaminated by underground storage tanks.
There are two mechanisms the state can assist with environmental remediation and redevelopment Neller explained: state-funded and managed cleanups, and grants and loans through the brownfield redevelopment program.
Since 2016, the department has begun receiving more consistent funding, which has allowed EGLE to remediate more sites, Neller said. That consistency ensures the department can plan for the long-term so they do not have to stop working on cleanup at a site, he said.
“The nature of the work is, if you stop working on a site, and then you wait 5-10 years to come back to it, you basically have to start over,” Neller said. “So you just threw that money away.”
Neller asked the Legislature to continue their support for EGLE and to increase funding, noting that the number of people impacted by environmental contamination will go up and clean up costs will increase if the contaminated sites in the state are not addressed.
“Any reduction in funds is going to mean we’re not going to be able to continue the work that we’re currently doing.” Neller said. “Which you’re, you’re then putting at risk the opportunity for contamination to affect public health and the environment.”
Travis Boeskool, EGLE’s senior deputy director noted that EGLE does not have many general fund dollars to redirect to programs like the ones Neller oversees, pointing to the Renew Michigan Fund, and the unclaimed dimes from Michigan’s bottle deposit law as the main sources of funding for brownfield redevelopment and environmental cleanups.
Rep. Ken Borton (R-Gaylord) asked how the state determined that revenue from increased waste tipping fees should go to support environmental clean up and remediation.
Boeskool explained that in other states, using a portion of solid waste surcharge to support environmental remediation is fairly typical.
“In some ways, it’s a marriage of potential revenue with an issue that we know we’ve got to keep tackling,” he said