UPDATE: Welp. It's official: I'm on the ballot!

TO CLARIFY: The image above is the PRIMARY ballot, NOT the GENERAL.

As many here know, I’m running for Oakland County Commissioner here in Mitt Romney’s old stomping grounds (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, along with Birmingham and most of Bloomfield Township, where I reside).

Oakland County has been controlled by Republicans for a long time, and used to have 25 commissioners...until a few years back when longtime County Executive L. Brooks Patterson started getting jumpy about the county shifting blue over the past few years, so he and the Republican-run state legislature whipped up a cute new law which was blatantly designed specifically to consolidate power among the Oakland County GOP. It’s a long story which I’ll write about that some other time, but the end result of it is that there are now only 21 districts, of which the GOP holds 14.

With only 1/3 of the commission seats, the Dem caucus obviously has pretty limited power. However, they can make quite a splash, and today they just made a big one:

Democrats on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners have proposed a $500,000 fund that would reimburse school districts and child care facilities that test their drinking water for lead and copper.

The proposal comes in the wake of the Flint water crisis and state officials saying it hasn’t determined whether it will fund school testing. The expensive tests have sparked a debate over whether school districts should be responsible for paying for them.

Gov. Rick Snyder is pushing for reforms that would require schools to test their water for lead every year. He proposed $9 million for school lead testing in his executive budget.

Testing can cost districts between $2,000 and $7,000.

The Oakland proposal calls for the creation of the Kids’ Safe Drinking Water Fund which would urge schools to test water before Labor Day, post the results on public websites and direct the county’s Health Division to develop guidelines for schools to be reimbursed.

“There’s nothing more important than the health and safety of our children,” Commissioner Dave Woodward, D-Royal Oak, said in a statement. “We can’t afford to wait to protect all Oakland County kids, and that’s why we believe the testing should be done before the start of the next school year.”

Oakland County is immediately southeast of Genessee County, where Flint is located. As you can imagine, the #FlintWaterCrisis is kind of a big deal around these parts; while we have an awesome Water Resources Commissioner in Democrat Jim Nash who’s on top of things, everyone is still pretty jumpy about the issue, so this is a good thing.

Anyway, we’ll see if Brooks and the Republican members of the commission do the right thing or not here. Steps like this are exactly the sort of thing I hope to help push through if I’m fortunate enough to get elected.

My opponent will either be the GOP incumbent or her GOP primary challenger, each of whom has  held one local office or another pretty continuously for the past 20 years or so. They keep swapping the job back and forth, but now they’ve both been term limited out at the state level and are fighting over the same spot.

It’s expected to be a pretty serious primary battle, too; the challenger has sunk a whopping $100,000 of his own money into the race (bear in mind that this is for a part-time job that pays around $32K/year), while the incumbent has rallied a lot of area establishment GOP types around her.

Meanwhile, I’m quietly raising money, getting my initial lit pieces squared away and am making arrangements for my official campaign kick-off event in a couple of weeks.

After that, I’ll be pounding the pavement, knocking doors and shaking hands for the next six months.

What else? Well, I’ve racked up a nice batch of official endorsements from various local officials. One of them you might remember: Former state Representative and current Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown, best known for the being censored by the state GOP for daring to utter the word “vagina” on the House floor a few years back. I was also formally endorsed by the local Dem club, but seeing how I’m the only Dem running and am also the corresponding secretary of the club, that might not be the most impressive accomplishment :)

I should also give another shout-out to Nicole Bedi, the awesome progressive Democrat running for State Representative in my district against another incumbent Republican.

P.S. For those of you who’ve already made donations: I apologize for the delay in the thank-you cards! Those should be showing up in the next week or so (I ran into a snag with the printer...)

UPDATE: Well this is certainly an unexpected mention…

Pro-tip: tweet more insults https://t.co/N1XjiAE4eI

 I suppose I could sprinkle a few more “Sad!”’s into my tweets...

I should also note that I attended the 9th Congressional District convention this morning (to choose DNC delegates for Hillary & Bernie). It was a pretty straightforward affair. I did get to meet former Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard and other various MDP dignitaries, which was pretty cool.