Democratic Legislation Will Hold Polluters Accountable for Cleanups

LANSING, Mich (June 6, 2025) — Democratic legislators in both chambers of the Michigan Legislature are jointly introducing legislation to hold polluters accountable by requiring more thorough cleanups, making information about sites more available, and making it easier for those harmed by pollution to seek justice. The bills’ sponsors are Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) and Rep. Jason Morgan (D-Ann Arbor), along with Sens. Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit), Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield), Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak), Sue Shink (D-Northfield Twp.), Sean McCann (D-Kalamazoo), and Reps. Donavan McKinney (D-Detroit), Noah Arbit (D-West Bloomfield), Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), Cynthia Neeley (D-Flint), and Phil Skaggs (D-East Grand Rapids). Several of the bills have already been introduced in the House as House Bills 4636-4640, and the remaining bills will be introduced next week.

“It’s shocking that Michigan law doesn’t require polluters to actually clean up their mess or even report all spills,” Sen. Irwin said. “This package will ensure more thorough cleanups and comprehensive spill reporting. I’m grateful to the many experts and stakeholders who helped us tailor these bills so that brownfield re-developers can continue to play their key role in cleaning up polluted sites. These bills put liability where it belongs: with the polluters, not the public.”

“For too long, corporations have dumped their messes on Michigan communities and left working people to pay the bill,” Rep. Morgan said. “If you pollute our water, poison our soil, or threaten public health — you pay to clean it up. It’s time we stand up for the people of Michigan and stop protecting billionaire corporations at public expense.”

Michigan’s Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act often enables polluters to restrict access to land or groundwater in lieu of cleaning up pollution. An ever-growing list of over 4,500 sites in Michigan features such land- or water-use restrictions. Environmental advocates and legislators have been working to strengthen Michigan’s pollution cleanup laws for decades.

The current Polluter Pay package was refined through an intensive stakeholder workgroup hosted by the Michigan Dept. of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) in the summer of 2024. Five of the six bills in the package passed the Senate last fall, but the House was not able to take them up before the end of the legislative session. The bills were re-introduced in the form they passed the Senate. Sen. McCann, one of the sponsors of the legislation and chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment, plans to hold a hearing on the bills next week.

“Michigan’s biggest polluters have been able to use bureaucratic barriers to essentially block updates to the cleanup criteria that say how much contamination is acceptable in our land and water,” Sen. Chang said. “We need this legislation so EGLE can update inputs to cleanup criteria as scientists learn more about the effects and exposure risks of different pollutants.”

“Michigan laws should protect residents, and the default response to a spill should be to clean it up, not fencing it off and letting it sit,” Sen. Moss said. “We know that contamination cleanup can be difficult, but the current law doesn’t even require polluters to try. The Polluter Pay legislation prioritizes removing contamination rather than simply issuing land and water use restrictions.”

“By the time we understood PFAS risks, the legal window to hold polluters accountable had already slammed shut,” Sen. McMorrow said. “For decades, manufacturers knew that even low levels of these ‘forever chemicals’ were dangerous and covered it up. We can’t let companies get away with poisoning Michigan just because they hid the evidence long enough.”

“When you’re notified a polluter has exposed you to a hazardous substance, of course, you want to find out if your health has been affected,” Sen. Shink said. “People already have the right to sue polluters who make them sick, but it often takes a while for the ill effects of a toxic exposure to manifest in a medical diagnosis. My bill would make polluters liable for the costs of medical monitoring to detect problems in the people they put at risk.”

“You don’t always know immediately that you have been harmed by pollution,” Sen. McCann said. “By starting the clock on polluters’ liability before the problem is detected, Michigan’s statute of limitations incentivizes coverups and penalizes people for not knowing they were being poisoned. My bill would, like federal law, start the clock on liability when a person finds out about the pollution so that they have a meaningful chance to seek justice.”

“We can’t continue to rely on the honor system when it comes to pollution,” Rep. Koleszar said. “Michigan enacted pollution cleanup laws because we had all too many examples of polluters who failed to do the right thing. Yet our current law still allows a polluter to release a hazardous substance, clean it up however they see fit, and never report it to anyone. House Bill 4640 would require reporting for all releases, because people have a right to know.”

“Polluters count on the fact that it’s hard for regular people to pay out of pocket for the kinds of testing and monitoring they need to prove that pollution has made them sick,” Rep. McKinney said. “You shouldn’t have to pay to find out how much a polluter has harmed you. House Bill 4637 would make polluters liable for medical monitoring so that people don’t have to shoulder these costs after being exposed to hazardous substances.”

“It is outrageous that many corporate polluters have successfully utilized government red tape to shirk their responsibilities to clean up harmful contamination — and leaving taxpayers to foot the bill,” Rep. Arbit said. “Michigan’s cleanup criteria for chemical substances are over 10 years out-of-date. House Bill 4638 will ensure Michigan no longer lags behind in protecting our residents from toxic substances.”

“People in my district know that you can’t always tell immediately when you’ve been exposed to dangerous levels of a chemical; some hazards, like lead, are not detectable by human senses alone,” Rep. Neeley said. “But in Michigan, the clock on your right to sue a polluter starts when they dump the chemicals. By the time you find out about it, you may have no way to hold that polluter accountable. My bill would set a common-sense standard that parallels the federal law: starting the clock when someone finds out about the pollution.”

“Unless we pass House Bill 4639, forever chemicals will mean forever costs for Michigan taxpayers,” Rep. Skaggs said. “Since my time on the Kent County Commission, I’ve worked to hold polluters accountable and prevent them from transferring that financial burden onto Michiganders. The pollution is still there in our water and land, but current law allows unethical businesses to avoid responsibility for cleaning it up because industrial polluters successfully concealed the dangers of PFAS for so long. The people of Michigan deserve to be able to sue for the damage emerging contaminants have done to our land and water. We all learned a basic rule in kindergarten: clean up your own mess. That simple truth should be the law of the land here in Michigan.”

The 2025 Polluter Pay Package would: