Engler funds skilled-job training

The governor's plan calls for 10,000 scholarships for people who enroll in technical-training programs at the junior college level. The program will provide up to $2,000 for each of the state's technical programs.

"This would effectively reduce by half the cost of community college in high-demand occupations such as construction trades, engineering technicians, computer programmers and health-care technicians," Engler spokesperson John Truscott said in a news release.

The scholarship program will cost $20 million, Engler said.

"We've got the demand right now for high-skilled employees," he said.

In addition, Engler said Michigan will use $30 million to create at least five new technical training centers at community colleges.

"We have worked too hard to restart Michigan's economic engine," Engler said yesterday before an address to the Economic Club of Detroit. "Keeping our jobs' engine turbocharged means training our workers."

Engler said hundreds of millions of dollars in planned public construction projects are helping create a shortage of 6,000 carpenters, electricians, masons and other skilled workers.

Wayne State University and Oakland University alone have $170 million in projects under way, he said.

"Add to that shortage the squeeze industry is already facing in finding enough engineering technicians, computer programmers and other high-tech workers," Engler said.

The state's unemployment rate is 4.1 percent, the lowest since 1969.

Engler acknowledged - as he has in the past - that educators and officials face a challenge in getting young people to enter technical programs, rather than academic schools.

"The reality is most of us are not going to be doctors," Engler said. Another reality, he said, is that many technical program graduates make more money than graduates of liberal arts colleges.

The move comes in the wake of a Michigan Jobs Commission study completed in September by Fantus Consulting that said Michigan's image had improved during the past four years, bolstered by a strong economy and a surging auto industry.

In comparing the state's business climate with seven other competing states, the study ranked Michigan's business climate as comparable to or better than those found in Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Alabama.

But it said Michigan doesn't fare as well against Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina, the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday.

The study rated Ohio as more aggressive in economic development and having better financing, technology and transportation than Michigan. North Carolina has cheaper utilities, business taxes and labor, lower crime and a strong economic-development program, the study said.

Engler also used the Detroit appearance to promote his proposal for a $500 million bond issue for environmental protection and improvement. He first announced the Clean Michigan Initiative in his State of the State address.

The bond issue would require a statewide vote - and support from both parties in the Legislature to put it on the ballot.

Engler said $325 million would go for cleanup and reuse of "brownfield" sites, $50 million for water quality programs, $50 million for waterfront revitalization, $50 million for state parks and $25 million for river sediment cleanup.

02-03-98