EDWARDSBURG — If Lt. Gov. Brian Calley looks familiar, it wasn’t that long ago he knocked on Dowagiac doors for Rep. Sharon Tyler.

Now Calley’s part of Gov. Rick Snyder’s transformational team with Cass County’s own Dan Wyant, reinventing Michigan.

As he told county Republicans at their Lincoln Day dinner Saturday night at Edwardsburg American Legion, it’s time to confront Michigan’s $1.5 billion structural deficit rather than cook up another accounting gimmick to survive the fiscal year.

“It’s a broken record, like the movie ‘Groundhog Day.’ The type of changes that have to be made to fix it are really hard,” Calley said. “We’ve never had the right leadership to actually change it. It’s always been what accounting gimmick can we employ to put off this decision another year?

“But the problem is it gets bigger every year. We’re unwilling to leave this problem for the next generation. We propose to reduce state spending by about $1.5 billion, which in Portland is still a lot of money. There is controversy when you talk about this and we don’t enter into these decisions lightly. These are real people’s lives affected by the types of decisions that are made, but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation we face. Just balancing the budget is not enough. We need to fix the structural problems and start fixing the debt.”

Despite Michigan having a constitutional balanced budget amendment, the lieutenant governor said “pesky off-balance-sheet debt” has ballooned to more than $50 billion.

This includes unfunded promises made to state and school retirees for health care and pensions. “Tens of billions of dollars,” he said, adding, “We have an unemployment account with the federal government behind $3.8 billion. We have awarded companies specific tax credits to 2032. We’re the only state in the nation to take this step to include in the budget provisions to both cap liabilities and start paying them down. It’s hard because schools are impacted. Local governments are impacted.”

The difficulty of imposing such reforms demands a different attitude, he suggested.

“We’ve heard ‘service consolidation’ for years. Within a few months the barriers will be gone,” Calley said. “If you think changes in the emergency financial manager law have been dramatic, the debt accumulated by local governments, whether they be in southeast Michigan, southwest Michigan or the UP, guess what? They all come back to obligations to the state, obligations to all of us. Do you want a state with or do you want a state without tools to deal with the insolvency and pending liability to the state, i.e. you, in the event of a local government or local school collapse? We can’t any longer put off these types of decisions. It’s time to face reality.”

Using education for example, Calley commented, “We’ve heard for a long time that certain school systems aren’t doing well and trap throwaway kids with graduation rates of 25 percent or less who aren’t ready to go on to college. What if we scrap that attitude for ‘whatever it takes?’ In the past we’ve looked at it as our responsibility is to teach kids. That worked fine in the past, but now our responsibility is different. It’s to make sure that kids learn, and that doesn’t just mean more money. Statistically, there is no correlation between more money in education and higher performance. ‘Whatever it takes’ recognizes some kids do have more challenges and we have to try different things — even in my own family. I have a 4-year-old daughter who has autism, which takes an extra 20 hours of work a week to make sure she learns. I’m her father, so my attitude is, ‘Whatever it takes.’

“What if we took that attitude a father has for his autistic daughter and interlaced it through our entire system. We have 4.9 percent less money to operate on than last year, that’s the reduction that’s been proposed. Even with a 4.9-percent reduction, whatever it takes, we can give these kids the best shot at the future by busting down barriers to try different things to make sure they learn. The old style of just teaching them doesn’t work in some parts of our state. That’s what we want to see from citizens all over the state. Difficult change is really uncomfortable, but give it a chance. Ask yourself, is the status quo working?”

Calley, who earlier in the week survived a ragged serenade of Happy Birthday in the Senate, where he casts tie-breaking votes as its president, recounted the humbling experience of trying to get past security into his restricted- access office on the second floor of the Romney Building when he forgot his state identification card.

The officer scrutinized his driver’s license, then began filling out a visitor’s pass. “I don’t walk around with a big head,” he said. “Something happens every day to keep me grounded.”

Calley, during two terms as a state representative, counted as colleagues state Reps. John Proos, Tyler, Matt Lori and Rick Shaffer, in attendance as St. Joseph County Republican chairman.

“Here we are after a lost decade,” Calley said, “of missed opportunities in a state which once enjoyed the status of being the economic center of, not just the country, but the world. A few generations later, where do we stand? At the bottom of every good list and at the top of every bad list.

“But we know we have the people, the resources, the drive, the entrepreneurs and the vision among our citizens to move this state forward. The problem has really been a lack of leadership.”

Calley’s office overlooks protests.

“I always take heart that they’re there because that means we’re actually doing something. The only way to avoid protesters is to do nothing. Right now we’re in a position where none of the options are particularly attractive. We just approach this from the standpoint of doing what’s right regardless of political consequences and conventional wisdom and to lead with a bold vision focused much more on the future than on the past. It’s quite different than anything we’ve seen here in this state, at least for a long time.”

The vision guiding Michigan for a “path to prosperity” is led by Snyder, a former venture capitalist, and Calley, a mid-Michigan community banker for 10 years.

Calley, from Portland between Lansing and Grand Rapids, was an Ionia County commissioner and vice chairman for four years, 2003-2006.

He graduated from Michigan State University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and added his MBA in 2000 from Grand Valley State University.

His wife, Julie, teaches Sunday school to middle-school age children at Portland Baptist Church, where he is a song leader and pianist and serves on the deacon board. They have three children: Collin, 6; Reagan, 4; and Karagan, 1.

This state’s choice is between the discredited “convincing someone to come in from outside Michigan and save us” and the preferred “harnessing the enormous potential of this state and the people already here to lead us on to the type of Michigan we all know it can be.”

Tax policy “is only part of what we’re working on,” Calley said. “We looked at it and saw kind of a lumpy system that treats different types of businesses and different types of individuals radically different, depending essentially on your political power. How can we build a system that is simple, fair and efficient, without worrying about the legacy of decisions made before? In other words, what if we started from scratch?

“We knew the Michigan Business Tax (MBT) had to go, so as we went forward in this process, we put a real premium on simple. Here’s the corporate tax plan, so listen closely: federal taxable income times 6 percent. That’s it. Today, you see literally billions of dollars of favoritism within our corporate tax structure. Most all businesses have to pay twice — at the business tax level and all the business income is taxed again on the individual income tax return. Our job growth comes from expansion of businesses already here.

“I know you in Cass County all know who Edward Lowe was and the wonderful work his foundation does. A while ago, they came up with this idea of economic gardening. It’s a concept about growing jobs from right here instead of chasing jobs around the world through an incentive structure that’s like a house of cards.”

Calley characterized the 1990s and the 2000s as “two different decades,” the former one of expansion and the latter one of contraction.

“The only job growth we had in this state was from expansion of existing businesses,” he said. “In both time periods, the net jobs from relocations into Michigan in times of economic expansion and economic contraction was negative. We’re 20 years into an experiment and we want to try something radically different — treating all businesses the same with a simple, fair and efficient system that is the easiest in the nation to comply with. That could unleash employment potential behind particularly innovators, small businesses and entrepreneurs that is exciting. It might surprise you to know that the (MBT), which raises $3.8 billion, only nets the state $2.2 billion because of the favoritism of tax credits. We collect from this group and give it to this other group. You can make one big sweeping change and it can improve things for virtually everybody, but that’s only part of the story.

“The other part of the story is the regulatory environment. That’s why we’re so proud to have put Dan Wyant in charge of the DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality). While it’s important that we be good stewards, we need to make sure that our approach is predictable, reasonable and science-based. That’s what Cass County’s own Dan Wyant brings to the table. This part’s harder because it’s not one big sweeping change, but literally, hundreds of small changes that will result in a better climate for job providers. I’m so proud of the work that our partners in the Legislature have done. The MAEAP legislation for agriculture that rewards environmental stewardship with liability protections has been signed into law already because of the fine work by the House and the Senate.”

Calley concluded, “That $2.2 billion premium that you all pay, retailers around this state, for the privilege of having little stickers on every item in the store. It would be one thing if item pricing made it more accurate, but it does not. We need to do away with this needless regulation that we all pay more for. Businesses have to pay to comply with this, which doesn’t actually protect anybody. Michigan is the only state that has item pricing. As we remove the horse-and-buggy-type regulations from our system, and unleash the small businesses, the innovators and the entrepreneurs, who make jobs as a result, think about what the future of Michigan could be.”