Mr Jack R Westbrook

Michigan Public Recreation Lands' Billion Dollar Bonanza: the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund Story Mr Jack R Westbrook

Publisher Marketing: GET YOUR MICHIGAN OUTSIDE ON! Come inside for a whole new look at places to play in Michigan's great outdoors. A Billion Bucks worth of public playlands await your pleasure. From the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula to a harbor park in downtown Detroit, over 2,200 public recreation facilities from rail trails to parks to fishing piers statewide have benefitted from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, born of a unique alliance of government, environmental groups and the Michigan oil and gas industry in the mid-1970s and serving today as a solution to a seeming impasse. In 1976, Michigan became the first state in the nation to earmark state revenue generated through mineral, including oil and gas, activity for acquisition and improvement of environmentally sensitive and/or public recreation lands. The Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund was created by the legislature through Public Act 204, the Kammer Recreational Land Trust Fund Act of 1976, signed by Governor William G. Milliken on July 23, 1976. Through 2014, the Fund has 1,874 MNRTF project grants either active or closed (completed) in each of Michigan's 83 counties totaling nearly $900 million. An additional 332 projects totaling more than $156 million have been approved by the Trust Fund Board but withdrawn later for varied reason. This brings the total of approved projects to 2,207 worth $1,055,641,127. Retired Michigan Oil & Gas News magazine Managing Editor Jack R. Westbrook has covered the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund from first plans to adulthood, and now guides you, the reader, through a county-by-county guide to the Fund's projects in all 83 counties, with general and oil and gas histories of their county home venues.