TRAVERSE CITY — Northwest Lower Michigan’s business sector hopes to build on several legislative accomplishments over the past year as it pushes forward its policy agenda amid looming state and federal elections in 2026.
The Northern Michigan Chamber Alliance laid out some of those goals at its recent 2026 Northern Michigan Policy Conference, which brought out hundreds of area business leaders, numerous state lawmakers and a half-dozen gubernatorial candidates in Michigan to learn about the Alliance’s legislative platform for the year.
“We were able to engage with a lot of these key policy makers to ensure that our voice is heard,” said Alliance Director Dakota Baker. The organization includes a coalition of 20 chambers of commerce and economic development organizations that represent more than 7,000 business members across northern Michigan into the Upper Peninsula.
Baker said the Alliance achieved several accomplishments in 2025, led by its response to the devastating ice storm in late March that wiped out utility service to thousands of northern Michigan businesses and left tens of thousands of area residents without power, cell phone service and more for days and even weeks in remote areas.
Baker said the Alliance was in daily contact with its membership to coordinate ice storm response with local and state emergency management agencies, and helped secure $14 million in state funding to aid recovery efforts.
“We were engaging with the Chamber Allliance every single day,” Baker said. “We were incredibly effective in the ice storm response and recovery.”
The Alliance also assisted area businesses in sorting through the HR1 piece of federal legislation in early 2025 — widely known as the One Big Beautiful Bill” — to understand and benefit from the tax and appropriation implications of the bill. Baker said the organization also closely monitored the Trump administration’s trade policies and tariffs, relaying to federal lawmakers the challenges created by the tariffs on northern Michigan businesses.
The Alliance’s efforts gained recognition both in Michigan and on the national stage in 2025. The National Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives honored the Alliance as a “model for effective advocacy” at its national conference in Philadelphia last July. The Michigan Association of Chamber Professionals also cited the Alliance for partnering with local businesses and elected officials for its ice storm response efforts.
“We’re really increasing our recognition nationally and state-wide,” Baker said. “I think that’s a tremendous win for the alliance.”
In 2026, Baker said the Alliance wants to continue building on the momentum of its advanced air mobility (AAM) efforts that generated almost $1.7 million in state funding last year to support drone activity efforts in northern Michigan, including helping Munson Medical Center deliver medical supplies, lab samples and other items via drones to its local facilities. Other local initiatives involved search and rescue work and ground mapping using drone technology.
Efforts this year will focus on expanding those programs and creating local infrastructure to go beyond the current “line of sight” limitations of the drone delivery program.
“We want to establish northern Michigan as a place to test and develop those technologies,” Baker said.
The Alliance is also monitoring other proposed state legislation, including a pair of economic development bills in the state House outlined by state Rep. Mike Hoadley (R-99) at the recent policy conference. Hoadley’s proposal — dubbed “Real Jobs for Michigan” — would create a $50 million pool that would enable state employers of all sizes to keep half of their state income tax withholding payments from new employees as a hiring incentive. To qualify, an employer would have to hire a new, full-time employee at a salary of at least 150% of the area’s median hourly wage.
“We try to dictate job creation by swinging for the fences- we’re always going for the home run, we want to create 2,000 jobs, 3,000 jobs,” Hoadley said at the conference. “I approach that as let’s create one job at a time, and that’s going to happen in small businesses…it’s a tax incentive that starts at job one for every industry. It doesn’t pick winner and losers.”
“We can rebuild this one job at a time,” Hoadley said.
Baker said the Alliance will also be involved in helping reshape some of the business support initiatives through the Michigan Economic Development Corp., and with implementing the new Legislatively Directed Spending Items (LDSI) requirements signed into law by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November. It’s designed to create more public transparency in how state money is directed to local projects and organizations.
“We want to understand how to partake and be competitive in that process,” Baker said.
Several state lawmakers at the conference cautioned local business people to temper their expectations for significant legislative achievements in 2026, as it’s an election year which can stall legislation at the state and federal level and that there are significant partisan challenges in the state and federal capitol buildings.
“In general, I don’t think there’s a tremendous amount of optimism amongst the Legislature that something significant is going to happen,” state Sen. Ed McBroom of the Upper Peninsula said. “I’m not sensing that right now there’s a lot of optimism from either the Executive branch or the Legislature that things are about to have a major shakeup.”
Baker acknowledged that the upcoming elections could hinder the Alliance’s legislative efforts but the organization will continue to push its policy agenda.
“(Officials are) spending a significant amount of time campaigning and it can be more difficult to accomplish policy goals,” he said. “If we’re smart and tactful about how we engage, we can make it possible to reach some of those priorities.”