Public Act #72
Legislation has charged the Michigan Department of Treasury with measuring and identifying local units that may be in fiscal distress (Public Act 72).

To make certain the process of identifying fiscal distress was based on a transparent and vetted methodology, the State charged Michigan State University Institute for Public Policy and Social Research with the task of developing a scoring system.

A paper was published in 2002 based on their research and conclusions.

One of the primary author’s of this paper was Robert Kleine, the state's current State Treasurer.

The algorithms and terminology used in the Munetrix tool are based on this paper.

The tool has been loaded with data for most of Michigan’s 1,800+ municipal governments for the years 2006 – 2008.

Additionally, the tool has been developed to permit the storage of budgeted and forecast data for forward-looking analysis.

As soon as the audited data is available for 2009 it will be made available in Munetrix.

Score Card
The image on the left illustrates a score card for one local unit, in this case the City of Auburn Hils, for one year, in this case 2008.

At the top you can see a score of 2; relatively low and puts Auburn Hills in the middle of the green category.

These reports are stored as an Adobe PDF file on the Treasury’s website or available quickly from the Munetrix database.

Notice that the score of 2 is the sum of each of the nine factors identified in the right-most column of the report.