The Michigan Association of Counties released the final number of commissioners that will be representing Michigan counties after the 2022 elections.
The state is going from 622 commissioners to 619 across the state.
The county with the largest loss for their Board of Commissioners is Antrim County—which will be moving from nine commissioners to five.
“Our census data for this year, we lost a couple hundred people,” said Antrim County Commissioner for District 1 Jarris Rubingh. “It wasn’t a big drop, but there were some counties that gained.”
Census data shows Antrim County lost about 200 residents from 2010 to 2020, which played a factor in the drop of commissioner seats.
“There’s people that debate is seven the right number, is six or five,” said Rubingh. “The commissioners themselves don’t have any say in it, the committee comes up with it so we’ll see how it does going forward.”
This also determines where districts are located in the counties.
“If you look at how many commissioners there are there’s 83 counties in the state of Michigan, and just about 30 of them have either five or six commissioners, so I think Antrim’s going to be joining good company,” said Rubingh.
Rubingh says it would place more workload on the remaining commissioners, but it is in line with how the rest of the state is set up.
“My district, I’ll have a whole other township if I’m a commissioner next year,” said Rubingh. “If you look at committees, we’re all on different committees, so every commissioner that’s left is going to have more meetings to go to. It’s going to be a bigger time commitment.”
“This is for ten years, they’ll look at it again in ten years,” said Rubingh. “It’s not set in stone forever, so I think every committee in the state of Michigan looks at it and they either leave it the same or it goes up or it goes down. They do what’s best for the county, so that’s kind of unique and that’s a good thing.”
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