Bill No. 4995 Approved by Michigan House of Representatives

The Upper Peninsula will now be required to be included on all official state maps and publications.

Can you imagine a state where 1/3 of the state is not included on the map in official state documents? We recently mentioned a bill introduced by State Rep. Michael Lahti (D-Hancock) which seeks to fix this problem.

Now it seems silly to me that this has to be an official bill. Some “trolls” have stated that the Yoopers are whining. But the fact that a state isn’t wholly represented within state documents seems absurd. Our legislature shouldn’t have to spend time on petty little bills like this that shouldn’t have been needed in the first time. Apparently the house of representatives agreed.

The bill passed the Michigan House of Representatives with a vote of 106-0.

The Lansing State Journal commented as follows…

Some “Yoopers,” as U.P. residents call themselves, felt slighted last year when a state-sponsored tourism commercial only showed the more populous peninsula to the south. The TV ad was later fixed.

Some high school students from Escanaba wrote to a textbook publisher last year after a map in a history book appeared to exclude the U.P. from the borders of the United States.

– LSJ.com

House Bill 4995 reads as follows:

May 26, 2009, Introduced by Reps. Lahti, Lindberg, McDowell, Nerat, Booher, Spade, Gonzales, Polidori, Cushingberry and Paul Scott and referred to the Committee on Government Operations.

A bill to require all official depictions of the state of Michigan to include both peninsulas of the state.

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN ENACT:

Sec. 1. (1) Any illustration, image, or depiction of the state of Michigan on a publication produced by a department or agency of this state shall include both the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula of this state.

(2) Subsection (1) applies to all documents produced by this state for distribution to any member of the public, including, but not limited to, maps, forms, brochures, pamphlets, and commemorative items, and also applies to digital images made available over the internet by any state department or agency.

Photo by Lincolnblues on Flickr