Upper Peninsula Rep. Dave Prestin is running for reelection to the state House, facing Democratic challenger Christiana Reynolds, a teacher and local activist.
“The UP is a difficult place to live,” Prestin said. “It’s beautiful, but it’s a difficult place to live, raise a family, and Lansing is doing nothing to make things easier on us up here.”
The 108th District stretches from Lake Superior to Green Bay, including all of Luce, Schoolcraft, Delta and Menominee Counties, along with portions of Mackinac and Chippewa Counties.
“I fully believe that the 108 just needs a new kind of perspective to reach its full potential,” Reynolds said.
Prestin, a paramedic and former Menominee County commissioner, was first elected to the 108th District seat in 2022, defeating his Democratic opponent by over 30 points.
Prestin says that housing access in the region could be expanded through investments in trade education.
“Workforce development — we don’t have enough skilled trades,” he said. “We have put so much emphasis on four year degrees in higher education that we have lost sight of the fact that we still need carpenters, we still need plumbers, we still need electricians. We need the labor force that that that built the housing that we have today.”
Reynolds says that the area could explore more diverse styles of housing, putting increased state and local resources behind different types of residences.
“How can we make our small towns more walkable and increase housing — like condos and townhomes and apartments, and thinking more strategically, I think, with our city planning,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds also weighed in on the state tipped wage, which is set to begin a multi-year phase out early next year.
“A slow kind of phase out would be a better solution than something that happens quite abruptly — that can be kind of a shock to our local economies,” Reynolds said.
Prestin says he opposes the policy, saying that most servers are satisfied with their current earning system and predicting hardship for small businesses that would see greater labor expenses.
The candidates also shared their thoughts on state climate legislation passed last year, which requires energy producers to become carbon-neutral by 2040 to meet a non-mandated goal of a carbon-neutral state by 2050.
Prestin, who was previously a board member of the Alger-Delta Electrical Cooperative, says that the state should continue to support numerous energy sources, including coal, nuclear and natural gas.
“These are all base load energies that can be scaled up and scale down as needed,” he said. “Everybody looks at energy as being these linear curve of demand — it’s not. It’s full of massive spikes and valleys, and energy producers and transmission operators have to be able to adapt. And this legislation that Michigan passed just blows that all up.”
Reynolds says that she supports the goals set by the legislation and that Michigan should take climate change seriously, given the cultural and economic importance of the Great Lakes and surrounding nature.