Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Senate Bill 723, sponsored by Sen. Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing), into law as Public Act 36 of 2026 on July 22. The bill revises the state's transformational brownfield program, administered by the Michigan Strategic Fund, by expanding oversight, increasing transparency, and tying state tax reimbursements more directly to measurable project performance. It also raises the amount of incentive capacity available for future projects, but its most notable change is a set of accountability measures meant to ensure developments deliver the investment, housing, and economic activity promised when incentives are approved. State officials pointed to stalled projects, including Detroit's Renaissance Center redevelopment and riverfront work in Grand Rapids, as examples of the capacity constraints the law is meant to relieve.
Annual Milestones Now Attach to Every New Award
Every new transformational brownfield project approved after the law's effective date must include annual milestones, covering construction progress, capital investment targets, or residential housing benchmarks, as part of its development and reimbursement agreement. The Michigan Strategic Fund gained authority to respond when a project falls short: it may reduce reimbursements, eliminate future tax captures for unfinished phases, or, where a developer is found to have acted in bad faith, terminate reimbursements outright. For developers, that is a shift away from incentives largely awarded upfront and toward incentives that depend on continued execution, the same recalibration already reshaping how incentives factor into site selection decisions more broadly.
A Bigger Incentive Pool Comes With More Public Reporting
The law roughly doubles the program's annual capacity, authorizing an additional $80 million in state tax capture for new projects and raising the yearly ceiling to as much as $160 million, with the total aggregate cap across all approved projects rising to roughly $3.2 billion, subject to statutory limits. Alongside that expansion, the Michigan Strategic Fund must build a public webpage carrying financial analyses, underwriting reports, fiscal impact studies, milestones, and tax distributions for each project, and livestream board meetings that consider new awards. A separate, statewide searchable database of approved brownfield work plans must go live by April 1, 2027, with quarterly updates after that. Future residential projects must also include an affordable housing component, defined as units rented or sold to households earning no more than 120% of area median income, echoing the AMI-based thresholds already used in brownfield-financed housing projects elsewhere in the state.
Michigan's changes track a broader pattern in how states are structuring economic development incentives: less as upfront commitments, more as agreements that have to keep being earned. For developers and investors, that means a signed incentive package is no longer the finish line; sustaining it now takes continued reporting and measurable delivery, not unlike how other site-selection variables have shifted from a one-time checkbox to an ongoing condition a project has to keep satisfying.
