What we're watching in 2023: A Q&A with the Free Press

What stories and trends will Free Press reporters and editors be watching for in 2023?

For the final episode of the year of the Free Press' weekly news podcast "On The Line," podcast producer Darcie Moran and host Cary Junior II talked with several Free Press writers and an editor to see what they expect.

They spoke about a new District Detroit development plan, the future of the anti-abortion movement, and circumstances surrounding Russian prisoner and Michigan native Paul Whelan, among other things.

What follows is a condensed version of Junior's conversations with Kristen Jordan Shamus, health and gender reporter; Dana Afana, city hall reporter; Duante Beddingfield, arts and entertainment reporter; J.C. Reindl, business reporter; Clara Hendrickson, Report for America Corps member who focuses on Michigan politics; Lyndsay Green, restaurant and dining critic, and Brian Dickerson, editorial page editor and columnist.

Kristen Jordan Shamus: One of the stories that's top of mind in the year ahead is the story of Paul Whelan. He is the Novi businessman who was arrested while he was traveling in Russia four years ago. He was there for what he says was a wedding of a friend. And he says he was set up by the Russian military, you know, secret service agency. He was arrested in his hotel room. He was charged with espionage and sentenced to 16 years of hard labor. The U.S. government is saying that he's wrongfully detained in Russia and they're working to try to release him.

Junior: Are you expecting any movement on that come next year?

Shamus: His family is definitely hopeful and they've been working really hard. It's hard to say.

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After Junior spoke with Shamus in the newsroom, some news broke. Brittney Griner was released from Russia on Dec. 8. And so he caught up with her again to see how that impacts Whelan.

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Shamus: President Joe Biden announced that he had brokered a deal to trade WNBA superstar Brittney Griner for a man named Viktor Bout, who the U.S. had been holding since 2011. Now, Griner was arrested because officials said they had found a vape cartridge containing cannabis oil. She was sentenced to nine years in the gulag. Bout is a pretty notorious Russian arms dealer. He was found to be conspiring to kill American citizens, and he had tried to sell anti-aircraft weapons to drug enforcement informants. He was known as the Merchant of Death. They absolutely were asking for both Whelan and Griner, pretty much all the way through this year. And then it came to a point where, you know, the U.S. secretary of state said the Russians made it very clear either we take this deal for Griner, or we make no deal at all. And there have been some media reports that the Russian government has asked to swap Whelan for a man who's being held in Germany right now. He was a colonel who served in Russia's domestic spy organization. But we're not really sure what it's going to take to release Whelan and to get his freedom from Russia.

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Brian Dickerson: Well, for the last 30 years, one of the most effective grassroots lobbying groups in Michigan has been the pro-life movement generally and Right To Life of Michigan specifically. Nobody was more effective in electing sympathetic lawmakers and crafting legislation to achieve their objectives; every year they made abortion a little bit harder. Proposal 3 came along, and in a single election, everything they've accomplished was swept away. So, I'm really curious about where that energy is going. They're not about to abandon it and then say, "Well, been there, done that; I guess we'll move on to something else."

Junior: You know, you talk about where all that energy is going to go next year. I remember we had conversations with Dave Boucher (politics reporter) and Clara Hendrickson about this and how, you know, although Proposal 3 was adopted, there's still going to be an ongoing fight in the Legislature. There's levels to what this means going on. To that point it'll be interesting to see at what level the energy for the anti-abortion movement goes and how long this fight will go, which I imagine will go forever.

Dickerson: But at some point, some young person is going to decide they don't need a parent's permission or a court's permission to have an abortion, which is what the law in Michigan currently requires. And they're going to say that that requirement is no longer constitutional under Proposal 3. And, you know, that will be litigated probably up to the Michigan Supreme Court.

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Dana Afana: I'm keeping my eyes on a couple of different things. So, one of them is a paratransit contract. That was something that got voted down this year where the city would have voted on a nearly $50 million contract to provide for paratransit services, which is for those with disabilities. Those in the community who use paratransit services said, you know, these were subpar services. They're either waiting over an hour to get picked up; they're getting dropped off at the wrong location; they're dealing with unprofessional drivers, drivers not knowing how to hook up their wheelchairs into the vans. Now, voting that down poses a problem. Recently, the Federal Transit Administration said that the city is violating federal law by not providing those services. And so, the mayor is now flexing his emergency powers. He put a contract in place that would provide these services to avoid any litigation. Council members have to put out a new proposal for a new contract. And that process could take 3 to 6 months at least.

Junior: Just to get an idea of paratransit services, does it take people from door to door?

Afana: Yeah, that's correct. So there's the DDOT fixed route, which is, you know, the traditional bus that you see everywhere. And then there's paratransit, which is more of a shuttle that comes to your home.

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Duante Beddingfield: The National Endowment for the Arts every year selects three people that they classify as jazz masters, and all three of 2023’s NEA Jazz Masters class, they're all Detroiters. Saxophonist Kenny Garrett, drummer Louis Hayes, and violinist Regina Carter. It's a big, big deal. These people are legends. And on April 1 at the Kennedy Center in D.C., there's going to be a big celebration and honoring of those three. Louis Hayes, he's one of the most revered drummers in jazz history. He's been playing since the ’50s. Louis Hayes played with John Coltrane, Horace Silver, which is probably his best-known work. Cannonball Adderley, Oscar Peterson, a lot of major, major jazz musicians. Regina Carter is one of the youngest who's ever received this honor; she's 55. She came up in the ’70s and ’80s. And Kenny Garrett, he's been playing since the ’60s or the ’70s. A Detroit artist that I'm really excited about watching in 2023 is Paul Verdell. He is a painter who, just a few weeks ago, got back from one of the most prestigious art residencies in the world. It's Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock. Kehinde Wiley is a painter. He's best known, probably, for the portrait he painted of President Obama. I've known artists before who have gone to Black Rock and have gone on to really major things after that.

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JC Reindl: Well, a big one is this massive collab between the Ilitch organization and billionaire Stephen Ross' organization, the Related Companies, and they have put forth this $1.5 billion plan to build out the District Detroit Entertainment and Commercial District around Little Caesars Arena. Two brand new hotels. We also would have about a million square feet of office space. We would have a lot of new apartments and also some redeveloped apartment buildings, along with a lot of ground floor retail. 1.0, you could say, of District Detroit was unveiled back in 2014, and the Ilitch organization, just on their own back then, did encounter some criticism where, lo and behold, a lot of that was not built. Some was, but the majority of it wasn't. And people are relatively hopeful because Stephen Ross is the chairman of the Related Companies and they're a very big developer in New York. And Stephen Ross is a Detroit native, comes back here fairly often. They think the chances of this happening this time are higher.

Moran: What, specifically, are we expecting to see come to fruition in 2023?

Reindl: There will be the first new office building, you know, of this Detroit 2.0 collab. That is going to break ground and that is going to be near Comerica along Woodward. There may be some more breaking ground. We've yet to see the total request that the Ilitches and Stephen Ross' company want in terms of public subsidies. So we're waiting to see what they approve.

Another big story that's going to be in our midst is auto insurance. There is going to be a big Michigan Supreme Court case on whether some of the cost controls in that big overhaul that the governor signed in 2019, whether that, you know, can be retroactive and apply to catastrophically injured people who are injured before this is upended care for those catastrophically injured individuals.

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Clara Hendrickson: Gosh, I feel like I'm still recovering from the midterm election in some ways. But the big thing that I'll be really interested to watch play out is Democratic control of the state Legislature now for the first time since the 1980s. It's a huge power shift that's coming to Lansing, and it's going to mean a whole new set of legislative priorities are in play.

Junior: Now I want to bring up one thing that your editor, Emily Lawler, brought up to us about Michigan potentially moving up in the schedule in the primaries. Can you just talk a little bit about that and what could go on there?

Hendrickson: Yeah, sure. So, Michigan Democrats have been fighting to be among the early slate of states that weigh in in the Democratic presidential primary. And it's something that President Joe Biden wants to see as well. He recently recommended the DNC adopt new rules to move Michigan up further in the calendar. It wouldn't be first, but it would be among the, I guess it's technically five, states that would have primaries at the beginning of the Democratic presidential primary calendar. One thing Michigan Democrats who've advocated for this shift have said is that Michigan is kind of a microcosm of the entire nation. It's a pretty diverse state. And so that would give Black voters, Muslim voters, Hispanic voters potentially more voting power here. You typically have states that are pretty white early on in the calendar — New Hampshire, Iowa. One thing to note here, so in Michigan election law, it does say that the presidential primary is the second Tuesday in March. So moving Michigan earlier in the process would require a change to the law. The Senate recently passed a bill to do that, but the House hasn't voted on it yet.

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Lyndsay Green: I am keeping my eye on popups. I think popups had a real moment in 2022. Is that what year we’re in? Yeah, 2022. And I'm interested in seeing how they kind of evolve as we get farther away from the height of the pandemic. I want to see if they really start to ramp up even more as restaurant owners and chefs start to just think whether it's maybe just more sustainable to think about, you know, sticking with popups as opposed to brick-and-mortar restaurants or if they'll start to kind of ease back into the traditional sense of a restaurant.

Junior: Now, when I think of popups, I think of people who own my clothing brand showing up at events or a space. Is that essentially kind of the same thought of what a popup is for a restaurant? What does that entail?

Green: Similar. A popup is basically just an opportunity for a chef to sort of showcase their skills and get their cuisine out there without the confines of a brick and mortar. There's a lot that it takes to open a restaurant. There's overhead that you have to consider. There's staffing. And we've seen there's a huge labor shortage over this past year. You know, there's just a lot of challenges that come with it. So maybe it's at a restaurant or if a bar has a commercial kitchen that they can use, they might do it there. In the summertime, you'll see them outside. You'll see them maybe popping up. And Detroit has a few of those alleyways and you'll see pop ups there.

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You can find On The Line and all of our podcasts at freep.com/podcasts and anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

Cary Junior II is the host of On The Line. Contact cmjunior@freepress.com and follow him on Twitter at @Cee_jae2.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: What we're watching in 2023: A Q&A with the Free Press