Through the Council of Great Lakes Governors, the region is now setting the pace in the global marketplace and protecting the world's largest single source of fresh water.

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Governor Jennifer Granholm - Michigan

On January 1, 2003, Jennifer M. Granholm was sworn in as the 47th Governor of the State of Michigan. An honors graduate of both the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, Granholm clerked the Honorable Damon J. Keith on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. She worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office where she maintained a 98 percent conviction rate. She was then appointed Wayne County Corporation Counsel in 1994.

Elected as Michigan's 51st Attorney General in November 1998, Ms. Granholm has made child protection, high tech crime prevention, consumer and environmental protection, and senior citizen safety key priorities for her office.

In February 2000, she introduced Michigan's Mentoring Initiative, a program aimed at linking children who have had a light touch with the justice system with a stable adult mentor who can steer them away from the courthouse doors. She has also teamed with the State Bar of Michigan to introduce "Peace on the Playground," a peer mentoring program designed to help elementary school children solve their conflicts before they escalate into violence.

She introduced Michigan's first State-level High Tech Crime Unit to explore, investigate, and prosecute Internet and high tech crimes. Her office brought the nation's first criminal charges against an on-line company selling GHB, the date rape drug, via the Internet and was the first law enforcement official to use racketeering charges to successfully shut down a for-profit child pornography website.

Since taking office in 1999, Ms. Granholm has been a vigilant protector of consumers and families; she filed the State's first-ever criminal charges against an individual for failing to protect the safety of workers on the job; and has taken criminal action against numerous nursing homes and physicians for the neglect or abuse of their patients. She has also sued pharmaceutical companies for conspiring to keep generic, lower-cost, alternative drugs off the market. She established the Attorney General's office as the State's leading force in prosecuting environmental crimes by adding the State's first full-time environmental crimes prosecutor.

Following the September 11 attacks on the United States, Granholm led a multi-agency effort to ensure that Michigan laws can effectively be used to fight terrorism at the State level. She took legal action against 46 gas stations statewide accused of price gouging following the September attacks, forcing the stations to pay consumer refunds and civil fines.

She and her husband, Dan Mulhern, have three children and live in Northville Township.