Hackel and Rea: “Macomb is With Everybody” 

• Macomb County’s achievement of 15 years of balanced budgets and fully funded liabilities demonstrates a stable fiscal environment, which is attractive for business investment and long-term planning. 

• The county’s success was rooted in partnerships with local governments, organizations, and industry, especially in areas like the blue economy and defense sector. 

• Reliable infrastructure supports business operations and expansion, making public-private partnerships and advocacy for infrastructure funding valuable. 

View the full session recording below.

During the 2026 Detroit Policy Conference, Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel and Deputy County Executive John Paul Rea discussed the progress and solutions Macomb County has achieved, including securing better road funding and building financial stability.

About 15 years ago, the county elected new leadership, which Hackel and Rea viewed as an opportunity to improve Macomb County in a number of ways, including tackling its $13.5 million deficit. However, these efforts were not built overnight. One key piece of advice that both Hackel and Rea repeated throughout their time on stage was to focus on building relationships based on trust, not on which side of the aisle someone sits.

If you do what Macomb County has done over the years, and I’m going to say it, putting the ‘Rs’ and “Ds’ aside, leading and building trusting relationships is incredibly important,” Hackel said. “Let’s focus on us rather than the dividing nature of what we tend to want to talk about or lead with.”

Hackel and Rea also discussed Macomb’s proactive initiative to fix its own roads and infrastructure, which included working with partners like HNTB to assess its true funding needs — about a $2.5 billion infrastructure deficit at the time. Because of this, the county collaborated with local legislators, state leaders, and more to advocate for more sustainable road funding solutions, which now provide $1.8 billion annually for county roads.

“Early on, I kept looking at and talking with our Department of Roads, saying, you know, if we could just fix the funding, we can fix the roads,” Hackel said. “We at Macomb County were at the forefront of this conversation, not politically, obviously working with those who are elected leaders, but we also realized we have to get away from this partisan divide because we’re getting nowhere.”

In closing, the two touched on the immense recent progress made at Selfridge Air Base in Macomb County — a critical asset for both the county and Michigan as a whole. Again, working with trusted partners and ignoring party lines, Selfridge was able to secure its future through a new fighter jet mission.

“From conversations that started early on about 15 years ago about the base closing,” Rea said, “Now, we’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars that are going into new infrastructure, billions of dollars of new jets, and most importantly, an $850 million annual economic impact that’s helping rise up all of the defense industry.”

This session was sponsored by HNTB.