Mark Grebner: The Last Midwestern Hippie

Mark Grebner has been an East Lansing political insider for more than 50 years, serving several terms as an Ingham County commissioner and building a consulting company that provides voter lists and guidance to Michigan office-seekers. Local voters who have never heard Grebner’s name have likely voted for a candidate who used his services.

ELi sat down with the 72-year-old to talk about his life’s work and how campaigns of the past differ from today’s political spectacles.

In 1972, Grebner worked for Lynn Jondahl’s campaign for the Michigan House of Representatives, volunteering and becoming interested in data processing. Campaigns at the time, he said, “just sort of happened.”

“We were at the tail end of the pencil world,” he said. “There were lots of piles of index cards with handwritten names and addresses on them. The idea was to sort them into various orders, thousands of cards. It just seemed like there had to be a better way.”

Jondahl was impressed by Grebner’s innovations and spirit, he told ELi in a phone interview.

“What was always delightful about him was that he was so fascinated by the political process,” he said. “He loved the whole enterprise, and politics was very much part of his interest. So it was, for him, a great experience.”

He said he has watched his former employee become a key source of information for those running for office in Michigan.

“We used to purchase from him his developed partisan identification list,” Jondahl said. “As I would walk down the street, I would know from his list what a given person’s likely political ideology was. If I’m running in a primary, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to spend my time knocking on doors of Republicans. And so that resource became a key for campaigns all down the years. And he really was the single source for that.

“It was very, very credible, and put together with some very difficult work, because there was no technology to help with that.”

Part of Grebner’s work in the 1970s included registering Michigan State University students. The 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. It was not easy, and powerful local politicians stood in his way.

One of Grebner’s earliest battles was with Beverly Colizzi, former East Lansing city clerk. The mere mention of her name drew his ire.

“God, what a hateful woman she was,” he said. “And stupid. God, I want to tell you a Beverly Colizzi fact. I’ve been saying this now for 50 years. [She] taught me a lot of valuable things. One of them is, if you’ve got somebody who’s doing something improper, you don’t have to decide whether the problem is stupidity or dishonesty. Because those two things actually work together really well. You can combine stupidity with dishonesty.”

Before he was even elected to public office, Grebner and Colizzi clashed. Newspaper clippings from that time report Grebner (and other local Democrats) accused Colizzi of charging buyers exorbitant prices for voter lists and having less-than-ethical connections with the company that sold election equipment to the city.

But where Colizzi earned Grebner’s lifelong ire was her obstinance in allowing students to register to vote. If someone walked into her office looking like a student, she would create an excuse not to register them, Grebner said.

“She made up things,” Grebner said. “She just had rules that made no sense.”

Grebner, students and other local activists overcame the challenges, and student-backed candidates were victorious in the 1971 East Lansing City Council election.

Grebner has served for decades as an Ingham County commissioner. He first ran for a seat on the board in 1974 and lost by 18 votes. He ran again and won in 1976.

Grebner’s time on the board has not been unbroken. In the 1980s, he declined to run for reelection while he was in law school. In 2012, he decided instead to run for county drain commissioner in hopes of unseating longtime foe Patrick Lindemann. He lost that race but was reelected to the county board in 2016 after etching the message “We can’t get rid of him!” on his campaign signs, WKAR reported.

His biggest adversary over the last 50 years has been corruption. He authored an ethics policy that was finally adopted by the Ingham County Board of Commissioners after several failed attempts.

“Ethics is not about simple prohibitions,” he said. “A prohibition is like a blocker on a football field who just stands there and won’t let you run past him. That’s useless. A blocker has got to work with other blockers, got to move with the ball carrier. A blocker is a thing in motion.

“And the ethics policy has got to shift and move and be flexible and prevent all the things that really happen, because what we’re trying to do is not prohibit individual conduct. What we’re trying to do is to prevent reciprocal transactions.”

Grebner said the goal of the ethics policy is not to prosecute people but to nudge them back into line. Only one individual, a former IT worker for the county, has actually been publicly punished for ethics violations.

“I think that’s one of the best things I did for the county,” Grebner said. “The ethics policy has probably saved tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in waste — and nobody will ever know. I’ll tell you though, this is just cute. The Michigan Association of Counties invited me to talk about ethics policies. Everybody knows about the Ingham County ethics policy — and nobody wants to adopt it. But they do know about it.”

Throughout his time as commissioner, Grebner continued running his consultation business, now called Practical Political Consulting. His lists and services have helped both friend and foe, including longtime East Lansing City Council member and former state representative Mark Meadows, who has often been on the receiving end of Grebner’s criticism.

“I’ve been working on elections since 1968,” Meadows told ELi in a phone interview, “and when I ran for City Council in 1993, I got my ‘walk cards’ from Mark Grebner, and that was a gigantic improvement and efficient door-to-door activity. What Mark had done at that point in time is basically used signatures on petitions and things like that to estimate whether someone was a Democrat or a Republican, unless that was a well-known fact. And also, by identifying the specific things these people had signed onto, it sort of gave you a better feel for what you were gonna run into at the door if they answered the door.”

But Meadows didn’t hesitate to offer a gentle jab at Grebner’s more brusque comments about him and his politics, saying that sometimes he thinks Grebner offers helpful opinions and other times he’s off-base.

“Mark has not been afraid to state his opinion,” he said, “and I think that’s part of being a citizen of the United States, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

The 1980s and ’90s saw Grebner take on the mantle of defender and advocate for East Lansing’s gay community. But it wasn’t something he sought out.

“I’m not really a gay rights guy,” he said. “The funny thing is the Republicans think I am — and they think I’m gay.”

In the 1980s, local and county law enforcement planned and executed several stings at area rest stops, entrapping dozens of men in compromising situations with undercover police officers. Grebner came to the men’s defense when he was seeking reelection in 1986.

“The problem at the … rest stop had nothing to do with ‘security,’” he responded to a questionnaire published in the Lansing State Journal that year. “None of the men charged with felonies were ever seen by any member of the general public, nor were they ever likely to attack or molest anyone. I believe the prosecutor and police overreacted by charging 5-year felonies and refusing to consider alternatives.”

Grebner again waded into gay politics when he wrote a proposed amendment to the East Lansing City Charter in 1992 declaring that the city could not “discriminate against any person on the basis of marital or family status.”

The amendment failed at the ballot, and Grebner said it was actually his stated intention to protect renters. But that did not stop attention from his political opponents.

He recalls being invited on a radio show to discuss the proposed amendment and East Lansing zoning laws. His opponent on the show ranted about a homosexual agenda in America.

“And I keep trying to explain [the amendment is] mainly about how many parking spaces you need for various sized rental units, and maybe also about employee benefits that single people who are employees of the city,” he said.

But his opponent continued to denounce Grebner using quotes from the Old Testament. Finally, the man announced that Grebner was a Jew and a homosexual on the air.

Grebner laughed, further angering the man, he said, before rebutting, “I’m an atheist, but the God I don’t believe in is Lutheran.”

Now in his seventh decade, Grebner said he still clings to the image of an aging hippie. His trademark long hair has turned gray, but he has also adapted to some creature comforts.

“I’ve become affluent and fat and sluggish,” he said. “I own a car, although it is a 21-year-old Prius, and I have a really nice espresso machine.

Grebner speculates that he may be the last hippie outside of Seattle.

Correction: The title and a line in this story were updated.