Michigan Pushes Sweeping Drone Legislation Package Through State Legislature

By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill

An extensive package of drone-related legislation, ranging from bills that would restrict the use of foreign-made drones by public agencies to legislation to limit drone flights over public property, is sailing through the Michigan State Legislature.

The legislation, which includes 15 different bills to regulate various aspects of drone activity, is expected to test the boundaries of what sort of drone rules a state can issue without coming into conflict with the federal authority to regulate aviation.

“We did very well to avoid a federal pre-emption situation by adding a couple phrases here and there and making sure while we were pushing the envelope obviously, we were not pushing past some hard lines,” said Representative William Bruck, the chief sponsor of the legislative package.

Michigan is just one of a number of states across the country trying to craft legislation to deal with the rapid growth in the use, and misuse, of unmanned aerial vehicles.

The bipartisan package of bills, bundled under the title of Securing Homeland and Infrastructure with Emerging Laws for Drones, or SHIELD, is expected to be taken up by the State Senate by the middle of next month. Bruck said he hopes to get the bill package passed by the Senate and signed into law by the end of this summer.

“I already had one meeting with the Senate floor leader. I’m going to set up some more meetings in April to try to grease the skids in the Senate,” he said. He said he hoped that the bipartisan nature of the bill package would help ease its package through the upper House.

“There’re 15 bills, 12 sponsors. We have six Democrats and six Republicans as the main sponsors, and so I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able to get it through the Senate,” he said. 

The bill that is most likely to test the limits of pre-emption — the federal government’s authority to strike down state and local laws that conflict with the federal regulation of the National Airspace — would give non-federal law enforcement officers the authority to disable or destroy an unmanned aircraft deemed to be a threat.

However, Bruck pointed to the federal Safer Skies Act, which Congress passed in December as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, as signaling Congress’s intent to give state and local police greater authority to conduct counter-UAS operations. 

The Act authorizes trained and certified state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement to disable drones that pose a “credible threat” to public safety, large events, critical infrastructure and correctional facilities.

“With the Safer Skies Act and the fact that FIFA (World Cup tournament) going on this year, there’s a lot of granting of what traditionally were federal authorizations for counter-UAS,” Bruck said. He added that the Safer Skies Act is likely to pave the way for future federal legislation, giving even broader counter-drone authorities to the states.

“We look for that as a good model moving forward that the federal government is going to have to empower states, especially with the threat level from drones around the world,” Bruck said.

Michigan Drone Legislation Seeks Limits on Foreign-Made Drones

Other bills in the package would: prohibit state agencies from purchasing drones or related equipment from companies named on the U.S. department of Defense list of companies with significant connections to the Chinese military; and would prohibit the operation of a drone over a law enforcement facility, a correctional facility, or any other site designated as critical infrastructure.

Bruck said the most important pieces of legislation in the SHIELD package involve protecting critical infrastructure and enhancing public safety in regard to drones. Some of the proposed pieces of legislation call for extending existing state trespassing restrictions to cover UAV flights. 

One such bill restricts drone flights over critical infrastructure, such as power plants, data centers and airports. Another proposed law would expand trespassing regulations to ban some forms of drone flights over private property “where someone is using a drone in a way that prohibits the resident or the owner from having a peaceful life and interfering with their privacy,” Bruck said. 

He said these bills include some exceptions to accommodate expected changes to federal aviation laws. “We have that provision in the bills that as soon as there’s some changes at the federal level to essentially ensure that we would be within the federal regulations,” he said. “We put some restrictions in there as well for the (State) Capitol, different state buildings and the National Guard base. They’re not federal entities, so there’s really very little protections from the FAA or from the feds.”

Stronger Role for MDOT

Under the proposed legislation, the Aeronautics Division of the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) would be empowered to keep track of all registered drones in the state and to help enforce regulations in drone-restricted areas. MDOT would be required to maintain a database of all commercially operated drones in the state and to share that information with law enforcement agencies as required, Bruck said. 

“If security or police had to identify a certain drone nomenclature, the MDOT would have that information,” he said. Essentially, MDOT would maintain the same drone registration information as the FAA, but having the data accessible through a state agency would make it easier for state and local law enforcement personnel be able to access the data more quickly, he said.

The proposed legislation would also enable MDOT to establish aerial mobility corridors to accommodate the future growth of drone usages, such as delivery service, in the state.

“Already Amazon and Walmart are doing limited deliveries in certain areas where there are some established mobility corridors, but we’re looking at the Michigan Department of Transportation to establish a broader scope of corridors as well,” Bruck said.

Brock said he is happy that the comprehensive package of proposed legislation would strengthen Michigan’s role in regulating drone traffic in the state, while encouraging the growth of legitimate drone usage and avoiding the issues of federal pre-emption of state law.

“I’m very satisfied with where we landed. I think we’ve been able to thread the needle, to keep away from some issues,” he said. 

“I think this positions Michigan as a leader in this whole realm,” he said, adding that giving MDOT greater responsibility over lower-level aviation would help encourage the growth of future air mobility operations. “That needs to expand, but we need to be balancing that with security and safety of the population and our critical infrastructure. So, I’m very happy where we ended up, very happy to be in the lead nationally,” he said. 

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.