Nearly 60 community members from Grand Valley State University, local businesses and other organizations in West Michigan attended Gov. Rick Synder’s live virtual presentation at the MAREC location in Muskegon yesterday.

The Michigan Alternative Renewable Energy Center at GVSU was one of the three areas selected to join in the online video conference hosted on Google Hangout. The other locations were in Detroit and Traverse City.

“Now is the time to be proactive,” Snyder said in his speech at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners. Snyder addressed the topics of energy and the environment, beginning with his belief that the two ideas are not separate ones.

“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” he said. Though these two overarching parts of his speech intertwined at several points, the first one he focused on was the topic of energy.

Energy, Snyder said, has three major elements that need attention: reliability, affordability and protecting the environment. These areas are all part of the concept of “energy efficiency,” which Snyder said he thinks means doing better at not needing as much energy to begin with.

“Michigan has issues in terms of reliability,” he said, “That’s something we need to work on. One of the areas that we have the greatest challenge for reliability is in the UP. We have about 16 yellow alerts a year, which basically means there’s a power challenge in that geography.”

On the topic of affordability, Snyder advocated for assisting lower-income families with their energy needs.

“Too often we make people wait until the facilities shut them off,” he said. “Can’t we be smart enough to realize that these people need help? We’ve been going through this mess for years; why can’t we just knock it off?”

With the last area of energy efficiency, Snyder segued into the topic of the environment.

“I think it’s critically important that we talk about our environment,” he said. “It’s time we get strategic.”

The governor focused on several areas of environmental concern, including managing state land, urban farming and state trails; managing the Great Lakes and inland water sources; and taking an “ecosystem approach” to dealing with both land and water related issues in the state.

Snyder focused on the trails that cover Michigan, highlighting one that is 200 miles shy of reaching from Belle Island, Detroit, to the border of Wisconsin. With a laugh from the audience, Snyder added, “Now I’m not going to answer the question about ‘what do you do when you get to the Mackinac Bridge;’ you’re on your own for those five miles.”

Another highlight was on the urban areas of Michigan.

“I’m not going to give up on this area,” Snyder said. “It’s time to get the Right to Farm issue solved with urban areas (and) we need to be more aggressive with people who misuse these lands.”

This issue was especially important to his message, as he spoke for several minutes about urban land that people buy at auction and don’t pay taxes on because it’s cheaper to buy the property at auction again after it’s been reclaimed. Snyder said that, in his opinion, the opportunity to buy land at auction should be taken off the table for people who regularly don’t pay property taxes.

He also spoke about the 180 invasive species in the Great Lakes, specifically the Asian Carp.

“We don’t want these things in the Great Lakes,” he said, and spoke further about his ‘ecosystem approach’ idea, which is based on the fact that the lakes, the lands in Michigan, the natural gas and all of the other resources in the state are tied together and need to be treated as one system.

“Let’s spend the next year, 2012, having an open dialogue,” Snyder said. “Let’s make this all happen; there’s no better time to do it.”

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