Divorce; Custody; Established custodial environment (ECE); MCL 722.27(1)(c); Distinguishing Bofysil v Bofysil; Focusing on a plaintiff’s “questionable conduct”; Butters v Butters; The children’s best interests; Adequacy of the trial court’s findings on the MCL 722.23 factors; MacIntyre v MacIntyre (On Remand); Child support; Imputing income; Stallworth v Stallworth; 2021 Michigan Child Support Formula Manual 2.01(G)(2); Request for remand to a different judge; Effect of rulings against a litigant

While the court held that the trial court did not err in finding the parties’ children had an ECE only with plaintiff-mother, it concluded the trial court did not make adequate findings on the statutory best-interest factors. It also held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in imputing income to defendant-father for purposes of determining child support, and it rejected his request for remand to a different trial judge. Thus, the court affirmed the trial court’s finding as to the ECE and its decision to impute income to defendant. But it vacated the trial court’s findings on the best-interest factors and its decision to make plaintiff the children’s primary custodian, and remanded for further fact-finding. “On remand, the trial court shall make explicit findings under each factor, and it shall explicitly state if any factor does not apply.” As to the ECE, while defendant asserted this case was similar to Bofysil, the court found it was dissimilar as “the trial court here credited plaintiff’s testimony that defendant ‘did not really spend much time’ with the children while he was home—the court did not hold defendant’s working outside the home against him.” As to his argument about plaintiff’s “‘erratic behavior,’” the court noted it recently reiterated in Butters “that focusing on a plaintiff’s questionable conduct is” relevant to the children’s best interests, not the ECE, where the focus is “‘on the children’s perceptions of their relationships with the parents.’” But the trial court’s failure to provide “any rationale for its finding that factors a, b, c, e, f, g, and h ‘favor neither or both parents’” meant that the record was insufficient for the court to review its findings. As to the decision to impute income to defendant, the trial court “acknowledged that the decision to seek different employment may have been reasonable, but it did not believe that the valid reasons for seeking new employment justified a 50% pay cut.” The court found that neither “this conclusion nor the trial court’s ultimate decision to impute defendant’s previous income to defendant were outside the range of reasonable and principled outcomes.” As to his request for remand to a different judge, the court noted “the law requires—and has always required—more than erroneous decisions for a judge to be removed from a case.”