A politically divided Michigan Legislature wrapped months of drawn-out, often-contentious budget negotiations with bipartisan votes Friday morning. Already past the July 1 deadline set in state law, lawmakers spent nearly 24 hours straight in an overnight session to approve the spending plans.
Proposals are split between two bills. One to cover general government spending, and another for K-12, community colleges, and public universities.
The school aid budget would include more money to help school districts with declining enrollments and large numbers of low-income families, special needs students, and English-language learners. But the new education budget also continues to allow the state to use money dedicated to the School Aid Fund for higher education.
Jennifer Smith of the Michigan Association of School Boards said that makes the budget a mixed bag for K-12 schools. She said the fact that the Legislature missed the July 1 target is a continuing problem. K-12 schools, public universities, community colleges and many local governments have fiscal years that began July 1.
“School districts have already passed their budgets on numbers they had to make up,” said Smith. “They can’t get ready for the school year until they know what money they’re getting from the state, and so waiting until July 3 to get their budget just makes everything harder for them.”
This is the second year in a row the scofflaw Legislature missed the deadline in state law.
“I wish we were done sooner,” said Senator Darrin Camilleri (D-Trenton), who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“I think we all wish it were done sooner, but the reality is this is what it took to get this bill done and this overall budget deal. We’re moving policy as well and so we’re making some good progress and my hope is we can go home for the summer and talk about these big victories that we got done.”
House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) was unapologetic about the delay.
“I would have gone another month if I had to get good outcomes for the people of Michigan, but, fortunately, I didn’t,” he said. “I only had to go a couple of extra days.”
Hall said he is happy the budget does not include tax increases and does not raid the state’s “rainy day” fund to help cover the spending.
Lawmakers knew this would be a challenging year going into budget season. Estimates showed the state was facing a billion dollar shortfall.
Suggested fixes included raising taxes on luxury services or online gambling, cutting back services, and pulling from the rainy day fund. The final result took none of those approaches.
Senate Appropriations Chair Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) said lawmakers accomplished that through reductions and finding “efficiencies.” Though she said that approach isn’t sustainable.
“We don’t have enough revenue in order to really to meet the needs adequately of our state. That’s a fight for another day. So, we’ve definitely found plenty of efficiencies. But this year’s budget was challenging. Next year’s budget is going to be worse,” Anthony told reporters.
The new budget would pull from non-traditional pots of money like the School Aid Fund, usually meant for K-12 schools, to keep other parts of the budget afloat. Some more notable items like Medicaid would rely, in part, on nebulous sources like unspecific amounts of federal money that could become available to the state.
Rather than expand into many new programs, Anthony argued “creative accounting” let lawmakers avoid making any serious cuts to the social safety net. The focus stayed on keeping housing, healthcare, and community violence interruption efforts alive.
Some Republicans derided the process used to pass the spending bills and the little amount of time lawmakers had to review them before voting on them.
“This process is absolutely horrendous,” Sen. Jim Runestad (R-White Lake) said, criticizing the tradition of passing budgets late in the night. “It seems like it’s getting worse every time.”
To get through the Legislature, the bills needed support from both the Republican-led House of Representatives and the Democratic-led Senate.
While working on the budget Thursday and Friday morning, both chambers fast-tracked dozens of policy bills. Those covered ranging topics from stopping lawmakers from being lobbyists immediately after leaving office, to low income housing, to letting people drive golf carts in the street.
One bipartisan package, co-sponsored by Senator Kevin Hertel (D-St. Clair Shores) would give child abuse prevention efforts more resources.
Hertel said the votes show that lawmakers can work together, even under deadline pressure and divided government.
“In recent history, we’ve had to get to some of these deadlines to be able to move policy forward. As a legislator, that’s frustrating. I think we should be doing stuff like this all of the time. Most of the stuff we work on here in the Legislature is bipartisan,” Hertel said.
In a statement, Governor Whitmer praised the budget deal as a successful bipartisan effort.
"This budget builds on our progress by strengthening student literacy, opening doors for more housing opportunity, protecting health care, fixing our damn roads, and lowering costs for all Michiganders,” she said. “I am proud of this budget, my final as governor. It will leave our state stronger than before and keep things moving forward for Michigan.”
Now, Whitmer and her team will have the final word as they review the budget bills and make line-item vetoes.
With the budget out of the way and several other bills already on their way to the governor’s desk, it could be tough to get anything not already in motion done for the rest of the term.
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