Tim Skubick

And you think the Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find common ground on the state budget. Wait till the GOP speaker opens another can of worms to revisit three issues that once dominated the legislative agenda for decades and were finally resolved by the voters way back when.

“That’s going to be the next issue that will dominate this town. How do we do property taxes and the potential of putting that on the next ballot if we can’t do it legislatively,” reveals Speaker Matt Hall. For the first time in front of a somewhat surprised bunch of capitol correspondents on Off the Record, he put into motion one of the toughest assignments any legislature has tackled. In addition to that, which will be tough enough, he adds he wants to take a whack at “Proposal A and Headlee and try to kind of modify those so that we can make property taxes more affordable.”

Ya wanna know how difficult this will be?

To answer that, first a look at history.

Starting in the 1970s during the Milliken administration and continuing through the tenure of Gov. Jim Blanchard, both parties tried to find a compromise to beat down skyrocketing property taxes. The public outcry spawned several petition drive efforts by the gangly Shiawassee County Drain Commissioner, the erasable Robert Tisch who peddled his ideas all over the joint in 1978 but failed.

It wasn’t until 1994 that then Gov. John Engler brokered a deal with the Democrats to put Proposal A on the ballot and produced real tax relief.

To make the elongated debate even more convoluted, in 1978 GOP Gov. candidate Dick Headlee stuck his big nose, and he often referred to it that way, into the issue and successfully pushed a ballot question. Lawmakers to date have never revisited the proposal in the last 47 years. Nor have they taken a whack at modifying Prop A in the last 29 years. There’s a good reason for that.

The issues are so complex, politically radioactive, and if former seasoned pre-term-limited lawmakers took soooo long to crack those nuts, why should one think this current batch of comparatively “new” and term-limited salons would do any better?

If Speaker Hall has his way, and he usually does, we’re about to see if he can do in one year what took others an eternity.

“After the budget, our next focus is going to be how do we tackle this issue and at that time, I’ll have a good read on whether we can pull that together for this election (2026) but we’re definitely considering it.”

To add even more weight to this legislative heavy lift, during a non-election year this would be a toughy, but in the midst of 2026 with virtually every statewide office up for grabs and the entire house and senate members fighting for their politically lives, the temptation to turn this into a partisan slug-fest may be too hard to resist.

You can hear it now. The R’s propose tax relief plans months before the statewide vote and Democrats will be in a box. They could go along and make it a bipartisan solution, but the Republicans will take credit for offering it first leaving the D’s to pick up the political scraps to enhance their own bids for office.

Or the Dems could battle this tooth and nail attempting to blame the R’s with politically exploiting this issue for their gain while putting funding for the schools and local governments at risk.

On top of that what’s the poor soon-to-be-retired governor to do?

Some will argue that embracing property tax relief would add a nice coat of polish to what she hopes is a shining legacy of eight years in office. But if her party doesn’t want this, what does she do?

Of course all of this is so far ahead of this story that in the end it may not be worth the paper it is written on.

Maybe the speaker can work his magic and do this in record time.

Assuming they get the budget done, buckle up for this ride which could have more ups and downs than a roller coaster at Cedar Point.