Tim Skubick

“We’re getting close but we’re not there yet.”

In the last seven months since Gov. Gretchen Whitmer released her new state budget, nobody in this town has uttered those eight little, but important words. Instead, a ton of the rhetoric has centered on not getting a budget agreement which would create a government shutdown on October 1st, the deadline for getting the budget job done.

But then, seemingly out of nowhere, was the House GOP Speaker Matt Hall during a Zoom interview reporting that he and the governor were not only working on a deal but actually piecing one together and he was confident they could meet the deadline.

“I wouldn’t say we have a deal but we are having a lot of really positive conversations and working toward a deal… there are enough positive conversations that I’m hopeful to get it done by September 30 on time.”

That significant comment was basically ignored by most of the mainstream media in town. Go figure.

The speaker, who is super critical to resolving the stagnant impasse, went on to observe, “Her and I are working forward trying to solve this problem… I talked to her the other day when she was in Japan. We had a conversation for quite a long time.”

Where there is smoke, there is fire on the budget issue? His comments certainly smelled like that.

What he is doing behind the scenes currently is to “educate” the governor and her staff on how you can fix the roads without raising taxes but cutting alleged government waste, fraud and abuse instead. He claims the tab on that is in the neighborhood of 5 billion smackers and only 3.1 billion dollars is needed to get the roads on the repair path. Do the math.

Now, of course, many Democrats are not buying the 5 billion number, but for the sake of argument, one could assume there is some waste and it might be enough to reduce the need for a higher revenue increase plan which the governor and D’s have demanded be in the package.

Mr. Hall remains upbeat adding, “once the governor sees all this and understands it, I feel confident that she’ll come around to our way quite a bit but we’re working on it.”

Asked if they were closer to a breakthrough agreement than they were three weeks ago, he answers, “yes.”

In a bipartisan gesture, he also revealed that while he was doing his educating, he was also working to make sure the governor and Democrats got part of what they wanted, too.

He thinks that the way this will eventually come down is that he will deliver a whole bunch of GOP House and Senate votes and all the governor has to do is deliver enough D’s to get to 56 votes in the House and 20 in the Senate.

Coming away from the Zoom exchange, it was the first time there was even a glimmer of hope that the October 1st deadline cliff would not be traversed.

Nonetheless, after his remarks were out there, the Whitmer team remained on radio silence.

That is until the silence was broken by somebody who should know a thing or two about the status of these endless conversations and whether the speaker was correct in his “we’re getting close” comments.

“We are getting closer and closer to having a resolution,” Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist offered up to a panel of reporters last Friday.

And he observes, “there are conversations every single day which means people are working together with the teams to resolve this impasse.”

So in a twinkle, the speaker’s reporting was confirmed unless he and the l.g. were, for some reason, misleading the capitol press corps and nobody would really believe they would connive to do that.

Like Speaker Hall, Mr. Gilchrist reflects, “I am hopeful that we get this resolved and there will not be a shutdown.”

The naysayers will correctly point out that saying you hope to get a deal does not mean there will be one but the speaker and lt. governor could have said no progress is being made and it looks grim, but they did not and until they do say that, there is reason for optimism that state services will not be halted.

Fingers crossed?