Skubick

While you were busy getting the cottage together for holiday visiting relatives and other hangers on last week, state lawmakers were engaged in a little house cleaning of their own. They made a mad dash for a July first deadline to finish the new state budget. As Maxwell Smart use to opine, “missed it by (hands held apart) this much.”

After pulling an all-nighter Thursday and Friday,two days after the self-imposed deadline, 23 hours later at 9 am Friday morning the new spending document was on its ways to the governor for her blessing following a bi-partisan vote from both the house and senate. Since her office was involved in the delicate budget negoiations with Republicans, it’s a good bet she’ll sign most of it pegged at around $84 million of your hard earned money although some R’s will try to convince you it is much lower. Beware.

Question: If you miss a deadline at work, are their consequences? Guess it depends on the boss but at any rate, it’s not a good look.

In the legislature, where the code word last week was, “laws were made to be broken” they breezed past July one without even a grown. That’s because when they passed that law, they somehow forgot to attach some punishment. One lawmaker, who apparently did not get the memo about keeping your mouth shut about failing to meet the law, has now suggested that the governor, house speaker and senate leader all be docked pay for missing the deadline.

File that under, no way will that pass.

To their credit legislators and the governor missed the deadline by 95 days last year so being only a couple days off the mark looks good by comparison, but for the education lobby there was plenty of grumbling.

For starters the K-12 lobby wanted the state budget June first so that local school boards had plenty of time to fashion their school budgets by their due date of June 30th. Instead they issued news release after news release pleading with the legislature to get hopping.

Can you say deaf ears?

What the schools did was write a ghost budget based on “guesses,” as one lobbyist described it and now they have to go back and fill in the blanks based on a $250 increase for each student bringing that figure up to, the governor likes to boast, the record level of $10,300. This is the same governor who in her state of the state message declared that Michigan was pouring more and more money into the schools and the product coming out the other end, was not prepared for the real world.

The K-12 lobby notes that boasting about the increase is misplaced in that the figure does not keep pace with inflation which means schools have to scramble to find revenue from internal sources to met the every rising costs of teaching Johnny and Janey.

And they say, as if that was not bad enough, the governor and lawmakers swiped about $2 billion out of hte K-12 budget and gave it to higher education.

“Budget malpractice” complained one K-12 lobbyist who once worked for the governor. So much for friends in high places.

And if you stop this think about, if a whole bunch of current students are not doing well..why invest in higher ed if fewer kids will be going, the K-12 folks might argue.

And in an ironic twist, you would think the higher ed folks would welcome the largesse with open arms but not so. The guys who runs the state organization of university presidents complains this will result in higher student costs because the money is not baked into our guaranteed from year to year.

So while educators are licking their wounds here are some folks who aren’t.

House Speaker Matt Hall is just tickled pink at getting most of what he wanted and took credit for beating the governor at the same time. He wasnted no tax increases. Check. She did. He did not want to raid the state Rainy Day Fund. Check. She did. He wanted a smaller budget than last year and while some will argue he didn’t get it, he tells reporters, “it’s $800 million smaller than last year and we cut $3 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse. Check. She wanted an $88 billion dollar budget.

“She failed at almost all of them” referring to what she wanted and then with a political swipe he adds, “that’s just the way it is when you’re not fully engaged.” He did not elaborate and she hasn’t responded in public. No way of telling what she might have uttered, if anything, in private to Mr. Hall.

On the election year front, lawmakers were originally proposing to spend $4.1 billion in so-called pork barrel projects back home. File that under, if you bring home the bacon, your chances of getting re-elected are enhanced. But when the dust settled only 135 projects to the tune of $125 million were approved. Darn. To have spend $4.1 billion would have been a much juicier story to tell.

At the end of the week lawmakers were able to head home to march in those July 4th parades knowing that the budget was completed. But they might have had their fingers crossed hoping citizens would not quizz them for more details on how their money is being spent. That’s because the bulk of lawmakers complain they did not have enough time, maybe only hours, not days, to read the 1001 page document.