The Michigan Senate voted Tuesday evening to restore most of the hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding that a House committee had canceled last week.
Democrats have seized on some of the groups that would have received the funding — including a nonprofit that provides wigs to children with hair loss from cancer, and an organization supporting child survivors of sexual assault — as signs that Republicans are pursuing reckless budget cuts at the expense of vulnerable people.
The vote in favor of restoring the funding is the first step toward undoing a move by the House Appropriations Committee last week, which blocked around $645 million dollars from carrying over from the last state budget. The committee used a very rarely invoked law to bypass the state Senate and the governor and unilaterally prevent spending on what are known as "work projects" items that can span multiple years.
In response, the Michigan Senate Appropriations Committee heard testimony Tuesday from groups that were expecting to receive the now-canceled funding. Representatives of those groups said they were caught off guard.
Lansing Public Schools Superintendent Ben Shuldiner said the district was promised money through next year for a new high school track that’s currently stuck midway through the work.
“We don’t have the shot put. ... We don’t have the concession stands. We don’t have the bathrooms,” Shuldiner said.
Dr. Mona Hanna said her program, Rx Kids, which provides cash assistance to pregnant women and new mothers, can no longer expand. It got over $250 million in the most recent state budget, but Hanna said the organization can’t access that yet, and private funders are getting antsy because of the message the revoked funds send.
“Six thousand less babies will not benefit from this program. And those are babies who’ll miss out on life changing support,” Hanna said.
Jazmine Danci, with the Downriver Community Conference, told the Senate committee that her workforce training organization won’t be able to finish badly needed building renovations.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do. We don’t have heat on two of the three floors,” Danci said.
After hearing those and other stories, Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) said reinstating the funding was non-negotiable.
“It’s incredibly important that we make those people whole, and that we can help restore the trust that they should be able to have when the state makes a promise that they get certain funding to do certain things for the public good,” Brinks said.
Democrats and some Republican lawmakers have derided the choice to unilaterally cancel the spending as eroding public trust in the state.
“They changed the rules midstream. It’s a bad fiscal policy and terrible governance,” Senate Appropriations Chair Sarah Anthony (D-Lansing) said.
Her minority vice chair, Jon Bumstead (R-Muskegon), said he felt the state needed to stand by the promises it made in the budget.
“When I signed that, I represent our caucus and our leadership. And, to me, a person is only as good as their word,” Bumstead said.
The funding restoration bill now heads to the House of Representatives, which led the cuts in the first place. House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Twp) called most of the blocked items wasteful spending in the face of real budget concerns.
“These cuts are coming eventually, whether it’s now or next year when you get the revenue estimating, and we’re going to have to make a lot of cuts. They’re going to say, ‘Wow I wish we had that money before it got work projected for five years,’” Hall told reporters at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, before the Senate vote.
Hall left the door open for some of the items to get added back through a future spending bill. But he criticized the Senate’s actions, saying the work projects spending the House committee voted to cancel was not subjected to rigorous oversight.
“The Senate Democrats are so addicted to pork and their secret slush funds that they just voted to reinstate the waste, fraud, and abuse that House Republicans fought to eliminate,” part of a Tuesday night statement from Hall read.
Annual work projects funding has grown by billions of dollars in the last few years. Some Republican leaders said that left it open to abuse and lax oversight, though the state Department of Technology, Management, and Budget said it's sent Hall hundreds of pages of documents detailing the projects ahead of the vote to cancel their funding.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have also asked the state attorney general, another Democrat, to decide whether the law used to block the spending was constitutional. Regardless of that decision, the matter could one day end up in court.
