LANSING — In late August, a deal to fix Michigan’s crumbling roads fell apart when Gov. Rick Snyder rejected the state House’s insistence on slashing $600 million a year from the already strapped general fund budget.
That would be highly irresponsible, Mr. Snyder said, because such a cut would devastate human services and hurt higher education. So the governor, who had said he favors “relentless positive action” to make Michigan competitive, said no.
But this month he reversed himself, and said yes. Suddenly, Mr. Snyder was willing not only to sign off on cutting the general fund by $600 million a year, but also to approve an agreement that seemed even worse than the ones he had previously rejected.
The package of bills the Legislature narrowly passed Nov. 3 and Mr. Snyder signed this week indeed recklessly slashes the general fund — without specifying where the huge cuts are supposed to come from. And it hikes car registration fees by an average of 20 percent.
But that’s not the worst news: Incredibly, the bill package fails to raise any meaningful money for years to fix Michigan’s roads. The bills won’t generate anything like the promised $1.2 billion a year until at least 2021.
By that time, however, the funds will be far too little, far too late. A Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman showed me a comprehensive independent analysis done last year that indicated the true cost of bringing the state’s roads and bridges back to an acceptable standard had risen to nearly $2.2 billion a year. That is certain to be much higher by 2021.
The reason that lawmakers structured the bill this way is simple — if contemptible — and directly related to Michigan’s government-destroying lifetime term limits. By the time the really hard decisions about financing road repairs have to be made, nearly all current lawmakers will be gone from the Legislature, banned for life from returning, under Michigan’s Draconian term limits. They won’t have to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Governor Snyder also will be gone from office. Asked why he changed his mind and agreed to sign these bills, he said he was convinced a booming economy will cause the state’s general fund to grow so much that the $600 million in cuts won’t be felt. Most economists think that is highly unlikely.
Governor Snyder is not financially naive. He is a former venture capitalist, and a former computer company executive with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Michigan. What happened to change his mind?
Quite possibly something that had nothing to do with roads: Flint.
The Snyder administration was embarrassed in recent weeks when it turned out that despite smug administration denials, the water in impoverished Flint was badly tainted with lead, which can cause brain damage in babies and young children.
A Snyder-appointed emergency manager had ordered the city to shift from water supplied by Detroit to Flint River water to save money. The river water was discolored and foul-smelling. It had to be treated for bacteria contamination.
But Snyder appointees at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality insisted this summer that there was no reason to worry about lead, and claimed they had tested the water. DEQ spokesman Brian Wurfel, the husband of Mr. Snyder’s press secretary, said anyone who was concerned about lead should “relax.”
The DEQ tests turned out to be bogus. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expressed concern about lead in a confidential memo. Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter for the American Civil Liberties Union, saw that memo, and helped get a grant to have a researcher from Virginia Tech test the water.
The water indeed was lead-contaminated, because the corrosiveness of the water caused lead to leach out of old pipes. An embarrassed governor suddenly found money to reconnect Flint to Detroit’s much safer water supply.
After that, “there was never any real doubt the governor would sign whatever road plan came across his desk,” Inside Michigan Politics editor and publisher Susan Demas said. “He’s a politician who really needed a win.”
But whether the road bill is any kind of a win for Michigan’s citizens is a different, and dismaying, question.
Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.
Contact him at: omblade@aol.com
First Published November 13, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
