Infrastructure association likes new road funding deal; schools worry it will come at their expense

The Michigan House of Representatives Thursday night passed a handful of bills that could help pay for road repairs. The legislation is part of a deal agreed to by Democratic and Republican legislative leaders and the governor’s office days ahead of the start of the state's new fiscal year.
 
It includes raising new money from marijuana sales and putting some money collected from corporate income taxes into a new Neighborhood Road Fund.
 
Lance Binoniemi is with the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association. He said he likes the plan’s emphasis on fixing local roads.
 
“This legislation really focuses on putting more money on the local system, as the legislators have been calling it, paving those streets from your driveway to the highway,”
 
Officials said the roads deal would put $2 billion toward repairs. That’s short, however, of previous $3 billion proposals.
 
Binoniemi said the $2 billion would “go a long way,” since the state has short-term issues to work out as previous funding streams run out, although he stressed there’s still work to do on the long-term.
 
“The jury is still out on a lot of that of how impactful all this will actually be. But once we get all that information figured out, we can go back to the legislature. And I think, with some education, lawmakers really understand that this is a problem that if you invest early, you can save money down the long run,” Binoniemi said.
 
The roads deal also sets the stage for lawmakers to likely vote on a state budget proposal next week. If a budget doesn’t get adopted by Wednesday, Michigan would go into a partial government shutdown.
 
K-12 Schools, which are already months into their new academic year with no state budget to inform them of how much money they'll get from Lansing, aren’t happy about that uncertainty.
 
Robert McCann is executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan.
 
“We’ve seen no details, we’ve heard no real information about what this deal fully entails. And so we’re as fully worried about this as we’ve been for the last three months. This is not how this budget process is supposed to work. Even as we rush right up until the literal 11th hour here,” McCann said.
 
One concern from schools as they've been waiting on a budget has been the part of the roads proposal that would remove the sales tax collected on gas to make room for higher fuel taxes.
 
McCann said that sales tax revenue usually generates hundreds of millions of dollars for schools annually.
 
“If lawmakers want to get rid of that and dedicate that solely to road construction, then it raises the serious question of, are we going to be forcing our schools and our kids to pay for the legislature’s own inability to find a real funding solution for our roads,” McCann said.
 
He said he’s not opposed to a road solution, but he doesn’t want schools to lose out because of it.
 
Lawmakers are promising to replace the missing school funding but haven’t yet offered many public details.