Brinks says passing road funding and public safety trust fund will take conversations and compromise
MACKINAC ISLAND – With a little over a month until the July 1 deadline, Michigan Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) told the Michigan Advance she has concerns about whether the Legislature would be able to pass the state's budget for Fiscal Year 2026 before the end of June.
'We're at the stage where we need to negotiate the differences between a House budget and a Senate budget, and the House has not passed what you can reasonably or meaningfully call a budget that we can even negotiate from. So they're pretty far behind in the process. And so that gives me pause about that deadline,' Brinks said.
Michigan House Republicans took control of the chamber in the 2024 election, winning a 58-52 majority and bringing an end to Democrats' trifecta control of the House, Senate and governor's seat. As a result, the Legislature has deadlocked, passing only four bills since the start of the year.
Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has repeatedly refused to commit to meeting the July 1 deadline, when lawmakers are legally required to pass a budget. However, the state's fiscal year does not start until Oct. 1, with Hall telling reporters in January that the budget may not be done until Sept. 30. A failure to have a budget in place by the Oct. 1 deadline would force a state government shutdown.
As Democrats raise alarms about the potential for a shutdown, House Republicans have passed what they call a 'shutdown prevention plan' which allocates $20 billion for critical programs like schools and local law enforcement if the Legislature cannot reach an agreement by the end of September.
While there is no penalty if lawmakers fail to agree on a new budget by July 1, Brinks noted in an interview with the Advance during the Mackinac Policy Conference that completing the budget on time is critical for municipalities, K-12 schools and universities.
'They're all making their plans right now for how they expend resources and serve their folks that they serve. I don't want to show up at my kid's school and find out that they didn't know enough about the resources they have coming from the state to be able to hire enough teachers to teach the kids and have larger class sizes. That's a completely unnecessary thing, and it's completely avoidable,' Brinks said.
And while Hall has slammed the Democratic-led Senate for failing to act on bipartisan road funding legislation and policies establishing a public safety and violence prevention fund to support local law enforcement and community violence intervention organizations, Brinks said those conversations need to be held in the context of the state's budget.
'You know something like the public safety trust fund, while there's a policy element to it, it's essentially a budget conversation. So get back in the room and have a budget conversation. I know our appropriations chairs have had some conversation, but there's so much more to the process…. This is exactly the kind of thing that could be worked out in a budget process, and there will, by necessity, need to be compromise,' Brinks said.
Similarly, allocating $3 billion towards road funding should also be subject to bipartisan discussion, Brinks said.
'So far, there hasn't been a lot of willingness to actually have those conversations between us from Matt Hall, and so, you know, at that point, they're simply just ideas that have been thrown out in the ether. The real work comes in the conversation, in the negotiation, in the sitting down and hashing things out,' Brinks said.
'It's not glamorous, right? You don't get to start in your own press conference for two hours as a negotiation. That's not negotiating. If he wants to do that, that's fine. But in addition to that, he's going to have to really find some time or empower his caucus, and there are some capable people there to sit down and really, do that work,' Brinks said.
While the House and Senate were able to break through their deadlock earlier this month to extend the filing deadline for lawmakers' legally-required financial disclosures amid frustrations with the rollout of the state's new financial reporting system, Brinks said there are several other policies they could be working on if Hall was interested.
'We could be talking about prescription drug affordability. We could be talking about ways to ensure, you know, we have more affordable housing, we could, you know, be talking about FOIA, you know, something that passed with a really strong bipartisan vote,' Brinks said.
In January, members of the Senate voted 33-2 to advance Senate Bills 1 and 2 to the House. The package looks to extend FOIA to include the Legislature, the governor and the lieutenant governor, which are exempt under the current state law. However, Hall has declared the package dead, calling them 'a very low priority.'
While Hall has pointed to the public safety trust fund as a bipartisan slam dunk, Brinks said the same about FOIA reform.
'It could be an easy bipartisan win that really helps improve transparency and the ethical environment in our state,' she said.
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