The July 1 deadline for the Legislature and Governor Gretchen Whitmer to have a budget deal wrapped up arrives in just over a week, and the House and the Senate don’t appear to be close.
The House has yet to adopt its version of a budget package. But Republican House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) has proposed a stop-gap budget and called Democrats “not serious” about getting a budget done. Hall said this week that he has hopes of getting education budgets out of the House soon, although earlier he suggested the House isn’t bound by hard budget deadlines.
In his weekly press conference Wednesday, Hall accused Democrats of not being serious about the budget.
“I’ve never had confidence that the Democrats, because of the people we’re working with, and you look at the quotes, that we’re going to get something done by July 1,” he said. “But I’ve always told people I’ll work in good faith to do it on some of them.”
The House did adopt a higher education budget last week with big reductions to state funding for the University of Michigan and Michigan State University while other public universities would get boosts. The House also adopted a school aid budget this past week. Both are a month behind the Senate's actions on budgets. The House has yet to approve its versions of budget bills for state departments and agencies. That spending does interact with school, community college, and university budgets in some areas.
Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) said Thursday that Hall is single-handedly driving the state toward a budget crisis. She said it’s not reasonable to expect the Senate to rubber-stamp House-adopted budgets on arrival.
“By its very nature, it must be negotiated by the House and the Senate and the governor, so it’s incredibly irresponsible to wait until the last minute,” she told Michigan Public Radio.” At the end of the day, this is very Trump-like behavior to cause a crisis and then to come in at the last second and pretend that they’re being heroic and pretend that it’s somebody else’s fault that it doesn’t get done.”
Local governments, community colleges, public universities and K-12 schools all have fiscal years that begin July 1. There is a state law that requires the Legislature to have their budgets wrapped up by then, but there are no specific consequences for missing that deadline. The state’s fiscal year begins October 1.
