LONDON – Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger said last week repealing the prevailing wage is still seriously being discussed, and he hopes to have some solution to transportation funding approved by the Legislature before the end of the year.
Bolger (R-Marshall) said in an interview with Gongwer News Service he currently is giving Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R-Monroe) and Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D-East Lansing) room to poll the public and create a proposal. He said he’s waiting to see if they can find a “home run.”
“If they don’t, I think we should not forget the issue. Just the opposite, I think we need to step up right to the plate and start hitting singles,” he said. “There are a lot of issues to solve within transportation. I do watch some of the debate or some of the coverage of transportation. And I scratch my head as people focus on raising more money as the only answer. Too many people dismiss money we found in the existing budget. And they say, ‘Yes, but when are you going to raise $1 billion to fix the problem.'”
Bolger said the Legislature continues to work on solving the problem with transportation funding, and the answer doesn’t have to be all new money.
“It would be great to have (transportation) done before the end of the year. That’s what I am shooting for,” he said. “But, we need to continue to work to solve the problems if that timeline doesn’t work out.”
Bolger also said the House Democrats made their demand clear that they would not negotiate raising new revenue for road funding if there was a repeal of prevailing wage law. However, Bolger said there is not a plan in place to raise new funds, and the repeal is on the House Republican agenda and “remains on the table for us.”
“We are listening to constituents and listening to taxpayers,” he said. “When you compare what they could have paid versus what they are paying in many projects, taxpayers are forced to pay a lot more to carry a lot larger burden because of this mandate.”
He said there is no timeline to introduce legislation on the subject, and there is still discussion going on.
beliefs.”
2013 PRIORITIES: As for the rest of the year, other than transportation funding, Bolger said he would like to see tax relief to individual taxpayers through sales tax on the difference legislation (HB 4234 , SB 89 ), bills streamlining the adoption process (HB 4646 , HB 4647 and HB 4648 ) and some sort of election reform signed into law.
“The adoption bills I talked about on our opening day here, where if we want to increase the value of life, if we want to reduce the number of abortions, we need to make adoption more readily accessible,” Bolger said. “We need to make adoption a greater option for our families.”
As for election reform, Bolger said he isn’t quite sure what that would look like yet. But, the goal is to create a more accountable and efficient process.
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