LANSING – Legislators and Governor Rick Snyder are poised to virtually finish the 2012-13 fiscal year budget Friday after striking agreements Thursday on the last remaining issue in the K-12 budget and resolving an impasse in the higher education budget.
Negotiators reached a deal in the evening on the higher education budget after days of difficult talks about how best to award a $36 million increase in funding to the state’s 15 public universities. Ultimately, they combined some of the concepts each side had pushed, mainly those from the governor and the Senate.
Universities awarding more degrees in the science, technology, math, engineering and health fields would receive a greater share of a $6 million pot, House Republican spokesperson Ari Adler said. That was a priority of Snyder. And those restraining tuition would get a cut from a $9 million pool of funds, also urged by the governor.
There would be $18 million made available to those universities performing well compared to their national peers in the Carnegie classification system. That was urged by Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker (R-Lawton), the Senate Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee chair. And there would be $3 million made available for those universities based on how much of a research and development emphasis they have.
The deal did not satisfy Rep. Bob Genetski (R-Saugatuck), the House Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee chair. On the conference committee for the higher education budget (SB 955 ), Rep. Chuck Moss (R-Birmingham) replaced Genetski because Genetski was uncomfortable signing the report, Adler said. Genetski had pushed for metrics that included tuition restraint, degree completion growth, critical skills area degree completion, and Pell Grant enrollment.
“Representative Genetski argued valiantly for the metrics that he thought should be included, and when an agreement was finally reached, he was not comfortable signing a conference report with the agreed upon combination,” Adler said. “So we replaced him with Representative Moss, who does feel comfortable.”
Genetski said he understood the need for a change on the conference committee.
“If you’ve got to move a budget, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got people that will vote yes and sign the report,” he said. “That’s standard operating procedure.”
But Genetski said he thought the metrics he supported would have better protected taxpayers and tuition-payers.
There has been some speculation that part of the difficulty in resolving the budget is the potential for a 2014 Republican primary showdown between Schuitmaker and Genetski in the new 26th Senate District. Most of Schuitmaker’s current district is in the new 20th, but she lives in the new 26th and expectations are she will run for re-election there although she has not announced her plans.
But Genetski dismissed such concerns.
“Senator Schuitmaker and I get along well,” he said, noting they attend many of the same events in their area.
He also noted that a disagreement over how to fund higher education is hardly fodder for an election campaign and quipped that anyone in their district following the budget that closely to decide how to potentially vote should the match-up occur should be given tickets to a West Michigan Whitecaps baseball game because “they need to get out more.” Schuitmaker could not be reached.
As House leadership resolved the budget with the Senate and the administration, the key was simply performance metrics, Adler said.
“This wasn’t going to simply be the state handing out cash,” he said. “The speaker feels good about an agreement moving forward tomorrow.”
Sen. Roger Kahn (R-Saginaw Township), the Senate Appropriations Committee chair, praised the agreement.
“I’m glad to see it appears that we have our last budget resolved,” he said. “It’s not the way I had envisioned the Senate dealing with these issues, but it’s consistent with the process that we’ve laid out.”
Dick Posthumus, Snyder’s director of legislative affairs, said prior to the agreement that what mattered to Snyder is not the specifics on performance funding, so much as getting a framework in place.
“It’s establishing a formula that sets up a standard of performance that needs to be met for funding,” he said. “The specific formula isn’t as important as establishing the philosophy so when we’re going forward we know universities have to reach a specific standard of performance.”
The agreement sets the stage for a pair of conference committees to meet Friday morning and then a rare Friday session of the full House.
At 9:30 a.m., the conference committee on the higher education budget will meet. Then at 10 a.m., the conference committee on the omnibus education bill for K-12, higher education and community colleges will meet to approve the exact same content. This procedure is part of the agreement between the House and Senate that the Legislature would first address separate bills for each department and major budget area so the Senate can vote individually on those issues.
But the omnibus education bill (HB 5372 ) would then get taken up by the House when it meets at noon and that will be the bill that goes to Snyder after the Senate presumably passes it Tuesday.
There also is an agreement on some controversial boilerplate language. Universities will have to make some type of report on their embryonic stem cell research although the exact nature of that report was not clear. A provision penalizing Michigan State University some of its funds if it did not discontinue its requirement that its students have health insurance is expected to be dropped.
The Legislature will not make its self-imposed June 1 deadline to complete all action on the budget, but the House will have completed its work by the deadline and Tuesday’s action in the Senate should be uneventful. The Senate might have stayed to complete the budget Friday if not for the funeral visitation and services for the son of Sen. Goeff Hansen (R-Hart), who died last week of cancer. Many senators were headed to those services.
“I don’t want to make a big media thing out of this but one of our colleagues lost a son,” Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R-Monroe) said after the Senate adjourned about 4 p.m. “Rather than make a big thing out of it, I would just as soon like to finish things on Tuesday than keep people late today. We wanted to make sure though that the K-12 information got out. We’ve been trying to get that to them before June. We did that last year and we did that this year. I think that’s really the most critical information to get back home and really it only took one business day, so I think we’ll be fine.”
Richardville said his hope for next week, besides wrapping the budget, is to complete work on legislation reforming the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (SB 1040 ) and providing income tax relief (HB 5699 , HB 5700).
The other major developments of the day included resolution on the question of how to fund kindergarten pupils in the K-12 budget (see separate story) and the Legislature’s passage of the omnibus budget for all of the departments and non-education portions of the budget (HB 5365 , see related story).
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