June 12, 1998

Legislative & Political Week in Review

• It was a lopsided legislature this week, with the Senate on a pre-recess break, but the House soldiered on, passing three appropriations bills.
  • The Department of Corrections budget (SB 909) as passed by the House totals $1.37 billion and includes $4.6 million for a pilot program to treat inmate substance abuse. The vote was 100-5. The House version is nearly $7 million less than the administration’s recommendation.
  • The Department of Community Health budget (SB 908) would receive $7.5 billion ($2.6 billion from the General Fund) under the House version. Weighing in at a hefty $159 million over the governor’s recommendation and the Senate-passed version of the spending plan, the measure includes funding for hourly wage hikes for roughly 9,000 nursing home workers.
  • The Department of Education budget (SB 910) adopted by the lower chamber totals $870 million ($44.6 Million GO) and includes increased funding to collect defaulted student loans and reorganization expenses for the State Board of Education. The vote was 87-17.
• Legislative leaders began discussing FY 1998–99 budget targets this week—and none too soon in the view of Department of Management and Budget analysts who note that appropriations bills passed by legislators significantly exceed revenue estimates as well as the administration’s recommended budget totals. According to the DMB, House-passed budgets exceed the General Fund revenue estimate by $368 million, while agency spending plans approved by the Senate overdraw anticipated revenue by $57 million. Setting budget targets is an annual ritual that fixes parameters for the House-Senate conference committees in which final budget compromises are hammered out.
• Lower chamber lawmakers passed two of the a three-bill sentencing guideline package this week, advancing the fractious, partisan criminal-justice policy debate closer to statutory enactment. The two bills (HBs 5419 and 5421) increase the sentences for violent crimes and require convicts to serve at least the minimum sentence they received. The House held back the third bill in the package (SB 826), pending Senate approval of these and other related House-passed bills. The package has critics on both sides of both aisles: Senate Republicans sniff that the action is too little, too late in response to more sweeping sentencing reforms introduced six months ago in the upper chamber; some House Democrats complain that the bills’ effects will be mainly to make prison overcrowding worse than it already is.
• The perennially controversial Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP) examination scores earned by state K–12 students are back in the news—linked this time with the equally fraught topic of charter schools. According to an Associated Press study, charter school students, although they showed improved performance in the recent round of MEAP tests, still lag behind their public school counterparts. The AP reports that in many instances the performance gap between charter and other schools is "sizeable"; for example, 69 percent of public-school eighth graders earned a score of "proficient" on the writing portion of the January exam, but fewer than half—44 percent—of charter schoolers did as well. On the science portion, the achievement rate is nothing to brag about in either sector, but again, public-school students outdid charter-school students; 22 of the former were deemed proficient, compared to 8 percent of the latter. Charter-school advocates say these relatively new schools need time to establish themselves and point out that many of them serve special-needs students.
• Governor Engler’s proposed environmental bond issue, which already passed the Senate, got a makeover in the House. The governor’s Clean Michigan Initiative is a November ballot proposal authorizing the issuance of general obligation bonds to fund environmental cleanup projects and redevelopment of previously contaminated industrial sites. The lower chamber has scrapped the program’s name, added $200 million to the $550 million project, and angered environmentalists, who say they expected more cleanup funding and less political rhetoric from the Democratic-controlled House. Now renamed the Economic Development and Recreation Plan, the expanded program will add sewage-overflow and related water cleanup to the list of projects that includes expanded recreation opportunities at state parks and contaminated-site cleanup and redevelopment. Environmental groups criticize the package for allocating only 18 cents per dollar for environmental cleanup and earmarking the rest for industrial redevelopment.