June 19, 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 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 House totals $870 million ($44.6 Million GF) and includes reorganization expenses for the State Board of Education and increased funding to collect defaulted student loans.
• 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. The department says the House-passed budgets exceed the GF revenue estimate by $368 million, while the Senate-passed versions overdraw anticipated revenue by $57 million. The targets will guide the House-Senate conference committees in which final budget compromises are hammered out.
• The House passed two sentencing guideline bills this week, advancing the fractious, partisan criminal-justice policy debate closer to final action. The bills (HBs 5419 and 5421) increase the sentences for violent crimes and require convicts to serve at least their minimum sentence. The House held back a third bill (SB 826), pending Senate approval of various related House-passed bills. The package has critics on both sides of both aisles: Senate Republicans say that the action is too little too late (the upper chamber introduced more sweeping reforms six months ago); some House Democrats complain that the bills mainly will make prison overcrowding even worse.
• The perennially controversial Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP) 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 improvement in the recent round of tests, still trail 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 percent 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 serve special-needs students.
• Governor Engler’s proposed environmental bond proposal, which already passed the Senate, got a makeover in the House. The governor’s Clean Michigan Initiative is a November ballot proposal authorizing issuance of general obligation bonds to fund environmental cleanup projects and redevelopment of contaminated industrial sites. The lower chamber scrapped the program’s name, added $200 million to the $550 million project, and angered environmentalists. Now renamed the Economic Development and Recreation Plan, the House version adds 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 the rest to industrial redevelopment.