Budget negotiations extend late into night
Gov. Jennifer Granholm awaits completed budget; Legislature votes to axe Michigan Promise Scholarship
Michigan state Senate members sit in session in the Senate chambers of the state Capitol during budget talks Wednesday night.
Tweet
Lansing — After spending all day and evening Wednesday in marathon budget negotiations, the Michigan House of Representatives and Senate failed to pass a budget by their midnight deadline at press time Wednesday, after the Senate adjourned until 12:15 a.m. without sending a continuation budget to Gov. Jennifer Granholm to avoid a partial state government shutdown.
But one thing was certain: The budget the state Legislature submits Granholm will include drastic cuts to higher education spending, including eliminating the Michigan Promise Scholarship from the higher education budget and cutting financial aid funding by tens of thousands of dollars.
Both chambers voted Wednesday to approve a higher education budget that would cut the Michigan Promise Scholarship along
with about $60 million in additional financial aid.
The bill also would combine MSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, and cut their funding in half.
But Wednesday morning, the House passed a supplemental House Appropriations Committee bill to reinstate the Michigan Promise Scholarship with $120 million in as-yet-unidentified revenue.
Video: Promises Promises ...
The Michigan Promise Scholarship provides as much as $4,000 to Michigan college and university students based on results from the Michigan Merit Exam. More than 7,700 MSU students and 96,000 students statewide are eligible for the scholarship during the 2009-10 school year.
The supplemental bill still must be voted on in the full Senate, but the chance of it passing are slim, state Sen. Tom George, R-Kalamazoo, said.
“The Senate will not reinstate the Promise,” he said.
“It’s one of the only places to cut — that’s where the money is and that is one of the few things we were able to make cuts on.”
Steve Webster, MSU’s vice president of government affairs, said there was no way to predict how the final budget will affect student aid.
“They’ve got so many different options — pass a continuation budget that doesn’t have a Promise, stick to these cuts only that doesn’t include a Promise grant, pass cuts only with some type of supplement for the Promise,” he said.
MSU Trustee Colleen McNamara said she hopes the Michigan Promise Scholarship still can be salvaged, but that the university will consider options to help students who are expecting payment.
“If it’s cut, we will spend a lot of time with the administration to give those who were dependent on it some other type of financial aid,” McNamara said.
She could not say where other financial aid might come from.
“That’s what we have to figure out,” she said.
The higher education cuts would hurt the university across the board, MSU Trustee Melanie Foster said.
“I’m extremely, extremely disappointed,” she said. “It leaves us in a worse situation than we are now.”
Session began in the Senate at 9 a.m. and the House at 8 a.m. and was scheduled to last until midnight.
“And that might not be long enough,” state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Lansing, said. “I’m concerned.”
If legislators failed to reach a budget agreement by midnight, the Senate would have to send the continuation budget to Granholm for approval to avoid a partial state government shutdown.
Wednesday afternoon, Granholm sent a letter to state employees stating they would be temporarily laid off and the state government offices would shut down beginning at 12:01 a.m. today if the Senate did not vote for immediate effect of the continuation budget.
Without the Senate voting on the bill, state employees were preparing to leave their jobs until the bill was signed by the governor.
The shutdown would
close Secretary of State branches and offices of the Department of Human
Services and the Department of Agriculture, along
with numerous other state offices.
East Lansing City Manager Ted Staton said city functions that rely on state government could be held up by a prolonged shutdown.
“It’s unacceptable what has happened in the House this evening,” said Liz Boyd, a spokeswoman for Granholm, of the Legislature’s drawing budget talks late into the night.
“The governor stands ready to sign that into law.”
In the case of a shutdown, corrections facilities, hospitals and unemployment offices would remain open and Michigan State Police officers would still be on patrol, Boyd said.
State Rep. Joan Bauer, D-Lansing, said two main areas causing disagreement were school aid and revenue sharing.
“(Those are) a couple of areas that there are creating huge differences in opinion,” Bauer said.
Revenue sharing — a form of state aid that pays for many city operations, including police and fire — was cut by 11 percent Tuesday, but the House approved a supplemental bill Wednesday that would alleviate that cut to three percent.
“We’ve experienced over $10 million in cuts since 2001 and we think that’s more than our fair share of cuts,” Staton said. “We think the cuts should be zero.”
Revenue sharing cuts would mean short-staffed city offices, slow property repairs and fewer sidewalk repairs in East Lansing.
Commentary
Add your $0.02, go to the comment form or follow the comment feed
michcitizen
(10/01/09 10:32am)Report
The promise scholarship was not good public policy in the first place. There is no reason why the state should fund the education of those scoring at a certain level on a test and not those just below the threshold.
If the government wants to promote college education, it should be across the board. If we need more college educated people for the workforce, we need to create more of the jobs those people seek here in Michigan and make sure the pay is competitive with other states.
People are mobile and simply paying for college in Michigan often results in funding of college for people working in other states. We need to get a little smarter about these things and use public money more wisely.
TO:Michcitizen
(10/01/09 11:31am)Report
Everyone got the scholarship…
those who scored high enough got a payment plan
year1 :$1000
year2 :$1000
year3 :$3000
Those that did not score enough
year1 :$0
year2 :$0
year3 :$4000
every single person that graduates gets the money.
My bad
(10/01/09 11:32am)Report
Sorry year3 :$2000 not $3000
both sets get $4000
Elise
(10/01/09 2:04pm)Report
It is irrelevant who “earned” the scholarship or not, who “deserved” it just because the results were based on test scores. Everything is based on test scores to get into college, arbitrarily or not. The fact of the matter is you do not “PROMISE” something and then take it away. Whether or not the program should have been initiated is again at this point irrelevant. The question now is, can I ever trust my government again? And why should I bother trying? As far as I am concerned, the $3000 remaining of my scholarship was stolen from me yesterday, and that is unacceptable. Perhaps I should just drop out of college, since our Michigan reps (granted, not all) don’t see it as a worthy pursuit of time; if they did, they would not have cut funding. Isn’t it a general rule that to try to stimulate a community, an environment, a government, anything, really, it is best to support today’s youth? I will remember this when I graduate and take the economic power I have out of Michigan. I have lost all respect for my State Government.
Tony
(10/01/09 2:56pm)Report
The name of the scholarship is the Promise scholarship…as in ‘You show promise’, not ‘The State promises you this money’.
And the next time a tax hike gets proposed, maybe your parents shouldn’t run screaming. The population absolutely refuses even the slightest tax increase, but people whine when they have to cut state services. You can’t have it both ways.
Hopeless
(10/01/09 6:24pm)Report
I’m frankly outraged. Sure, it is technically a merit scholarship, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t students who counted on it. If my university wasn’t fronting the scholarship to those who earned it for this year, I would be going home after only one semester of college. Now, even though I placed in the 99th percentile on the ACTs, who knows if I’ll be able to return for my sophomore year.
Even if the “promise” does not apply in a sense that it was “guaranteed,” it is still ridiculous that our state is taking funding for higher education away.
I wouldn’t mind a tax hike. In fact, I think taxes should go up nation wide, and quite substantially. Europe has the right idea there.
Thank you, senators, for taking away the one thing I’ve been waiting for my entire life.
michcitizen
(10/01/09 6:37pm)Report
California has been funding college education for decades to the point of making it nearly free. Their economony has been one of the worst in the nation lately.
Texas has made significant progress in making a more business friendly climate, with lower taxes on business and reasonable tort reform. They have one of the most robust economies in the nation. Can we figure out what is more important as we try to climb out of the hole we are in here in Michigan?
Jake Voisine
(10/01/09 7:25pm)Report
This is a disaster. It’s a shame and quite honestly unacceptable to allow politicians parade around during their campaign and act as if they give a damn about education. Clearly, they don’t have enough incentive to put education as a priority so it gets cut. What people need to look at is what isn’t being cut, because that is surely more alarming. This is money many students planned on receiving – this is a total failure by the State government. Is the Congress going to take money out of their over-inflated salary and pay for the student’s education. Failure, shame on the entire Legislature, in addition to dropping the ball on the PROMISE scholarship they also failed to meet the budget deadline. Sickening, vote em out. If you want change you have to make change, vote them out!
idontwantit
(10/01/09 9:36pm)Report
Promise scholarship should never have been created in the first place. By cutting it, they are correcting a previous error that hopefully does not occur again.
Tony
(10/01/09 11:01pm)Report
Hopeless, if worst comes to worst, you’ll have to transfer to Central or Western or Oakland. Life will go on. If you can afford MSU with the Promise, you can afford those three schools without it.
Nothing makes me roll my eyes like the melodramatic Spartan who makes it sound like they’ll have to live on the street and give tuggies in the slinky ramp for food money if they take this scholarship away. There are people getting a dirtier stick than you in this budget.
Big picture, people.
Rick
(10/02/09 10:44am)Report
There’s more happening with the state budget than the Promise scholarship, which was a good idea which the state can no longer afford. Unfortunately, given the necessity to build and attract employing businesses in the state, the tax structure will have to be changed in order to compete with states that already have lower taxes. There’s going to be a lot more good public policy ideas abandoned for lack of money. The state will become a less attractive place to live—but there’s no logical alternative.