Gov. Granholm still reviewing state budget, could veto parts

With less than a week until Michigan’s 30-day budget extension expires, Gov. Jennifer Granholm still is reviewing six controversial budget bills the Senate sent her this month. Despite the holdup, Megan Brown, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Granholm will sign the bills and avoid a government shutdown.

Granholm can line-item veto portions of the budget she does not approve, but legislators still have options to reinstate funding at the levels they requested.

A line-item veto occurs when the governor accepts the budget as a whole, but vetoes specific parts.

“She is certainly going to sign,” Brown said. “The governor has respectively called on state lawmakers to approve revenue to support the priorities of Michigan families.”

Michigan lawmakers passed a temporary budget Oct. 1 when they failed to balance the state’s $40 billion budget before the 2009-10 fiscal year deadline. In attempts to eliminate the state’s $2.8 billion deficit, lawmakers eliminated the Michigan Promise Scholarship and about $60 million in financial aid funding.

Before receiving the final budget bills from the Legislature, the governor vowed to veto any bills that didn’t reinstate funding to the Michigan Promise Scholarship, K-12 funding, Medicaid and revenue sharing for cities.

And in what experts say was an attempt to show her dissatisfaction with bills drafted by the Legislature, Granholm vetoed items in the K-12 budget, slashing about $212 million of school districts’ funding.

“She cannot do anything by herself — she can only accept or reject what the Legislature has sent her,” said Bill Ballenger, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics. “If she vetoes something, she has to hope the Legislature will bring it back.”

The Legislature can override the governor’s veto to reinstate funding, reinstate funding with tax increases or revenue enhancements or accept the veto without restoring thatportion of funding, Ballenger said.

Brown said the governor supports revenue enhancements, including a reduction to business tax credits and a noncigarette tobacco tax, to create funding for her priorities.

Matt Marsden, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said at this point, any funding she line-item vetoes will be gone.

Marsden said the Senate would fight for overrides for items the budget was supposed to fund, but it would not try to refund any item with more funding than the Senate had proposed in its budget bills.

“We are not going to refund deeper,” Marsden said.

But some lawmakers think it is best to look for new revenue sources to fund vetoed items.

“It’s nice to talk about overrides, but the money is not there,” said state Rep. Dan Scripps, D-Leland.

Scripps said lawmakers need to look for new revenue to fund things such as the Michigan Promise Scholarship and the MSU Extension and Michigan Agriculture Experiment Station, or MAES.

Officials are concerned that MSU Extension and MAES might get vetoed from the higher education budget because these programs did not receive their monthly payment on Oct. 16.

“We receive approximately 80 million in federal grants that would go away if we didn’t have the agriculture research funding from the state of
Michigan,”MSU Trustee Melanie Foster said. “It would have serious, detrimental consequences.”

Brown said Granholm has not made any final decisions line-item vetoes for the higher education budget.