Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI)
Over most of the past decade, budget deliberations in Michigan have taken on a glum and familiar monotony: What do we cut now?
But the state that experienced an economic downturn earlier, deeper and longer than most of the rest of the country has made an unlikely discovery as its officials closed out its latest financial books: Michigan has a $457 million surplus.
Even more surprising: Revenues, which had sunk or had been mostly flat for all but one year since 2000, have grown. Not a lot, but grown.
Michigan is the most unlikely example of a phenomenon that was unimaginable in most states in recent years. Though nearly all states are required by law to balance their budgets, most have been able to do so only through rounds of painful spending cuts to make up for deep shortfalls in revenue.
In Michigan, a state that has cut so much so often that in the words of a former state budget director, “we were so far down that the floor looked like up to us,” nearly everyone is now clamoring desperately for a piece of the extra cash. As Gov. Rick Snyder, a first-term Republican, prepared to propose a new budget on Thursday, he and his budget team were hearing from seemingly every imaginable department, agency and interest group.
The attorney general wants 1,000 new police officers after 3,200 were cut around the state over the last decade. Schools leaders say they need to offset cutbacks that have left teachers laid off and schools closed. Child advocates want money for early education for toddlers from poor families; construction workers want money for Michigan’s crumbling roads; and on and on.
For years in Michigan, the only certainty seemed to be a vanishing state budget. The auto manufacturing industry, so central to the state’s existence, was believed to be fading, then collapsing. At various times, Michigan officials had to offset more than $10 billion in expected shortfalls — closing prisons, eliminating state departments and cutting funds to libraries, day care programs, crime laboratories, zoos and more. By 2010, Robert L. Emerson, the budget director under Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a two-term Democrat who preceded Mr. Snyder, said he found himself working with general fund revenues that had dropped to levels last seen in the early 1990s (or the 1960s, when adjusted for inflation).
Read More: New York Times
