Michigan school districts face tough choices as their fiscal years began Tuesday while the Legislature remains deadlocked on the state K-12 budget.
The Republican-controlled House and the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, adjourned and left town earlier this week after it became clear they would not reach a deal by the July 1 deadline set in state law. There are big differences between the chambers’ differing versions and it appears possible if not likely the budget will hang fire into the fall.
“We’ve seen school districts passing budgets that make cuts, that pink slip employees, that dip heavily into their reserve funds that they aren’t supposed to be touching,” said Robert McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan.
McCann said this outcome was foreseeable as the budget process lagged months behind the typical process and missed key benchmarks, including getting initial versions adopted in the spring so they could move to bicameral, bipartisan conference committees to hammer out final versions. Those conference committee versions would have to be approved without amendments in up-or-down votes of the House and Senate before they would go to Governor Gretchen Whitmer for her signature.
“And instead we were left with this sort of chaos situation of trying to scramble something together before the deadline and, ultimately, there wasn’t the will or the way to make that happen and it’s really because of months and months of inaction,” said McCann. “This failure has been happening over the past five, six months now of delays and inaction and seemingly not caring about the urgency of getting a K-through-12 budget done on time.”
There are no consequences to lawmakers for missing the July deadline, which was enacted by the Legislature after a 2007 deadlock between Governor Jennifer Granholm (D) and a politically divided Legislature led to a brief partial government shutdown. The state’s fiscal year begins in three months on October 1, when the Michigan Constitution requires a balanced budget to be signed.
