CASCO TWP., MI (WHTC-AM/FM) – When state lawmakers return to Lansing in earnest next month, the issue of a agreeing to a Fiscal 2020 budget will be staring at each one in the face.
The failure for meeting a September 30th deadline in having a spending plan in place looms for the first time since the Granholm Administration days of a decade ago. Perhaps the biggest obstacle for coming to an agreement is the apparent wide gap in road funding. Although no lawmaker has formally introduced any legislation on this, Governor Whitmer is still pressing for a 45-cent hike in gas taxes that would take full effect by Christmas of 2020, while majority Republicans at the Capitol are stumping for a more modest increase of about half that.
Second-term GOP Representative Mary Whiteford of the South Haven area is confident that this gulf will be breached in time to prevent the return of a “closed” state government on October 1st. “I’m not going to say anything bad about the governor (for proposing the 45-cent hike), because she was in for just a couple of months and had to produce a budget,” she said in her monthly segment on “WHTC Talk of the Town” on Monday. “That was a good way to say, ‘Hey, this is the number I’d like to see.’ Now the legislature has been working for seven, eight months now on how best to do this.
“We will have this plan coming up; we will have a budget out by the end of September, so I just want everybody to rest assured that we are going to do this.”
Whiteford and first-term Republican Representative Brad Slagh of Zeeland Township will hold a joint town hall meeting on road funding and auto insurance reform at Holland City Hall on Monday, August 19th, beginning at 5:30 PM.
