by Gongwer News Service
September 11, 2009

With little more than three weeks left in the 2008-09 fiscal year or, depending on one’s point of view, little more than three weeks left before government shuts down at the start of the 2009-10 fiscal year, there is progress to report on the effort to come up with a new budget.

Proposals have been unveiled and family squabbles have gone public. Protests from both sides — don’t cut any more spending and don’t raise any more taxes — are showing up at the Capitol daily, almost hourly, and boosting in their own way downtown Lansing’s economy. Countdown clocks are ticking, on newspaper websites and elsewhere, and the national press has shown up to see if Michigan’s leaders reach a budget agreement.

A skeptic could and probably would ask: this is progress? But the answer is affirmatively, “oh yes.” While government leaders are not quite ready to hold a group hug in celebration of what’s happened, it also means that the issues are out now more in public, the dynamics of the current fissures exposed, and the essential framework of what could be an agreement to at least begin the new fiscal year is there. We are beyond the “Lowells talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God” stage of the budget discussion and now into the messier, somewhat more public platform of hammering an agreement.

Dashiell Hammett once lectured students that when creating suspense, absolutely nothing must happen in a scene. Leading up to this week, one could have said the suspenseful nothing had been underway. We had something happen this week, and that means progress.

Even with much more work to go on the budget, we also now have the basic framework of what that final budget agreement will be: cuts, stimulus funds and additional revenues. We know now who will be happy with the 2009-10 budget: nobody.

For weeks, stories about the proposals to resolve the upcoming budget had leaked out in drips and drops, some stories accurate, others not.

When Governor Jennifer Granholm, surrounded by reporters on a Michigan State University parking lot, pulled out the yellow sheets of paper on which her budget proposal was printed, it set off a new stage of considerations, worries and even fireworks.

Speaker Andy Dillon’s claim that she was showboating did something that rarely happens in the Capitol anymore: it caught everyone by surprise. Where did that come from, people wondered. Was this the informal signal that the Redford Township Democrat would run for governor in 2010 after all? Was he striking some distance between himself and Ms. Granholm?

And then came Lt. Governor John Cherry’s stinging rebuke of Mr. Dillon, saying any criticism was disingenuous since he had known about the proposal for a month. That, of course, was followed by a more contrite Mr. Dillon saying his reaction was more to Ms. Granholm’s call for the House to start passing budget bills and set its proposal.

Now there are the technical issues of having bills with differences for conference committees, but besides that, is more needed from the House at this point, once could ask. The Senate has called for massive budget cuts. The House is clearly going to be less austere and call for more in revenues.

Here now is Ms. Granholm’s proposal, somewhere in the middle, and there is a sense that in the end something like that will likely be the final result. There will be movement on numbers, expect more in cuts and less in revenues. But ultimately, one cannot realistically put down a bet that the budget resolution will not result in some new revenues. Republicans have been studying the issue of reducing the state’s tax credits, and Ms. Granholm would only agree to changes on the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Michigan Film Credit — two programs she would loathe touching — with the knowledge that the legislature will eventually agree to some kind of tax changes.

Which means in the end no one will be happy, because this budget when arrived at will set the stage for the next, and that is where and when officials anticipate major changes to the structure of the state’s government.

The rallies and press conferences and ads and websites now at full throttle just in anticipation of the new fiscal year will go into hyperspeed when talks of merging programs, cutting functions, privatizing systems, changing tax structures are off and running.

So from a parking lot comes the start of the last stage of this race and the warm-up for the marathon to follow.

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