Little Red Hen

by Tim Skubick
March 19, 2010

Many lawmakers proudly profess that education is their top priority. If so, why is there serious talk about slicing the K-12 school aid budget by almost $400 per pupil and higher education by 3 percent, which will most assuredly result in tuition increases above 5 percent?

To help understand the frustration of the governor who is trying to raise revenue to avoid the cuts, recall the story of the Little Red Hen.

The hen wanted to bake a cake. She went to every inhabitant of the farm and asked for help. She got none. But, alas, after she baked the cake herself, everyone wanted a piece.

Welcome to the barnyard, a.k.a. the state legislature, where special interest groups want to eat but are bashful about helping Little Red, played by Jennifer Granholm.

At the top of the list of non-helpers are university presidents.

For years, these folks have bellyached about the woeful lack of state support but have been unwilling to get in the trenches to reverse the trend.

As the governor pushes for a sales tax on services to avert the cut to K-12, the university presidents should be in the kitchen with her. Sure, none of that money would go to MSU, Wayne State or U of M, but in the long run it would save money. They currently spend a mountain of remedial dollars to teach the college kids what they should have learned in the elementary and high schools.

The governor also wants to give the universities what they got last year in state aid, which ain’t much but is a might-size better than the 3 percent wedge Senate Republicans want to remove from their budgets.

But where are the presidents?

Sheepishly the other day, their lobbyist, Dr. Mike Boulus confessed he was their stand-in fighting bravely to restore the cuts.

“It has to get ugly,” he warned, meaning that parents and college kids need to get into the game and pressure lawmakers to change this funding death spiral.

But where are the presidents?

The college kids met last weekend to plan a 5,000-person rally on the Capitol steps. This town would be shocked if they showed up, and even more shocked if their university presidents joined them.

To be fair, some of those presidents have participated in a backroom effort to forge a Grand Bargain with the Business Leaders of Michigan that demands reforms and more revenue. But BLM is cut from the same cloth as the higher ed leaders.

In fact, it got so bad the other day, some of the gov’s guys told the BLM gang to pick a reform and get in the arena to get it passed.

It’s easy to sit comfortably on the sidelines and shout in plays; it is quite another to suit up.

Business leaders and college presidents appear to be above the contact sport of muscling lawmakers to do what is right, for fear that some of those lawmakers might be offended.

Who cares?

Aren’t all the students in the state being short-changed and shouldn’t they be the ones offended by the apathy displayed by university officials?

A public and unified show of force from university presidents might not work, but you never know unless you give it the ol’ college try.

Betya Jen the Hen has some aprons she’d love to pass out.

Tim Skubick is Michigan’s Senior Capitol correspondent and has anchored the weekly public TV series “Off the Record” since 1972. He also covers the Capitol and politics for WLNS-TV6 in Lansing.

Tim Skubick Extra Extra… (A weekly bonus only for Dome readers)

Pure Baloney
Come hell or high water, legislative Republicans remain fixated on one objective: to get through this election cycle without ever raising any new revenue to balance the budget — which is dipping deeper into the red with no Obama money to tip the scale into the black.

This desire to stay on-message and craft a self-serving election year mantra — “we did not raise your taxes, so elect us” — may be the right thing politically, but when it comes to the Pure Michigan campaign, the governor has this one right: it is “short-sighted.”

In case you don’t have a TV, the wonderfully written and produced Pure Michigan tourism commercials are a work of art and have convinced lots of non-Michiganders to visit the state.

In other words, the Tim Allen voice-over spots work.

But the campaign can’t work without the dollars to buy the TV ads to lure those out-of-staters to visit the island, Motown, the Capitol or Uncle John’s Cider Mill up there in St. Johns.

Democrats have found an ingenious way to find the money by taxing rental cars at the airport. Last time anyone checked, local taxpayers don’t rent cars there; business guys and tourists do.

So the Ds figure, let them foot the bill.

But even though it is a tax hike on non-residents, the Republicans argue it is still a tax hike and, by gawd, they are not going to raise taxes on anybody and break their no-tax pledge.

“We are approaching a drop-dead date,” warns George Zimmerman, who runs the state tourism shop and is itching to buy up the TV time to air the commercials.

The stalemate to date means the state can’t buy any spots in April; that time is already sold out.

And unless there is a resolution within two weeks, it will be ditto for the month of May, which, state officials point out, is the month many families decide where to spend their vacation money.

Greg Main from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation figures if the state misses the May buy, you can just forget about the summer advertising campaign altogether…and watch the sale of fudge take a dive.

If that happens, the state will lose millions of dollars in new revenue from our temporary visitors, but the GOP does not care. When it comes to helping the state or helping themselves to get re-elected, you know which is more important.

Somebody tell Tim Allen he can give his voice a rest this summer.

Push Comes to Shove
Apparently Richard Bernstein believes he can nail the Democratic nomination for attorney general without the aid of the United Auto Workers union. That’s because he torched that bridge last week.

Without prompting from a pushy reporter, Mr. Bernstein of Bernstein, Bernstein, Bernstein and Bernstein law firm fame (come on you’ve seen the TV commercials) volunteered that lots of folks in the state D party are tired of being “pushed around and told what to do” by the UAW.

Bernstein pledged to bus load some new folks into the party mini convention next month to wrestle the nomination from the UAW and its candidate for A.G., David Leyton.

Leyton, the Genesee County prosecutor, read the anti-union attack and called it “highly disrespectful” to the union leaders who over the years helped to create the middle class and along the way used their backroom influence to propel this pol and that into office.

“It was out of left field,” Leyton noted while adding another note of criticism aimed at his opponent.

Leyton recalls that when Mr. Bernstein ran for the Wayne State University Board of Governors, he secured the UAW endorsement. Now he is fighting the very same union.

Asked if that was an example of hypocrisy in action, Leyton dove for the high grass, saying: “That’s your word, not mine.” Come on councilor, you surely recognize a hypocrite when you see one?

At any rate, Bernstein’s remarks have certainly been reviewed at Solidarity House, and some theorize that whatever chance he had at the nomination has gone out the window.

Surely, the union wouldn’t push people around at the convention to make sure Bernstein doesn’t beat Leyton, would it?

Bernstein may have been wrong to take on the UAW, but he gets high marks for speaking his mind. And he is right about one thing: “This is going to be one hell of a convention.”

Oh yeah.