Tricky language hides millions in pork in new Michigan budget

Paul Egan , Kathleen Gray | Detroit Free Press

LANSING – The $56.8-billion state budget is passed by the Legislature and on its way to Gov. Rick Snyder, but taxpayers need a copy of the latest census — along with some detective work — to figure out everything that's in it.

Tens of millions of dollars for lawmakers' pet projects — sometimes known as earmarks and sometimes known as pork — are buried in the budget, obscured by hard-to-decipher language.

Projects approved by both the House and Senate on Tuesday range from $400,000 for a new fire engine in Plymouth Township to $360,000 to improve a road in an industrial park in Beaverton, in Gladwin County.

But those levels of details are not found in the budget bill itself.

There, the Beaverton road project is described as “a road project located in a county with a population of between 25,500 and 25,700 and in a city with a population of between 1,050 and 1,100 according to the most recent federal decennial census.”

Wording the description of the City of Beaverton that way gets around a state constitutional provision that calls for a two-thirds vote — rather than a simple majority — for laws expressly targeted at specific municipalities.

The process lacks transparency, even with the help of legislative fiscal agency analyses that help identify the specific purpose of the expenditures, chosen or OK'd by legislative leadership.

"I've seen it done many times" and when both Republicans and Democrats have held chamber majorities, said Mitch Bean, director of the House Fiscal Agency from 1993 to 2011 and now an economic consultant.

"Everybody who is part of the process knows about it," Bean said Wednesday.

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Asked how analysts at the House Fiscal Agency or the Senate Fiscal Agency know how to identify the projects, based on the imprecise project descriptions included in budget bills, Bean said: "Are you kidding me? A lot of time (lawmakers) will say, 'We want to do this,' and staff writes up the legislation."

House Speaker Tom Leonard, R-DeWitt, said the earmarks are "part of the budget process." He said the "vast majority" of road funding in the budget went through the regular funding process, in which projects are selected by the Michigan Department of Transportation or local roads agencies. He also said none of the approved earmarks were ones specifically requested by him.

One of the largest earmarks approved is a $7.6-million extension to Coleman Road, which is in Leonard's district. But Leonard's spokesman Gideon D'Assandro said the planned extension of the road straddles a county line, crossing three House districts and two Senate districts. Other Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Rick Jones of Grand Ledge, have publicly pushed for the project.

The budget now awaits the signature of Snyder, who has line-item veto power.

Tuesday's budget, in a section titled "supplemental" appropriations apart from the regular departmental budgets, included close to $22 million in "Michigan enhancement grants" in the Department of Talent and Economic Development and $30 million for "community infrastructure investments" in the Department of Transportation. It's money on top of the extra $300 million for road projects that lawmakers approved late in the budget process, using unspent money from prior years and unanticipated money from economic growth.

Even the House Fiscal Agency analysis is lacking certain specifics on the earmarked projects.

But a report the agency released Tuesday says the Michigan enhancement grants include $1.9 million for Grand Haven State Park, $1 million each for the Grand Rapids Civic Theater, the Great Lakes Center for the Arts in Bay Harbor, and Macomb County Community Mental Health; $500,000 each for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, the Henry Ford Museum and the Arab American National Museum, both in Dearborn, the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, the Sloan Museum in Flint, and the Delta County Upper Peninsula Veterans Hall of Fame, and $250,000 for an environmental cleanup in White Lake Township.

According to the same report, some of the community infrastructure investments include $3 million for Beal City infrastructure improvements, $2.4 million for Traverse-area recreation and transportation trails, $1.8 million to improve Zylman Road in the Portage area, $1.1 million to improve an unspecified stretch of Dixie Highway in southeastern Michigan, and $500,000 to improve General Drive between Ann Arbor Road and Joy Road in Wayne County.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4.