LANSING – Money raised from Michigan's vehicle registration fees is supposed to be spent fixing the crumbling roads.

But for more than 20 years, millions of dollars in registration fees paid by heavy trucks have gone back to the trucking industry many blame for busting up the roads in the first place, records show.

The money, close to $8 million since 2012 alone, is paid in grants to the Michigan Center for Truck Safety — a nonprofit charged with educating truckers and the general public about truck safety. The center is an arm of the Michigan Trucking Association — the industry's Lansing-based lobbying organization that seeks to influence trucking legislation and has fought off efforts to reduce Michigan's highest-in-the-nation gross weight limits for trucks.

The Center for Truck Safety, incorporated in 1997, shares Lansing office space and has also shared employees with the trucking association, according to federal tax filings. It uses some of the state grant money to pay the lobbying organization more than $51,000 a year in rent, up to $20,000 a year for services such as legal advice and personnel management, and $16,800 in annual interest payments on a loan, according to the filings and other state records. Nearly all of the truck safety center's officers and directors are also directors of the trucking association and the state briefly cut off funding to the center in 2013 and 2014 after finding some state money was being used to pay expenses related not to the safety center, but to the trucking association, records show.

Essentially, the state has subcontracted its truck safety education efforts to the trucking industry's lobbying organization — which is knowledgeable about the safe handling of trucks but doesn't share the view held by many that bigger and heavier trucks are by themselves a major road safety hazard. It's comparable to using tax dollars to pay the National Rifle Association to spearhead education efforts related to gun safety.

"I, personally, don't think that there's a problem," Michigan Trucking Association longtime executive director Walter Heinritzi said Friday.

But State Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he's concerned by the Free Press findings and wants to learn more about the effectiveness of the safety education efforts.

"I am concerned about how our truck safety money is being used," Irwin said. "It's really important the Legislature makes sure that the money is not bled away to lobby legislators against stricter truck safety rules."

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says the state needs about $2 billion a year more to improve Michigan roads. She has proposed a 45-cent gas tax increase, while House Democrats want a corporate income-tax hike and increased charges on heavy trucks. Legislative Republicans are still working on their plan, but it's expected to include removing the sales tax from fuel sales to make room for a higher fuel tax.

For the safety education effort, the brunt of the funding is a $15 share of each commercial truck registration fee — money that went to road repairs until lawmakers created the Michigan Truck Safety Fund in 1988. In addition to about $2.2 million taken annually from registration fees, the fund receives about $770,000 in business fees from firms operating interstate trucks. The fund supports not only the education grants, but some commercial truck enforcement carried out by the MSP.

On Aug. 6, a committee of the State Administrative Board approved the latest state grant to the Center for Truck Safety — a no-bid award of $1.1 million — for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. That grant is subject to full board approval at a meeting Tuesday.

When the Free Press called the office of the Michigan Center for Truck Safety on Friday, center project director Michelle Zemla referred questions to Heinritzi at the Michigan Trucking Association. Asked whether he speaks for the center, Zemla said: "He does when it comes to the history, and the grant."

The state continues to fund the Michigan Center for Truck Safety despite a 2013 finding by the Office of Highway Safety Planning that the center was reimbursed by the state for close to $300,000 in impermissible costs over a two-year period.

More:Heavy trucks, businesses should help fund Michigan road repairs, top Democrats say

More:Experts weigh in on how much Michigan's heavy trucks damage the state's roads

A monitoring report — less invasive than an audit — found that the person the center hired to answer a truck safety "hotline" funded by the grant was doubling as the telephone receptionist for the Michigan Trucking Association, said Michael Prince, director of the Office of Highway Safety Planning.

"We didn't find any intentional diversion of funds, but we could find some expenses that we said, 'This really is an expense of the MTA (Michigan Trucking Association),' " said Prince, whose highway safety office is an arm of the Michigan State Police and administers the grant through the Michigan Truck Safety Commission, whose members are appointed by the governor.

The report also found that while expenses for certain programs — such as advanced truck driver training on a "skid pad" that simulates hazardous road conditions — were being charged to the Michigan Center for Truck Safety through the grant, revenues from those programs, such as tuition paid by truck drivers, were going to the Michigan Trucking Association, Prince said. The revenues should have stayed with the center to offset its expenses, he said.

The report also found that equipment worth more than $13,000, paid for with state funds was sold to pay off a trucking association debt for equipment storage, according to state records.

The report's findings resulted in the commission withholding funds from the center, which shut down for several months in 2013 and 2014, according to commission minutes.

The Michigan Center for Truck Safety did not write a check to repay any of the $287,492 in expense reimbursements it should not have received, but future payments to the center were adjusted downward to make up the difference, Prince said.

As a result of the report's findings, the center agreed to an "action plan" to improve administration of the grant and the center and the Michigan Trucking Association signed an agreement dictating how certain shared costs would be handled, he said.

Heinritzi denied the trucking association did anything wrong.

"They (the Office of Highway Safety Planning) were fine with everything, and then all of a sudden they weren't fine with everything," he said.

Heinritzi denied the center's hotline operator doubled as the association's telephone receptionist, but said there had been some sharing of staff. "It was a way to save some money because some of these activities were not full-time," he said.

"It worked just fine, but I guess the Office of Highway Safety Planning didn't deem that to be appropriate."

Dan Blower, an associate research scientist emeritus at U-M's Transportation Research Institute, who until this month was chairman of the Michigan Truck Safety Commission, said the scrutiny of the center's expenses shows the commission is doing its job.

"We talk about all of that stuff and they go over it with a fine-tooth comb," Blower said.

"This is not like a sweetheart deal."

Both Blower and Prince said there have been no recent issues about inappropriate expenses related to the grant. Both said they think the truck safety center is operating at a high level today.

The commission has in the past called for proposals from other groups to seek the grant money to handle the education efforts, but it has been rare for any other group to bid on the work, Blower and Prince said.

The most recent request for proposals, issued in 2016, contained an unusual requirement. It said: "Current personnel involved with the Truck Driver Safety Education project will remain on staff." In other words, any proposal to compete with the Michigan Center for Truck Safety had to be built around using all of the center's existing staff.

No other proposals were received.

Blower agreed that including such a provision in the request for proposals gave an advantage to the nonprofit already doing the work.

He said the requirement to keep existing staff was included because he and other commissioners felt the center and its staff were doing a good job. Asked whether the requirement discouraged competitive bids, he acknowledged it could have that effect and said: "There are always trade-offs."

Prince said he's not sure the requirement to keep existing staff would be enforceable and he agreed it could have the effect of discouraging bidders other than the Michigan Center for Truck Safety. Before such a clause was inserted into a future RFP, he would recommend running it by the Attorney General's Office, he said.

Heinritzi said he objects to the wording related to keeping existing staff, and his association had nothing to do with it being inserted in the RFP. He also said that it is the commission that decides what safety programs will be implemented with the grant money, not the Michigan Trucking Association or the Michigan Center for Truck Safety.

The Michigan Truck Safety Commission boasts that it is "the only organization in the nation dedicated to commercial truck driver education and training supported not with tax dollars but solely by the industry it serves."

But the $15 from each heavy truck registration fee that funds the safety education work is money that truck owners would have had to pay in any case, and money that normally would go toward road repairs. The commission also doesn't mention that the nonprofit receiving the grants is an arm of the trucking industry.

Among the educational efforts funded by the grant is a website, a telephone hotline, a trucker's handbook, a variety of courses, and a truck simulator used in demonstrations around the state.

But what Heinritzi, Blower and Prince all agree was the main educational tool — the skid pad for training drivers — has been unavailable since 2015, when the private firm that hosted the pad south of Marshall decided it needed the property for other purposes, Blower said.

Since then, the commission has committed about $1 million to establishing a new skid pad on state-owned land in the Michigan government Secondary Complex near Lansing, but it's estimated about $5 million more will be needed to complete the project in the next two years.

The commission is likely to ask the Legislature for a separate appropriation to cover capital costs related to the skid pad, but "the trucking industry ... should come up with some money to support it," Blower said.

Heinritzi said it's "an open question" whether his association will make a contribution toward the cost of the skid pad and the lobbying organization certainly cannot afford to finance the skid pad by itself.

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter.