MLive Michigan, 13 October 2015
Jonathan Oosting
LANSING, MI — Long-running talks over a long-term plan to fix Michigan’s crumbling roads have hit another speed bump in Lansing, where Gov. Rick Snyder and legislative leaders have been unable to reach agreement on a funding plan.
Negotiations reached “an impasse” on Tuesday, Snyder and House Speaker Kevin Cotter told reporters after emerging from a closed-door “quadrant” meeting that featured leaders from both sides of the aisle.
“We had made a lot of progress at prior meetings. We’re at an impasse now,” Snyder said.
Snyder explained that he and legislative leaders had found “a lot of common ground” on things like gas taxes, registration fees, budget savings and truck fees, but he told reporters “there were other issues that made it difficult to come to a consensus, in terms of something to move forward with.”
Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, offered a similar assessment, telling reporters that negotiations over a potential tax relief component have proved a sticking point. Senate Republicans previously pushed to pair an income tax rollback with any gas tax increase, but Cotter did not offer any specifics as to the current dispute.
“It’s fair to say people have different perspectives on what tax relief might look like,” Snyder confirmed.
House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, said little as he left Tuesday’s meeting, but he acknowledged that “we’re in the middle of some very thorny issues that are very difficult.”
The apparent stalemate is a dramatic turn for the worse in the road funding talks, which leaders have recently described in generic but productive terms. Cotter said as recently as last week that he believed a final package could reach the House floor in October, but his spokesman confirmed Tuesday that “we’re at an impasse right now.”
“We’ve had productive discussions in the past, and we’re hopeful that we’re going to have productive discussions in the future,” said Gideon D’Assandro.
When additional discussions may occur remains unknown. Snyder said he and legislative leaders may or may not meet again on Wednesday, as originally planned.
Beyond that, “there are no other scheduled meetings, and to be open with you, unless I see progress, I’m not going to schedule one until there’s a point of getting together,” Snyder said.
The governor and legislative leaders have been working to complete a roads deal by the end of the year. Last year’s lame-duck negotiations produced Proposal 1, a sales tax and gas tax measure that voters rejected in May. All sides have said they learned from that debacle.
Snyder, who first proposed additional road funding four years ago, has long pushed for a combination of fuel tax increases and registration fees — “user fees,” he calls them — to generate about $1.2 million a year for roads, a minimum target that most parties agree is needed to keep the problem from getting worse.
But the House and Senate have approached that target from decidedly different angles.
A $1.1 billion House plan approved in early June relied mostly on existing revenue and would have eliminated the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor. A $1.5 billion Senate plan approved later that same month relied primarily on fuel tax increases, which would have been linked to an income tax rollback in any year that general fund revenue increased.
Recent talks have revolved around a hybrid approach that would include some new revenue and the reallocation of some existing budget resources.
“One of the challenges when you do this is, this is really about compromise,” Snyder said Tuesday. “And so I try to remind people that when you do compromise, hopefully there’s a lot of things you like but obviously when you have the differences in political perspectives, you’re going to have some parts of the package you don’t like very much.”