Detroit Free Press, 3 November 2015
Paul Egan
The Michigan Senate is to try again, starting today, at coming up with a $1.2-billion-a-year road funding plan.
LANSING — The design of highway construction projects would be mostly taken away from the Michigan Department of Transportation and delegated to road builders under the latest road funding proposal being considered by the Michigan Senate, the Republican majority floor leader said Monday.
The change would allow the state to more fully enforce warranties on projects when roads don’t hold up as long as promised, said Sen. Mike Kowall, R-White Lake Township. Right now, MDOT is responsible for the design of road projects and the state can only collect on warranties if it can show the problem is related to the materials or work provided by the contractor.
Kowall said his proposal has strong support within his caucus and would end a situation in which “everybody is pointing the finger at everybody else” when a road job goes bad. It also should result in longer-lasting roads, which will save the state money, Kowall said.
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“It’s kind of a fail-safe mechanism,” he told the Free Press.
The Senate is expected to try again, starting today, at passing a $1.2-billion road funding deal after senators last week couldn’t get behind a plan passed by Republicans in the state House on Oct. 21. Though it’s not clear whether any road funding votes will occur today, GOP senators are expected to discuss at caucus the latest proposed revisions to the House plan and see if there is enough support to go forward.
Lance Binoniemi, vice president of government affairs for the Michigan Infrastructure & Transportation Association, representing road builders, said his group supports greater use of “design-build” road projects, as well as public-private partnerships, but he doesn’t feel putting the road builder in charge of project design would be appropriate or save money in every case.
He said he supports Kowall’s proposal in principle, but “if it was a blanket mandate, we would have a concern with that.”
Jeff Cranson, a spokesman for MDOT, said the agency already contracts out much of the design work — particularly on large projects — but it is often more cost-efficient to do design work for smaller projects in-house. MDOT also has used the “design-build” approach, in which a single contractor does both the design and the construction work, but due to federal restrictions and other reasons, that’s not appropriate in all cases, he said.
Republicans are mostly trying to go it alone with their road funding proposal, after bipartisan talks involving the Republican and Democratic leaders from both chambers broke down Oct. 13.
“We worked hard on bipartisan plans for some time and I think it is possible that there would be a Republican-only plan,” Gov. Rick Snyder told reporters in Lansing on Monday. But he said he doesn’t view the road funding talks in partisan terms, and what he wants is for the Legislature to “get a good plan to my desk that can fix Michigan roads and is fiscally responsible.”
Democrats say the plan passed by the House is anything but fiscally responsible, describing an income tax rollback built into the plan as a fiscal time bomb that will drain the general fund of money needed for priorities such as education and public safety.
Senate Republicans also had concerns. Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, said some caucus members felt the proposed 40% hike in vehicle registration fees, which would raise $400 million, along with $200 million from fuel tax increases and $600 million from the general fund, was too high. Republican senators, who earlier passed a sharp gas tax increase that never cleared the House, could opt to flip those numbers, with $400 million coming from higher fuel taxes and $200 million from registration fees.
Snyder said Monday that lawmakers were discussing “what would be an appropriate mix of essentially gas tax and registration fees.”
The registration fee hike proposed by the House would increase a typical $100-a-year vehicle registration fee to $140. Some have dubbed the proposal the “birthday tax,” because the bill from the Secretary of State’s Office is typically due the same month as the vehicle owner’s birthday.
Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, issued a statement Monday that said because the majority is “focused on a Republican-only proposal (it) makes it difficult for our members to take seriously (their) commitment to a bipartisan, long-term solution.”
“We’ve said all along we want a real fix for roads,” Ananich said. “The latest Republican plans aren’t even close.”
An Ananich spokeswoman had no comment on Kowall’s proposal to remove road design work from MDOT.
Also Monday, House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills, and Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Brandon Dillon announced a statewide campaign to fight the proposed hike in vehicle registration fees, including the creation of a new website, gopbirthdaytax.com.
“The Republicans’ new birthday tax is just the latest in a series of GOP tax shifts that puts the burden squarely on everyday families, but lets corporations off the hook,” Greimel said in a news release. “It’s clear that Lansing Republicans just cater to their wealthy friends, not the average working people who drive on crumbling roads to get to work every day.”