YPSILANTI, MI – Free school meals for Michigan’s K-12 students are among the programs state lawmakers are still negotiating ahead of the start of the next fiscal year Oct. 1.
But a day after her office announced a deal to pass a state budget and avert a government shutdown, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, when asked, did not expressly say she would reject a package that didn’t include the meals.
“We’re negotiating right now, and it is my intention to make sure that we continue to provide free lunch and breakfast,” she said Friday, Sept. 26, after addressing an event crowd for her Fight Like Hell PAC. “And no one’s going to be surprised that that’s a priority of mine. We’re going to negotiate hard to make sure that we get it done.”
Michigan legislators first missed a July 1 deadline to formalize a budget proposal, including school aid, for 2025-26, and a weeks-long slog of speculation and uncertainty followed for stakeholders across the state.
The Democratic-majority Senate and Republican-led House brokered a deal this week with Whitmer. By late Thursday, the details included $1.5 billion in additional funding for road work, mechanisms to eliminate alleged waste, fraud and abuse in state government, and no state taxes on tips or overtime.
The deal itself breaks the impasse that threatened a state government shutdown if Sept. 30 came and went without one.
State Democrats under Whitmer put Michigan’s universal meals program into effect two years ago, using both state and federal funds to give all kids free access to breakfast and lunch. Without the state program, schools are largely left with free and reduced lunch for just eligible students through a U.S. Department of Agriculture program.
Although much of the focus for schools and education advocates has been on school meals, lawmakers are also still negotiating per-student school aid funding.
The $1.5 billion in new road funding is expected to grow to $1.8 billion by 2029 via increased corporate tax revenue under this week’s budget deal.
However, it’s half the $3 billion in new road funding both Whitmer and the House GOP have previously had in common on their list of priorities.
On Friday, Whitmer addressed the difficulty of finding the funds to reach that threshold.
Instead, she said they are prioritizing a funding level they can successfully maintain.
“Our road need is much greater than what any one administration (has) been able to achieve,” said Whitmer, whose “fix the damn roads” slogan has frequently been incorporated in campaign and road announcements since she was first elected seven years ago. “But I think that the agreement that we announced last night takes a massive step forward in having secured long-term predictable funding so that we can do the road planning and continue the work that we’ve gotten started with the bond program.”
“These resources, when I do a bond like the Rebuilding Michigan bond, I can only use those dollars for state roads, and that’s why local roads have continued to deteriorate,” she said. The State Transportation Commission approved the rebuilding program in early 2020 to borrow funds covering road costs by selling $3.5 billion in bonds.
“This now will give us the ability to do more local roads, and so, people will see it in their neighborhoods and their communities even more than on the highways where you see the orange barrels all the time,” Whitmer said. “I think that this is a negotiation, right? We had the Senate and the House and me all negotiating, and we ended up here. And I think this is a great next step in really starting to fund and fix the damn roads.”