Barnett: House Bill Education Cuts 'Devastating and Permanent'

Not surprisingly, state Rep. Vicki Barnett (D-Farmington Hills) voted Thursday against bills that would – as she put it – "raid the K-12 budget to almost the tune of $1 billion in order to put the money into community colleges and higher ed."

The state House and Senate budget bills will likely end up in a conference committee, where some of the details may be changed. The House education bill would cost Farmington Schools $4 million, Barnett said, on top of last year's cuts and increasing pension and health care costs.

While pointing out the lack of "shared sacrifice" in the House education and omnibus tax bills — a reference to Gov. Rick Snyder's call for "shared sacrifice" in working to improve Michigan's economy — the outspoken former Farmington Hills mayor saved her sharpest criticism for the lack of transparency in the budget process.

Barnett said she received the 703-page omnibus budget bill Thursday morning, the same day she was expected to vote on it.

"I'm a good reader. But that's not right," she said.

In addition, she noticed a shift from line-item accountability to "lump sum" budgets for each department.

"The problem is, we have unelected bureaucrats spending dollars without any accountability to taxpayers," Barnett said. "Farmington and Farmington Hills take great pains to do line-item budgets. That's what good government accounting practices dictate."

Barnett called Thursday's school aid vote "historic." She said the Legislature has never, since Proposal A shifted school funding from local to state revenues in 1994, cut education spending with a surplus in school aid; but Barnett said that before the move to combine post-secondary and K-12 funding, championed by Snyder, there was enough money in the school aid fund to restore a $170-per-pupil cut already in place, as well as to fully fund categoricals (funds directed to specific educational needs). 

She said lawmakers have heard from school superintendents that the real consequences of the bill will be larger class sizes and even extending the life cycle of textbooks to as much as 10 years.

"Just imagine trying to create a world-class science and engineering student when their textbook says Pluto is still a planet," she said. "We're hurting our kids. They're not getting what we promised them."

Even with the shift, funding to higher education would be cut by 22 percent under the House plan. And that increase could go higher with a "stinging" amendment tacked on by House Republicans, Barnett said.

Rep. David Agema (R-Grandville) proposed taking another 5 percent from every post-secondary institution that provides benefits to unmarried partners. Barnett pointed out that many Fortune 500 companies, including Kellogg and Dow Chemical, offer partner benefits.

"They wouldn't do it if it didn't have a value to the bottom line," she said. "It allows them to attract high-quality talent without restrictions and to keep their work force healthy. If your live-in partner is unhealthy, you're going to miss work, or you might even have to look for another job."

Barnett said the amendment hurts Michigan's world-class institutions – as does an amendment that increases reporting requirements on stem cell research.

While she emphasized that she could not speak for Republicans, Barnett said the comments she heard on the floor indicated that their plan with cuts to education and in the omnibus tax bill, which also passed Thursday, "were relative to getting Michigan going in a new direction."

"They firmly believe that if you cut business taxes, it will create jobs, despite empirical evidence to the contrary," Barnett said. She said corporate tax cuts during the administration of President George W. Bush did not lead to job creation; instead, "we were embroiled in a global recession ... that started in the United States.

"The most prosperous states in the union don't have the lowest tax rate," she said. "I'm not advocating for higher corporate tax rates. We needed to get rid of the Michigan Business Tax and the surcharge."

Barnett previously said she favors a value-added tax, which would apply a flat tax rate to all businesses.

Among the cuts she said would be the most devastating are a 50 percent reduction to library funding, the virtual elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor, steep reductions to the Meals on Wheels nutrition program for homebound seniors and a two-thirds cut in a school clothing allowance for indigent children.

With the last item, Barnett shared a comment from Rep. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), who said, "You ask the poor to get a job and lift themselves up by their bootstraps. And then you take away their boots."

A handful of Republicans voted against both the school aid and the omnibus tax bills, which otherwise were approved largely along party lines. Barnett said Democrats offered more than 100 amendments yesterday, but only one, to restore Meals on Wheels funding, was approved. That amendment was stripped from the final bill.