I’m writing this column after a marathon 19-hour session at the Capitol that started at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 26 and didn’t wrap up until about 5:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, so apologies in advance for typos or if this doesn’t sound as lucid as normal.

We were supposed to vote on final passage of the Fiscal Year 2025 budget on Wednesday, but lawmakers didn’t get to see the version that came out of conference committee until after midnight.

The budget is over 1,500 pages long and there were a lot of changes from the version that previously passed the House. Lawmakers were only given a few hours to review before voting, so it wasn’t possible to go over the budget with a fine-tooth comb.

Here are some of the things that jumped out at me, in no particular order:

The budget doesn’t put more money into local roads – funding is virtually flat. But the budget does include more than $400 million in pork barrel spending for projects such as a Detroit boxing gym. That’s $400 million that we could instead be using to “fix the damn roads.”

The budget cuts funding for school safety by more than 90%. It got cut from $345 million last year to just $26.5 million this year. I wanted the budget to include more money for security to protect students. Instead, the budget includes money to subsidize things like EV charging stations.

All budgeting involves making tradeoffs, but to me, cutting funds for school safety to subsidize EVs is prioritizing the wrong thing. People will adopt EVs when it makes sense for them to do so – and companies will build charging stations because it makes good business sense.

The K-12 budget is flat; it didn’t get the typical increase.

The budget takes a previously planned $670 million payment into the teacher retirement fund and diverts it elsewhere to prop up new spending for other programs.

I think we should put the money in the teacher retirement fund as originally planned, because although the health care portion is on track to be fully funded, the pension portion is still underfunded by $34 billion.

The budget ends Michigan Tuition Grants (which have been around since the late 1960s) for Michigan’s private colleges and universities, even though they only receive about 1% of the Higher Ed budget but produce 20% of our graduates.

The budget shifts half a billion dollars from the Michigan Department of Education, which is governed by an elected board, to a new department controlled solely by the governor called the Michigan Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential (Mi-LEAP). It also moves 77 full-time employees into this new organization.

The budget includes boilerplate language that allows the state budget director to spend leftover money without legislative approval. That’s a no-go.

The final version of the budget removed clawback language that would have pulled funding from a Whitmer political appointee who spent $4,500 of taxpayer money to buy a high-end coffeemaker after receiving a $20 million grant from the state to start a business accelerator.

My big concern about that situation is that the $20 million grant was awarded in a backroom deal before the organization that received it even existed, and there are still a lot of questions about why governor approve the deal in the first place. The attorney general is now investigating based on a referral from the FBI. We should claw the funds back at least until there’s proper oversight.

This might be the lack of sleep talking, but I don’t understand most of these budget decisions. The budget is full of trade-offs that prioritize the wrong things, which is why I voted no.

*****

Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened at the Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad. I’ve taken my grandchildren there, and had they been visiting that weekend, there’s a good chance we would have been at either the splash pad or the playground at Innovation Hills.

Brooklands Plaza is a place for families to enjoy, and we don’t want to let that be taken away from our community because of the shooting. I’m glad that the city is working to get the splash pad back up and running as quickly as possible, and I’m looking forward to returning there soon. I hope you do too.