MACKINAC ISLAND, MI — Sometimes, leadership means making decisions that are unpopular, but critically necessary.
Last week, two of Michigan’s top leaders — one a Republican, one a Democrat – did just that before the state’s annual gathering of top business and political leaders at the annual Mackinac Policy Conference, a forum where nearly every significant leader in the state goes at the end of May to network, talk to the press and make deals.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the Democrat, gave a keynote speech on the conference’s last day, again pushing her sensible plan to fix the state’s wretched and collapsing roads and bridges.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican from the Jackson area, announced a plan to try and do away with something that nearly every expert agrees has helped ruin Michigan government – the state’s crippling, strictest-in-the-nation term limits.
Together, those two reforms could go a long way to restoring Michigan’s competitiveness and giving it an effective government.
That is, if they had strong bipartisan support.
Sadly, however, they don’t.
Here’s where things stand. First, the roads: On the conference’s last full day, the governor asked a packed auditorium full of business leaders to help her do something that vital to the state’s future:
Raise the price of gasoline by 45 cents a gallon, and use all the money that generates – slightly over $2 billion a year — to fix Michigan’s horribly wretched roads and bridges.
Polls show that an overwhelming majority of voters want the roads fixed – but balk at the idea of paying for it.
But leadership means not always watching the polls.
There’s no doubt of the need of this, or the urgency: Michigan, the state that put the world on wheels a century ago, now has the worst roads in the nation. That’s largely because for years it has spent less per capita on roads than any other state.
The state’s bridges may be in even worse shape, and are “what keeps me up at night,” the newly elected governor said, adding that “more than 400 of them are in serious to critical condition and 49 are completely closed,” because they are so unsafe.
There is virtually no dispute among highway experts as to the condition of Michigan’s roads, or about the cost to fix them properly.
Whitmer, a 47-year-old former Democratic leader in the state senate, was elected in a near-landslide last year, largely because her major issue was a promise to “fix the damn roads.”
Republicans kept control of the Michigan legislature, however, thanks to gerrymandering, even though Democratic candidates got more overall votes. And GOP leaders are flatly refusing to consider anything like the tax-at-the-pump increase the governor is suggesting.
“I don’t want to have a conversation about new revenue,” said Lee Chatfield, the 30-year-old Speaker of the House, a man who comes from a rural district at the tip of the lower Peninsula.
When asked if there was any way his colleagues in the upper house would support a 45-cent gas tax, Shirkey, his counterpart in the upper house,simply said “Nope.”
Unless that changes, that means more stalemate and continued decline, a pattern that has gone on for years. Everyone agrees fixing the roads is critical. That’s why the governor got elected.
But few are willing to take the difficult decisions needed to pay to fix them. That’s been due in part to many Republican lawmakers having signed Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.”
Some have nonsensically argued that money to fix the roads can be found by cutting social programs, or that they can be fixed with the tax on marijuana sales, which, as the governor noted, are expected to generate no more than $42 million a year.
If people were to smoke the amount of marijuana needed to generate adequate road repair taxes, she noted, citizens would all be so high that “nobody is going to care about the damn roads.”
Turning serious, she pleaded with the assembled business leaders to “seek out a legislator. No matter what side of the aisle they are on, have the conversation. Tell them what failing infrastructure means to you and your business… be a part of getting this done.”
Nobody likes taxes, but it is, in fact, hard to imagine a more sensible approach than raising the gas tax by an adequate amount.
Gasoline prices are constantly fluctuating; they were over $4 a gallon in 2008; less than $2 for a while a couple years ago.
Raising the tax at the pump also has the rough justice of a user fee; those who don’t drive or don’t have cars will be unaffected. Those who drive many miles would pay more.
Nor can Michigan afford a gradual approach.. Roads are, in a sense, like teeth: Fix a small cavity early, and it is neither very painful nor expensive. Neglect it, and you may be looking at a painful abscess a root canal, and thousands of dollars.
The same goes for the roads. Put off fixing them now, and pay far more later. The Republican leaders in the legislature ought to know that – and certainly business leaders must.
Shirkey, on the other hand, demonstrated courage when he announced the same day at Mackinac that he would lead a drive for a state constitutional amendment in 2021 to end term limits. Everyone in Lansing knows that term limits have greatly increased the power of special interest groups and lobbyists, and prevent lawmakers from being there long enough to really learn their jobs and build the relationships needed to govern effectively.
Gretchen Whitmer and Mike Shirkey are both spearheading movements that would go a long way to actually making Michigan great again. Joining forces on both would be a great way to start.
That is, if that ever happens.
