By state Rep. Roger Hauck of Union Township

Pay the highest gas tax in the nation or you’ll personally pay with cuts to services you rely on every day.

That was the painful and punitive message recently delivered to Michigan residents by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, issuing 147 line-item vetoes to a Legislature-approved budget plan and slashing roughly $1 billion in funding.

She told reporters following these decisions that the vetoes are not a death knell for any individual funding measure, as long as state legislators get back to the table to negotiate road funding. That means she’s holding critical funding for people and their families hostage – and her ransom demand is an extra $6 to $10 every single time Michigan drivers fill up their gas tanks.

I encourage people across Isabella and Midland counties to look at all of the things the governor cut from our original budget plan. It is a massive list hurting schools, roads, health and safety across the state, especially in rural areas and communities in central Michigan.

Over $37 million in funding for the Going Pro program will be eliminated through the governor’s actions. The initiative helps train more workers for good-paying, high demand skilled trade careers and allows them to support themselves and their families while continuing Michigan’s economic comeback.

Amazingly, the governor was in Detroit touting this program in early July and was quoted as saying Michigan needs to get serious about closing the skills gap. But actions speak louder than words, and this about-face will take away job opportunities and make Michigan’s workforce less versatile in the future.

A college education is also a vitally important option and working to give our state universities the best resources possible to provide that education is critical. The MiDocs consortium provides primary care doctors with loan repayment if they work in underserved areas in a number of specialties, including family medicine, general OBYN, general surgery, pediatrics and others. The initiative gets doctors to areas where people need care.

Central Michigan University was looking to use this tool for its College of Medicine, as it involved matching federal funds with state commitment. But the governor chose to leave money on the table when she left this plan out of her finalized budget. This decision puts Michigan at a disadvantage, as doctors will now be encouraged to go to other states that better position them for success.

A rural access pool was also eliminated, cutting off additional Medicaid payments to rural hospitals that serve a higher rate of patients going through pregnancy and childbirth. Gone too is supplemental funding for smaller, isolated school districts and secondary road police patrols to help keep our local streets safe.

The governor has said she is removing pork projects, but these are real funding measures that make our area a better place to live, work and raise a family. The cuts are a preview of how revenue from her 45-cent gas tax would be distributed – larger, metro areas first and rural areas last or not at all.

State spending plans are about more than just one singular issue. But the governor’s spiteful decisions threaten to make rural Michigan crumble like the metro-Detroit highways she still wants your money to fix.

Rep. Roger Hauck, of Union Township, is in his second term in the Michigan House serving residents in the 99th District, which includes Isabella County and portions of Midland County.