I started the year looking forward to hearing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s State of the State address, as well as her proposals for the next state budget.

It’s frustrating to me that the State of the State address was framed around ‘working together,’ only for the Governor to turn around and point fingers at Republicans for the politically motivated budget cuts she made last year. Rather than admitting her roads plan was out of touch with reality, and offering an olive branch to start over, she had the audacity to blame Legislators for standing up for their communities.

Let me remind you, it was Gov. Whitmer who used her veto pen to unilaterally nix millions of dollars the Republican-led Legislature set aside specifically for the roads last year. The phrase ‘my way or the highway’ has never been more pertinent. Since the Legislature won’t give in to a massive tax hike, our Governor has decided to borrow against your paycheck to put more money into, essentially, the highways.

Instead of ‘working together,’ like she alleged, she’s working without the Legislature to spend more of your hard-earned money for a new road bond that will cost $3.5 billion, which is projected to come to total cost of about $5.1 billion over the life of the repayment period. That money will only go toward state-owned roads like interstates and highways, not the county and local roads we take on our way to the highways. Once again, the Governor’s proposal leaves rural Michigan out in the cold.  This is an ill-conceived idea that will saddle future generations with the same crippling bond debt that we have spent several years working to eliminate (and successfully, I might add).

There are several proposals both introduced and publicly discussed that would address infrastructure funding. One in particular that I would like to see move forward is removing the 6% sales tax on gasoline at the pump, and replacing it with an equivalent fuel tax that is dedicated to the roads. I have heard countless times from constituents that one of their top priorities is knowing that the money they pay at the pump actually goes to the roads. This, to me, is a simple and effective start to revamping our road funding scheme.

More abstractly, we need to ensure that more money is making it to our county and local road commissions. The roads that we use from our driveways to the highways are JUST as important as interstates and state roads, if not more. Whether this be through modifying Michigan’s current funding formula, creating a new fund specifically for counties and municipalities, or otherwise, this needs to be at or near the top of any long-term road funding plan.

There is, of course, a ton to be done. To echo the Governor’s statement, we need to be working together. As we move forward, I truly hope we can find a way to have open communication between the Legislature and Governor – we can’t run the state of Michigan efficiently without a certain level of cohesiveness, regardless of party affiliation. And I, for one, am not interested into returning to the results of the poor decisions of the Lost Decade.