By Craig Manning | July 24, 2024
Like being stabbed through the heart with an electric drill: That’s the blunt analogy State Representative John Roth (R-Interlochen) uses to describe how he believes northern Michigan fared in the state’s 2025 budget. In a press release put out late last month, Roth decried the budget as “partisan” and argued it sent a gold rush of special project dollars downstate while leaving “hardly any dedicated funding for northern Michigan.” In her own press release, State Rep Betsy Coffia (D-Traverse City) praised the budget as “a big win for our communities,” thanks to funding wins for rural school districts, housing, healthcare, and more. So what did northern Michigan score in the state’s budget, and how do those wins compare to other parts of the state – or to previous years? In June, Roth’s office highlighted “enhancement grants” – one-time budget allocations to help fund special projects – as one area where northern Michigan came up short. Of the 200 enhancement grants included in the budget, Roth noted that “only 12 of the recipients could be considered up north.” Meanwhile, he pointed to “millions of funding for special projects downstate,” including “$17 million for zoos in Lansing and metro Detroit, $2 million for a boxing gym, $5 million for a movie theater, and more than $18 million for baseball stadiums” as evidence that other areas of the state were getting the lion’s share of the funding. “If northern Michigan got screwed last year, they took an automatic drill and drove that thing right through our hearts with this failure of a budget,” Roth proclaimed. “We don’t want special treatment, but we do want northern Michigan to receive the same dedicated funding that places like Detroit and Grand Rapids get.”
In total, the $82.5 billion budget includes $336 million in enhancement grants and $74.5 million in critical infrastructure allocations. Some of that is coming north, including a $1 million earmark for Traverse City’s FishPass project, $2 million to redevelop the former Pugsley Correctional Facility into an agritourism hub, and $5 million to a coalition of local school districts to fund a 200-unit affordable housing development for teachers.
In Roth’s view, though, those earmarks are small potatoes compared to the money going to urban hubs downstate.
“I can’t say we didn’t get anything, but if you look at the fact that Lansing got $60 million of funding for projects, and that’s where both of the appropriation chairs of the House and Senate live, I really do think this budget is a slap in the face for northern Michigan,” Roth tells The Ticker.
Roth notes that the teacher housing ask was originally $12.5 million and only resulted in a $5 million allocation. He also points to critical infrastructure, a section of the budget he says is dominated by Detroit counties.
“I requested several million dollars of sewer help,” Roth says. “We have lift stations in Elk Rapids and Kalkaska and that could have used some dollars. Frankfort needs an expansion. The Ellsworth area doesn't have any [sewer infrastructure]. These are projects that would help us keep our water clean up here, but we did not see that funding come north. And then, just in terms of road funding of any kind, northern Michigan is really light in this budget.”
Coffia thinks judging the budget solely by special project earmarks – or even judging without the context of the past few years – paints a misleadingly bleak picture.
This budget is the first in several years not bolstered by American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars, which gave legislators more leeway to fund special projects. The 2024 budget dealt out $764 million in enhancement grants and another $181.6 million for critical infrastructure projects, including headline-grabbing northern Michigan earmarks .
“We were in the situation last year where, if we did not spend down those ARPA monies, they would go back to D.C.,” Coffia says. “They needed to be deployed to the communities and spent by 2026. So, with the clock ticking, that was always an expected thing: We would see a stronger influx of one-time dollars from that federal COVID money last year, and then this year’s budget would be more of a ‘normal year’ budget, which means less one-time dollars to bring to the districts.”
Despite the smaller pile of cash, Coffia sees big wins for northern Michigan in the budget, ranging from funding for federally-qualified health centers – including Traverse Health Clinic and Northwest Michigan Health Services – to a 20 percent bump in the Medicaid reimbursem*nt rate for behavioral health.
Coffia points to the teacher housing earmark as a particularly notable victory, calling the $5 million earmark “a big bite” of the $20 million the project is expected to cost. But she also stresses that one-time localized projects don’t tell the whole story, and that statewide recurrent line items can have a huge local impact, too.
Last year, Coffia pushed for equitable school transportation funding for rural districts – something superintendents at Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) and other northern Michigan districts had spent years pleading for. That proposal made it into the 2024 budget: a $125 million allocation to reimburse rural districts for disproportionately high transportation costs. Coffia’s top priority this year was keeping that funding in the budget.
“That’s my baby, and I’m going to guard it with my life,” Coffia says of the allocation. “I want it to be permanent, and I think it has a good chance of being so.”
While Coffia acknowledges that special project funding may be “sexier” than dollars for things like housing, education, and healthcare, her takeaway from the 2025 budget is that it will ultimately benefit northern Michigan where it counts most.
“There are so many amazing projects – anything from a music program to a new fire truck – and I took many, many meetings and heard about a lot of really worthy one-time and ongoing budget priorities,” she concludes. “But I always tell people that when I think about advocating for funding, I think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and the baseline there is that people need food, shelter, medical care, things like that. When your community has those things, the whole community thrives.”
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