Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Sarah Anthony, D-Lansing, and House Appropriations Commitee Chair Ann Bollin, R-Brighton, in February. (Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance)

The ticking clock on the fiscal year is becoming frantic, and in a roundtable with reporters on Wednesday morning, the lead appropriator in the Michigan Senate said it would take courage and hard work to reach a deal with House Republicans on budget within the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, House Republicans said this week that they are no closer to an agreement with their Senate colleagues, and that it was time for the upper chamber to stop playing “chicken” with the already stalled budget negotiations.

State Sen. Sarah Anthony, D-Lansing, also said that she and her colleagues were doing their best to work with their colleagues in the House to avoid a protracted government shutdown, which is looking more likely as the days get closer to Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

The situation has not gotten any better over the past few weeks when the leaders of the House and Senate met to start negotiating. Both the House and Senate said those conversations went nowhere.

Despite the Senate’s own inaction on a roads funding plan, which remains the sticking point in Michigan budget negotiations, Anthony on Wednesday continued to lay the blame at the doorstep of the House.

“Since the start of this legislative term, Speaker Matt Hall has failed to step up and act as a serious partner,” Anthony said. “Instead of coming to the table to negotiate a budget in good faith, he and his Republican colleagues have chosen to manufacture a crisis in attempts to push through an extreme agenda, putting politics and petty vendettas over the people we’re entrusted to serve. Budgets are about values, and the values reflected in the House Republican proposal are dangerous and destructive. I will always fight for a fair compromise, but I will never sign off on a plan that does so at the expense of hardworking Michiganders.”

Anthony was joined Wednesday by three of her Democratic colleagues: Sen. John Cherry of Flint, Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak and Sen. Sylvia Santana of Detroit.

McMorrow said that when the budget negotiations began, chaos and a prolonged stalemate wasn’t initially in the cards.

She also touched on the House Republican assertion that it was cutting $750 million by eliminating so-called “phantom employees,” or jobs that have gone unfilled even though the previous budgets accounted for them. McMorrow said that the assertion that these positions were evidence of fraud shows a “stunning ignorance of basic budgeting, or it’s a deliberate attempt to mislead the public,”

“Any legislator worth their salt understands a full-time equivalent does not mean a full–time employee. One FTE does not equal one full time employee at a standard set salary,” McMorrow said. “Instead, a full time equivalent is a way to measure how much work the department can get done, including full time, part time and contract workers, whose pay ranges.”

McMorrow added that when the House talks of underfunded staffing while also expecting departments to maintain services, they’re not being fiscally responsible.

“You’re forcing agencies to cut corners and compromise the services that our citizens count on,” McMorrow said. “And now they’ve got Donald Trump baseless promoting this lie to throw red meat to the base. To Hall and House Republicans, these cuts may feel like some moral victory, but make no mistake, Michiganders feel the cuts to services, all in service of this lie.”

House Republicans to Senate Democrats: Stop playing chicken

Shutdown fears loom as the budget crisis continues. State Rep. Cam Cavitt, R-Cheboygan, accused the Senate Democrats of failing to negotiate now that the House has presented its budget in full, despite their apparent opposition to the priorities the House advanced.

“Senate Democrats are playing some sort of twisted game of chicken where they wait to negotiate until the very last minute,” Cavitt said in a statement issued earlier this week. “It’s sick. This isn’t a game. If we don’t get a bipartisan budget done by Oct. 1, critical services will shut down. Senate Democrats are going to close our schools just like they did during the COVID lockdowns.”

Cavitt also touched on the Senate’s lack of a roads plan, and how that is holding things up.

“House Republicans have a commonsense plan that doesn’t raise taxes. All we’re asking is that the Senate come to the table with their own commonsense plan that doesn’t raise taxes,” Cavitt said. “Senate Democrats are going to shut our state down because they care more about raising taxes than they do our schoolchildren and first responders.”

Anthony was asked Wednesday if she felt a shutdown would last longer than it did the last time the state was at an impasse over funding in 2007 and 2009 – shutdowns that lasted mere hours because the Democratic House, Republican Senate and then Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm agreed to a short term temporary budget meant to cover spending over a few months until a new deal was reached.

The senator from Lansing said she was a legislative staffer when those shutdowns occurred. She said she remembered late nights and tough decision making. Anthony hoped to avoid that this time, or worse, a longer, month-long shutdown.

“There’s real lives behind these political antics, and that’s why … the fact that House Republicans have waited so long to engage, and wasted precious time for us to avoid a government shutdown, is completely unacceptable,” Anthony said. “I’m not looking forward to a shutdown. We are trying to make sure that we’re preventing that every step of the way, even today, we’re ready.”

That said, Hall and state Rep. Ann Bollin , R-Brighton, have been waiting at the negotiating table for weeks now. In fact, on social media, he posted a picture of himself and Bollin waiting to negotiate on Aug. 28, two days after the House finally passed its budget.

“We’ve been sitting in the room ready to go all day,” Hall wrote on X. “This is not the way to get this done. I think they’re afraid because we know the budget so much better than they do.”

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