In these times of serious economic upheaval, every government program and interest group in Lansing that relies in some way on state taxpayer funding can produce claims of doom, despair, agony and injustice. The only certainties in the state budget are past cuts, new cuts this year, and the threat of more cuts in future years.

Yet, given the clear common ground priorities for Michigan’s future we regularly hear citizens express in the Center for Michigan's statewide Community Conversations, we can’t help but question the wisdom of some of the budget strategies outlined by the governor last week. We’ll quickly detail four…

1. CUTS TO UNIVERSITIES: Economic development and education are the clear top priorities outlined by state residents. And yet, universities, which are seedbeds for both, will lose $100 million in funding under the governor’s budget. Several years ago, the governor boldly set a goal to double the number of Michigan college grads. The state has steadily dis-invested in higher education ever since. Click for a quick and scary graphic illustrating how Michigan is losing the higher education arms race to other states..

2. THE END TO PUBLIC ARTS FUNDING: It is a Michigan tradition to publicly invest in arts and cultural venues, institutions, and programs. Thanks to the economic boom times at the turn of century, $25 million state tax dollars went to arts and culture grants in local communities in 2002. Last year, as a result of repeated budget cuts, that number had dwindled to $7.9 million. Still, that money helped support nearly 300 local arts and culture groups and thousands of jobs. Next year? Zero. The governor’s budget proposes to end arts and culture grants. With that one cut, Michigan’s cities will get a heckuva lot less cool, to borrow one of the governor’s favorite phrases. While decimating employment and creativity in the arts and making communities less attractive to creative and prosperous professionals, the $7 million in savings does next to nothing to close the state’s $1.4 billion budget deficit. At last year’s levels, arts funding accounted for about 70 cents out of every $1,000 in the state’s discretionary general fund budget. Last year, Michigan taxpayers spent more on prisons in 36 hours than they spent on arts and culture in the entire year. (Bias disclosure: the author is on the board of ArtServe Michigan. But any interest group of any kind that so heavily relies on such a tiny slice of state funding can make a similar argument. Big cuts to little programs don’t solve the budget crisis but can decimate strategic programs.)

3. ENVIRONMENTAL DIS-INVESTMENT: In almost every Community Conversation, participants express pride in the state’s great natural resources and water-and-woods-based recreational bounty. Yet the Michigan departments of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources are on the chopping block again this year, as they have been repeatedly for the past decade. Diverse, bipartisan calls to raise hunting and fishing license fees for investment in fisheries and wildlife programs have been ignored. Now, wetlands protection will be handed off to the federal government – a strategy against which environmental groups have built a strong case.

4. BLIND FUNDING WITH NO ACCOUNTABILITY: Year after year, Lansing blindly hands out tens of billions of dollars in grants to more than 1,000 school districts, local governments, community colleges and universities. The money is doled out on old formulas based largely on population and student head counts. The governor's budget strategy this year is no different. It includes billions in blind funding to locals with no clear sense of what’s working in schools and city halls and what’s not, no best practices identified and funded, and no disinvestment in failing operations. The governor has heard expert advice on this topic for years. Two years ago, her bipartisan panel of state budget experts, including former state budget directors, two former governors and others, urged a better approach: "Government must find better, less expensive ways to deliver public services… Government can do better. Reforms that should be considered include… requiring specific measurements of performance, value, and benchmarking from all public agencies, including K-12 and higher education." Two years later, no such benchmarks or value-based funding strategy exists in the governor’s budget.