By David Eggert
Associated Press
LANSING, Mich. — Michigan would cut spending at all but one of its 30 prisons under a legislative compromise reached Wednesday without the support of Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration, whom Republican leaders have excluded from budget decisions because of his opposition to closing the pension system to new school employees.
A House-Senate conference committee voted 5-1 for a nearly $2 billion corrections budget, which includes a $10 million operations cut across 29 state facilities to reflect a declining inmate population. That is far less than the $41.6 million reduction proposed by the Senate, which the corrections director had warned would lead to hundreds of officer layoffs and unsafe staffing levels because prisoner numbers have not fallen enough to justify closing a prison.
Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz said after the vote that department officials had just seen the plan and would review it.
“That’s something we still need to look at,” he said. “There are a lot of issues. We already have close to 600 officer vacancies around the state, so there’s a lot of other programs that we want to make sure we can maintain.”
The Republican-led Legislature has been advancing individual budgets out of conference panels after setting “target” spending without Snyder. The impasse over teacher pensions could prolong the full Legislature’s passage of the budget beyond June for the first time in years. The fiscal year starts in October.
The committee agreed to Snyder’s request for nearly $4.4 million to train 177 new officers. It blocked his proposal to spend $1.5 million to expand an alternative sentencing program for probation violators to 13 counties in western Michigan.
Republicans have set aside $475 million to cover first-year transition costs of making new school workers eligible for a 401(k)-only retirement plan instead of a current hybrid pension-401(k) benefit. It is money that Snyder has proposed to either add to the state’s savings account or to spend on other priorities in the next budget.
Snyder and GOP legislative leaders were meeting privately Wednesday for the first time in two weeks to discuss their stalemate on the pension switch.