Never letting the opportunity for special favors go to waste seems to be the operating philosophy of the Legislature. Lawmakers stuck nearly $1.3 billion in pork spending to the $82 billion budget on June 28 in the dark hours before the appropriations plan came up for a vote.

The 11th-hour splurges, 65% of which was not included in the Executive Budget or in the House- or Senate-passed budget bills, came on top of the earmarks funded with federal COVID-19 money or the more than $125 million in pet projects that lawmakers tucked into the K-12 education budget.

Earmarks are not inherently bad. Lawmakers and governors from both parties have approved them historically. Public funds can be allocated to address specific needs.

But if they are worthwhile and justifiable, they should be debated and voted on in the daylight. The Legislature must be transparent in these additions to the general fund budget and respect the legislative rules that prohibit last-minute additions.

To not do so is self-serving and lacks the respect and clarity the doling out of taxpayer dollars deserves.

Lawmakers had little time to review the target spending before having to vote on it. The final budget was released in mid-afternoon and voted on within seven hours.

Much of the targeted spending included approval of funding that Republicans attached to last year’s $76 billion budget.

The bipartisan splurge erodes the public’s faith in the budget process and depletes the state’s rainy-day fund should the economy falter.

One interest lawmakers neglected in their largesse was taxpayers. Lawmakers did not extend the meager cut in the tax rate triggered this year by the surplus. So, despite having a $9 billion surplus this year, taxes will go up next year.

Fortunately, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy is leading a group of business associations, citizens and lawmakers into court to challenge Attorney General Dana Nessel’s opinion that lawmakers never intended for the reduction to last more than one year.

Suing to preserve the tax cut would save Michiganians about $700 million a year.

Pet projects in the budget went toward spending that is not obviously in the public interest, including $20 million to Fey Beydoun, a campaign donor and appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who received the grant for an Oakland County-based nonprofit that seeks to attract international startup businesses to Michigan. Beydoun signed the paperwork to form the nonprofit just three days before the budget passed.

Along with that spending, there were more than 200 pet projects that benefited from the funding this year, including a $50 million grant to revamp Oakland County’s government complex in downtown Pontiac, $8 million for Detroit’s North American International Auto Show, and $20 million to revamp the Greektown corridor.

An additional $900,000 was doled out for a Troy cricket field, $1 million for a Novi schools wellness center that includes a “zen zone” for teachers, $5 million for an AFL-CIO training program and $200,000 for a splash pad in Novi.

Again, these may be worthy projects. But both the governor and lawmakers bear the responsibility to give them more scrutiny before they were passed.

Lawmakers should stop negotiating pots of money behind closed doors and do it all in the committees and on the floor where these kinds of debates are meant to be carried out.

The resources provided by taxpayers should only be spent through a transparent and deliberative budget process.

– The Detroit News