A number of transportation-related legislative issues saw action in recent days...
Complete Streets - The House Transportation Committee met on June 10th for the second hearing on House Bills 6151-6152, the Complete Streets package. The League testified at this hearing, in conjunction with a number of other local government and local road agency groups, supporting the concept of the bills while indicating an interest in continuing to work on the language in the bills to ensure that they accomplish their stated goal without creating additional burdens or mandated costs for local units of government. These bills are getting close to passage out of the committee. The chairwoman has set Thursday, June 17th as the target date for completing committee work on the legislation. Additional discussion on drafting language is scheduled for earlier this week.
Parking Tickets - The Senate Local, Urban and State Affairs committee reported House Bill 4726 to the Senate floor recently, where it awaits action by the full Senate. This bill would allow a local unit of government to speed up the notification to the Secretary of State for a driver who has repeatedly failed to respond to multiple parking citations. The City of Grand Rapids has been actively pursuing passage of this bill that would take the number of outstanding citations from 6 down to 3 before a community could notify the SOS and have a drivers license renewal suspended until the driver deals with the outstanding citations. The League is supporting the passage of this legislation as another way to help communities collect revenue they are owed.
Transportation Budget - After a significant delay, the Michigan House has passed their version of the state Transportation budget. House Bill 5889 was originally reported from the Appropriations subcommittee with a nearly $500 million reduction from the current year, to reflect the state's inability to match all available federal revenue with our current motor fuel and vehicle registration funding stream. When the bill got to the House floor, it included language that would have provided sufficient revenue to draw down the federal funds, contingent upon the passage of a gas tax increase. There was not enough support for either version to move out of the House, so a new substitute bill was offered last week that utilized $84 million in General Fund revenue to plug the shortfall. A source for this new $84 million was not identified. The bill now goes over to the Senate, where it is expected that the Senate will oppose the bill and send the budget to conference committee.
Chris Hackbarth is the transportation policy advisor for the Michigan Municipal League. Chris can be reached at 517-908-0303, or by email at chackbarth@mml.org.
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