* Emily Dievendorf, State Representative (D) Lansing

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to Michigan's Big Show starring Michael Patrick Shields. I'm
Kyle Malin, editor of the Murrs newsletter, billing in today
for Michael Patrick as he is on assignment out in Europe.
Sounds like a good time. But I was talking in
the last segment with Craig Mauger about catching up on sleep.
I've almost caught up, I think, on the sleep of

(00:31):
two back to not back to back, but there are
two all night sessions last week. We're gonna check in
with a state legislator here who also didn't get a
ton of sleep. I don't think last week, Representative Emily
Devendorf out of Lansing. Good morning, How you doing.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Good morning. I am definitely still catching up on that sleep.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Oh my gosh, that was a tough go. We had
an all night or a Tuesday Wednesday morning, and then
another one Thursday Friday morning. I'd like to say that
I that I know everything that happened in that state budget,
but I think we're going to be taking the next
few weeks to trying to figure that out.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
What do you think that is absolutely true? There is
a lot to pour through, and let's be real here.
I think most of US Republican and Democrats received a
copy of the budget shortly before we had to vote
on it. So I think we have a lot of
homework to do well.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
And I want to talk to you about that because
that's been a frustration of mine and I wrote about
it in the Lansing City Pults this week that you know,
in years past, we were able to get pieces of
the budget for you know, in the weeks coming up
to the end, where we would pass like an agriculture
budget and then we'd look at it, and then we'd
pass like a dn R budget and then the Correction's budget.

(01:46):
But now they cram all the budgets into one big
document and then they stick it on your lap and
give you about an hour to go through it, and
they're supposed to vote on it. That's got to be
really challenging.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
It is challenging. It's also not good for government. It's
not an example of good governance, and it is the
opposite of what our constituents have been demanding of us
increasingly as they have lost faith in government over time
and they want to see us do our jobs better.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Why does this happen? Then, I mean, why why do
we cram everything into a budget, give it to you all,
like you know, in the middle of the night when
everybody else is sleeping, and then tell you to vote
on it. It's just we're why are we doing this?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
So I don't love to guess at intense, but I
can say that we had plenty of opportunity to pass
the budget on time, both the omnibus budget and the
education budget, which once passed, was months overdue, leaving our
schools in a really precarious situation. Anytime we get to

(02:55):
that final moment and we are we are bumped up
against the deadline, and this case after the deadline. And absolutely,
when we're passing laws in the middle of the night,
there is no transparency there. There's not an opportunity for transparency.
And I think this time that resulted in great part
from lack of process. And I'm not sure that a

(03:15):
budget existed prior to a few days before we ended
up passing it. So there are very few excuses for
how we got here when we really could have done
our jobs responsibly and as you said, passed different parts
of the budget earlier, but also done so in a
way so that our communities knew what we were doing

(03:36):
and could weigh in, and that transparency completely lacked, from
lack of committee hearings to lack of open negotiations and
certainly not the ability to review the documents that funded
our lives.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Back twenty years ago, we used to have fifteen different
spending bills, sometimes sixteen if you counted capital outlay, but
we'd have sixteen bills that accompanied the budget, so there
was not like one vote on the budget. There was
like fifteen of them, and they were spread out over
time so that folks would have a chance to take
a look at it, the interest groups to take a

(04:12):
look at it, and the legislators and everybody kind of
knew what was in there if that was your level
of expertise. And now they roll them into two budgets,
one for the schools and one for the general government.
How did you end up voting then on those two bills.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
So it has become a collaborative, hustle effort to be
able to understand what is in the budget, between briefings
with House Fiscal Agency and our different branches of government
to honestly keyword searches, which we have to admit has
a lot of flaw involved in it. It means that

(04:49):
due to your own personal bias or what your expertise
is or isn't, you are looking for and able to
identify different things. But if it isn't in your area,
if it isn't something that is already on your radar,
you could miss it completely. So there is a lot
that has been able to fly under the radar and
that we will continue to discover. And I'm sad to

(05:10):
say my community is regularly now bringing to me that
the different programs that they felt they really needed just
did not make it through this budget, and we will
continue to figure that out.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
So on the school the school aid portion of it,
did you end up supporting it or not?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
So I do support the school aid portion of the budget,
with some exceptions, with some cautions and concerns because we
have now made education funding somewhat vulnerable due to the
way that we have shifted where the funding is. It
is now in a place where every single budget cycle,

(05:53):
our schools are going to have to fight for that
funding and that makes it harder for them to plan.
But also it makes it harder for our educators to
know that they have the resources they need to continue
to serve our kids in an equitable and consistent way
every time, it will be a battle. And unless we
return it to what really should be a constitutionally protected

(06:17):
pot of money that ensures our schools can keep going,
So that is not okay. And there is also a
lot of funding that was shifted and focus from public
schools to charter schools. This is not a topic and
area of our investment that our schools had a chance

(06:37):
to weigh in on enough in an open dialogue in
order to fight for what they needed.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
So the reference I get on the first person that
you're talking about, we're talking with Representative Emily Diveendorf. But
what they've done with the school aid budget is that
they've dedicated more and more money from that school aid
budget to fund universities, which isn't necessarily what it was
intended to. And when the governor, Governor whitmer Ran, she

(07:03):
said that we're going to stop doing that, but the
temptation has just been too much, and instead of ending it,
we've doubled it. And so more money from school aid
is going into universities, and it's just it's just become
kind of more of a general fund pot, which is
not what the school Aid fund was designed for. And
I can sense that you're not happy about that.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
What about no, I go ahead, and I think that
throughout this budget cycle we've screwed over schools plenty enough.
You know, they they were patient with us as long
as they possibly could be, until we put them in
a position where they had to figure out whether they
were going to have to dip into other areas of

(07:46):
funding in order to continue to feed our kids. They
weren't able to plan, and then in the final moment,
we ended up making their funding vulnerable to being robbed
every year thereafter. So I'm pretty sure that our education
community is fed up with the legislative process.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
We only have less than a minute left here. So then,
on the general government kind of side of things, did
you end up being a yes or a no on
that one?

Speaker 2 (08:11):
I was a yes on that and acknowledging that this
is not a dream budget. We did not have the
excess dollars that we've had in past years. A couple
of years ago it felt a little bit like Christmas
for our communities, where we were able to really invest
in a lot of things that had been long neglected
or had not been able to have support from the state.

(08:33):
This time, we were already functioning with less money. We
were predicting that the federal government was going to cut
us significantly, not knowing whether our state departments would be
looking at forty percent less or fifteen percent less. We
had a leaner budget proposed to us by Republicans.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
And that leader budget just that. We didn't do that one,
but it was less money. Thank you, Emily Devendor. If
you're listening to Michigan's big people.

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