Whitmer signs bills to resolve $2.2 billion budget shortfall
Associated Press | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 4 years, 5 months AGO
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Friday signed spending bills as part of an agreement to resolve a $2.2 billion deficit in the current budget by using federal coronavirus relief aid, tapping savings, shifting funds and banking cost cuts from employee furloughs that are complete.
The laws include additional funding for K-12 schools and essentially shield universities and community colleges from reductions. Teachers in public and private schools will each get a $500 bonus under the measures that cleared the Republican-led Legislature with just one no vote.
The state still faces a multi-billion dollar shortfall in the fiscal year that starts in two months due to declining tax revenues in the pandemic. Schools in particular are in limbo as they prepare to reopen without knowing their 2020-21 state aid.
“This bipartisan budget package will help protect critical funding for Michigan’s front-line workers, educators and students, but our work isn’t done,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. She again urged President Donald Trump and Congress to extend additional federal unemployment benefits and give more aid to Michigan "so we can maintain essential services like education, health care and public safety.”
The White House and its GOP allies appear to be retreating from their opposition to a $600-per-week supplemental unemployment benefit that has propped up the economy and family budgets but was expiring Friday. Another issue in the negotiations is an almost $1 trillion Democratic demand for funding for state and local governments.
___
Follow David Eggert at https://twitter.com/DavidEggert00
ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hong Kong police arrest 4 from university student union
HONG KONG (AP) — Four members of a Hong Kong university student union were arrested Wednesday for allegedly advocating terrorism by paying tribute to a person who stabbed a police officer and then killed himself, police said.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.
For South Sudan mothers, COVID-19 shook a fragile foundation
JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Paska Itwari Beda knows hunger all too well. The young mother of five children — all of them under age 10 — sometimes survives on one bowl of porridge a day, and her entire family is lucky to scrape together a single daily meal, even with much of the money Beda makes cleaning offices going toward food. She goes to bed hungry in hopes her children won’t have to work or beg like many others in South Sudan, a country only a decade old and already ripped apart by civil war.