On Monday, Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed three more budget bills that provide funding for the Department of Corrections, Department of Education and Department of Transportation. While doing so, she also issued several line-item vetos on specific provisions in those bills. A press release from her office spells out the details.

On the DOC funding bill, the release notes:

The governor vetoed three line items. One line item was a negative $38.2 million which represents cost savings unspecified by the Legislature.

“A negative appropriation of this magnitude threatens the security and order of the state’s correctional facilities,” Granholm said. “Instead, I have directed the Department of Corrections to implement additional efficiencies and economies with a goal of saving $20 million.”

The other two line items deal with the County Jail Reimbursement Program. One increased funding for the program by $4.3 million while the other funded the increase with $4.3 million in unspecified cost savings. The governor vetoed the two line items because of the Legislature’s failure to change reimbursement criteria. By law, the program is supposed to reimburse counties for housing offenders in jail who otherwise would have been sentenced to prison. However, the Legislature chose not to change existing criteria that allows counties to be reimbursed for many cases that would not likely result in prison sentences.

“I support restoring the program to fiscal year 2009 appropriation levels with reforms that conform to statutory requirements,” Granholm said.

The Department of Education budget, which does not include the controversial cuts in K-12 funding or the cuts in the Promise scholarship, was signed with no line-item vetoes, but the governor did express her disappointment at a 40 percent cut in funding for local libraries and Granholm asked the legislature to “find the funding for libraries.”

The third budget was for the Department of Transportation and she did apply three line-item vetoes to that bill. According to the press release:

The governor vetoed three line items. Two directed scarce transportation resources away from core program activities, while the third was for an unnecessary study.

The signed bill is not yet available, so it is unclear what study was cut. In the waning days of September, the conference committee reached a compromise on funding for a public bridge to Canada that would compete with the privately-owned Ambassador Bridge. That compromise included a requirement for a study to be done before more state money could go to that project, a requirement that puts a major roadblock in the way of the development of any publicly owned bridge to Canada.

If that was the study that was cut from the DOT budget by Granholm, that would likely spark a major controversy and another big fight in the state Senate. But it seems unlikely that this item would be the “unnecessary study” mentioned in the press release because that item in the bill required no funding.