Legislators finish up Michigan budget

The Michigan House and Senate finished up the last three budgets for FY 2011 on Wednesday and Gov. Jennifer Granholm is expected to sign them into law on Thursday, a far easier result than has been the case in two of the last three years when last minute wrangling resulted in a temporary shutdown of the state government.

Those last budgets included:

The restoration of $154 per student to public school districts in the new fiscal year. Schools that had been bracing for more cuts will get at least $7,339 per student — $23 more than schools received this past fiscal year. Earlier this year, $154 per student had been cut from school funding to help erase a deficit in the 2010 budget…

The Legislature scraped together $84 million the state needed to put up to receive $500 million in federal road project funds. The state will sell short-term notes, redirect some driver’s license fees and use savings in other areas to raise the money…

Approval in the Department of Human Services budget to hire 684 additional child welfare workers, 417 of whom will work in child protective services. Those additional workers will cost the state $37.1 million.

Those workers are “desperately needed,” said Sharon Parks, president of the Michigan League for Human Services. “There were some good things, like the restoration of some optional services (for the poor), such as adult dental and podiatric care.”

Because state revenue has finally been on the increase, the cuts were not as deep as expected and no tax increase was needed to balance the budget. But without the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, next year’s budget is likely to be far more difficult to balance.