DALLAS -- Gov. Rick Snyder put Michigan's infrastructure needs at the top of his to-do list in his State of the State address, saying Flint's water crisis and a sewer collapse illustrate the urgent need to invest.
Snyder said every corner of Michigan is at risk because of aging infrastructure, pointing to Flint's water contamination crisis and a Christmas Eve sewer line collapse in Macomb County that created a sinkhole. "The Flint Water crisis, the Fraser sinkhole and other challenges around the state and nation demonstrate that we must act with urgency to address infrastructure challenges," Snyder said Tuesday.
Michigan has allocated $234 million in Flint aid since October 2015 when Snyder acknowledged that state mistakes were in part to blame for the lead contamination of the city's drinking water supply.
The Fraser sinkhole could cost about $78 million or more to fix, the county estimated. Snyder has declared a state of emergency through Feb. 3.
A report Snyder commissioned in December argued that Michigan is underinvesting in infrastructure by about $4 billion per year. Transportation infrastructure alone has an annual investment shortfall of $2.7 billion, the report said, that will exceed $40 billion over the next 20 years.
Snyder is expected to call for action on at least one recommendation from his recent 21st Century Infrastructure Commission — creating an integrated asset management system to combine information on infrastructure and coordinate planning among cities, utilities and state government.
The database would link roads, bridges, sewers, water mains, fiber-optic cables and energy supply lines. Such a process could help assure, for example, that a road project could be coordinated with sewer and gas main replacement, allowing the road to be torn up only once and the costs to be shared by multiple agencies.
Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, acknowledged infrastructure needs around the state but said the Republican-led Legislature is unlikely to approve any new fees or taxes until it can assess the impact of a $1.2 billion road funding law that began to take effect this year. Snyder is also a Republican.
In areas like Fraser, "local governments can pass millages to support sewer lines and other things like that," Meekhof said. "I want them to take the responsibility and find out what happened, because it's their asset. If they ask us for help, we would consider that."
Snyder spent little time addressing Flint's water crisis, a focal point of his 2016 State of the State. He said progress has been made and cited the $27 million of state funds provided for lead pipe replacement, the 24,000 new Flint residents placed on Medicaid waivers and 827 new jobs in the community. He also said he would introduce higher water standards and better testing protocols for copper and lead than the federal government currently has in place.
Despite the progress, local elected officials have said that Flint residents won't have access to safe water until 2020 and contend Snyder hasn't secured enough funding to deal with Flint's problems.
"Shame on the governor for not using tonight to outline additional steps that he is going to take to ensure clean drinking water in Flint," Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint, said in a statement after the speech.
Another big ticket item looming is the Healthy Michigan initiative, the state's Medicaid expansion for low-income residents under the Affordable Care Act, as the Republican-led Congress considers ending expanded Medicaid under the federal health care law and Michigan begins to pick up more of the costs.
The state has enrolled more than 640,000 in the program. Snyder said that under the program recipients have made over 2.8 million primary care visits and said hospital costs for uncompensated care have decreased more than 40% from 2013 to 2015, "saving millions of dollars."
Snyder said is his speech that he is "hoping for the best" but added "there's going to be changes in health care. The important thing is we need to let them know that Healthy Michigan is a model that can work for the rest of the country that we should be speaking up."
Snyder will unveil a proposed budget for fiscal year 2018 on Feb. 8. The state has a $330 million surplus to work with from better-than-projected fund balances and other one-time savings.
