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2005 House Bill 4831: "Omnibus" FY 2006 State Budget Proposal

Public Act 154 of 2005

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1) Prison budget needs lead screening and health intervention  by Anonymous Citizen on June 16, 2006 
Period
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2) Where is lead screening and appropriate medical intervention  by Anonymous Citizen on June 16, 2006 
Lead poisoned 4x more likely to be violent?
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3) Sen. Switalski's "journal statement"  by Admin003 on September 22, 2005 
Senator Switalski's statement is as follows:

I rise in support of the minibus. I understand that ridership is up and I expect it to pass. But I wanted to inject a note of reality into the discussions regarding the proposed $17 million in savings in the Corrections budget. This has been offered by some of my colleagues in order to present the Governor with an alternative to closing the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility. But on review, the savings are more imagined than real.

Let me point out to three elements in the savings. There's the jail capacity money, and the prison overcrowding money, the money to locals for expansion of jail facilities. And this is described as a defunct program. Now it is true that the administration proposed changes to the sentencing guidelines that neither colleagues on my side of the aisle or the other side found acceptable. That's because we have severe jail overcrowding problems among the locals. The idea of sending more of the state's prisoners to the locals is not acceptable. So that did not pass. That doesn't mean that the programs $4 million worth offered by the administration to try to gain acceptance of those changes aren't legitimate in themselves; they are much needed. My county has had several releases, early releases of prisoners in the past year involving hundreds of inmates. This is a problem all over the state in terms of local jail capacity. So the administration has offered money which is in this budget to fund jail renovation and expansion to encourage more use of community corrections and other measures to help locals house their prisoners in jails and to keep them from sending us even more prisoners for the state prison system. That is money well spent, and to say that is a defunct program and we can easily cut that, is misguided and misleading to the members.

Second issue: cleaning allowance. This is a negotiated item with the corrections officers. It's about $4 million, I believe, and if we don't fund that, the department has to pay it anyway, whether the uniforms are cotton or silk and it's a cleaning allowance. They can take them to the dry-cleaners. It's not that dry-cleaning or washing machine or whatever method you're going to use, we're obligated by contract to pay that money. So to identify that as a savings is to just tell the department, "Go cut $4 million somewhere out of your budget," because you can't cut that.

Finally, there is the economics for salary increases. I think that's about $10 million. Now the department is probably one of the largest departments in the state. They've got 17,000 employees. Throughout these budgets, we've funded pension and medical cost increases, but we didn't fund economic increases. Now that falls particularly heavy on the Department of Corrections because they've got 17,000 employees. So if you take away $10 million, again, they're going to have to cut it out of their budget somewhere. That's not free money that we don't have to pay. So I think on balance, these aren't real savings, and perhaps a proposal that created new resources or actual cuts would have been more convincing.

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