Guy Gordon (00:01.345)
Hello, I’m Guy Gordon. Welcome to the In the Weeds podcast, a brother of sorts or a surrogate to our Facts Matter podcast. A chance for those of us that are a little walkier, little nerdier, want to do a deeper dive. This is where that happens. We will go In the Weeds. And today, In the Weeds with us is Eric Paul Dennis, infrastructure research analyst for the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. This is to piggyback
A data-driven assessment of Michigan’s road program, study that he released in March, updated in early August. And Eric, welcome to our first In the Weeds podcast.
Thank you Guy, happy to be here in the weeds with you.
And as we go into the weeds, let’s start with the weeds that have the thorns and that is reforming the Public Act 51, which has been determining how to carve up the road funding pie for 74 years now, 615 different public entities rely on it for their funding. Is it fair? Is it needs based?
I would say no. Short answer is no. And a longer answer is it’s really difficult to tell exactly how unfair it is. One thing I would note is that this program was designed in 1951 when the state looked far different. It was actually designed to
Eric Paul Dennis (01:37.146)
taking a step back, in the late 40s, there was a group of people that got together and decided where, how Michigan should improve and expand its highways infrastructure. So they basically drew a bunch of lines on a map and said, this is where new highways should be. This is where we need to expand some roads. They gave that to the legislature and then they gave another document to the legislature that said,
this is how we should fund this. so Michigan’s legislature actually didn’t exactly write Act 51. It was written by road industry lobbyists and automotive industry lobbyists. They largely adopted it. It was intended to fund a limited construction program that originally was supposed to last about 15 years, but the construction wasn’t done after 15 years. A bunch of other stuff happened in that interim. The federal highways program was enacted.
Suddenly we had a lot more federal funding coming down.
Well, all these interstates were being built and that added another layer of need, right?
Right. And it extended the period where we thought we would transition from building infrastructure to maintaining it. And so the Act 51 formula just kept getting readopted. At some point, the legislature realized it wasn’t the best way to do this. And so a sunset provision was added. Later on…
Eric Paul Dennis (03:10.382)
the legislature got tired of recognizing that they were kicking the can down the road and the sunset provision was rescinded. And so here we are 74 years later, still using this law that the basic structure of which was created 74 years ago. It’s been amended a bunch of times, but those amendments have kind of become band-aids on band-aids on basically the zombie law that continues to haunt us.
So as you look at this, I mean, I’m trying to think of how different the world looks in 2025 than it did in 1951. And the biggest one that leaps out to me is urban sprawl. That, you know, West Bloomfield Township.
was nothing but corn fields and here we are in the weeds. They were in the weeds too. Now it is a thriving metropolis and a residential and retail, you know, high growth area. The kind of growth of funding for those townships was never envisioned, was it? And has that been addressed in the 300 some odd amendments over the past 74 years?
In some ways, the formula and some legislative carve outs have, so the formula has been tinkered with somewhat and there’s been legislative carve outs to try to address that, but it’s still very insufficient. A couple of weeks ago, the Michigan House Subcommittee on State and Local Transportation Appropriations,
They had a meeting, they took their committee on the road to Macomb County. One of the people invited to give testimony at that meeting was the township supervisor for Shelby Township. And so he was advocating for more road funding because among other reasons, he said it would take $400 million to repair all of the subdivision roads in the township. He also needed more money to add lanes to some congested, some congested thoroughfares like Ryan Road.
Eric Paul Dennis (05:25.55)
Road. Putting aside how accurate that $400 million figure might be and the wisdom of adding more lanes, Shelby Township doesn’t have a roads program. All of their roads are managed by Macomb County. Actually, think Dequinder Road is managed by Oakland County. It’s on the border. But townships are not eligible for state revenue sharing through Act 51. When Act 51 was written, townships were just squares on a map. now Act 51 is sending
money to 531 cities and villages, only 12 of those municipal recipients have a greater population than Shelby Township. Shelby Township has 80,000 people now. so I actually, do believe that Shelby Township roads are struggling because they don’t get any revenue sharing and Macomb County appears quite underfunded as a whole. I looked at some 2023 fiscal year data.
On a per population basis, Macomb County is less funded than any other county except mine, Washtenaw County. So I think it’s pretty clear. I don’t know exactly how divorced the formula is from needs, because there’s just not been enough data to get to that with much precision. But there’s definitely a problem there.
Okay, so if we were to approach this and say, just as our mission statement, we need to make Public Act 51 or maybe just wipe the slate clean and start over, we need a new road funding formula that is truly needs based. How do we go about creating a better needs assessment process?
That’s the really difficult question, right? So I have suggested a series of contributors that basically determine what the cost of a road is.
Guy Gordon (07:30.818)
and understanding it’s different in the UP than it is in Metro Detroit.
Yeah, so I mean, think about what imposes costs. So you’re looking at, first of all, just area of pavement. So you can get to that by centerline miles of road, lane miles of road. You should also think about what that need for that pavement is, because you don’t want to incentivize building more pavement when it’s not needed. So you should be thinking about vehicle miles traveled. Now think about once you have that pavement, does it cost? How much does it cost to maintain?
over its life cycle on like an annualized basis. So there what we’re mostly looking for is truck traffic. Trucks impose most of the pavement damage. There’s also climate issues. The lower tier of Michigan is actually more stressed by freeze thaw cycles than the Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan. So traffic, truck traffic, climate, some geological factors may come into that.
geographical factors, getting back to the idea again, that your costs are going to be different depending on where you’re laying down that pavement.
Absolutely. once you have an engineering design for an appropriate road and a 30-year plan for how you’re going to maintain that road over its life cycle, you need to think about what those costs are to do that. And so then you need to start thinking about the regional differences in road construction costs. And there are significant regional differences in road construction costs.
Eric Paul Dennis (09:03.982)
And the complexity of those projects, if you’re rebuilding a road in an urban area that has a lot of underground infrastructure and a lot of difficulties around maintaining traffic flow around that construction, it’s going to cost a lot more than if you’re in a rural area where you don’t have pipes and electric and stuff underground and you don’t have to worry too much about diverting a ton of traffic.
Well, we’ve all heard the justifiable cater walling from businesses and retailers when you’re repaving or remaking the road in front of their stores or on one of the arteries that leads to their retail centers. It’s costly. And in some cases, it can be fatal for some of these businesses. You have to weigh that as a cost as well. What is going to be the biggest hurdle here? Because it seems that
It seems like the consensus is we would rather stick with a flawed funding mechanism than run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of a reformed funding mechanism.
Yeah, and so I think the biggest hurdle is putting in the effort to figuring out where the money should be going, which can be done. It’s very possible we can assess life cycle costs of road infrastructure on a road by road basis, a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis. But that would take a lot of work. would probably be a require a study in over a million.
million dollars or something like that. But that study would allow us to make sure that we are sending, can base a formula off of those assessed needs that make sure that we’re getting funding to where it’s needed as best as possible and can save us hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the future.
Guy Gordon (10:59.732)
And it’s, but I mean, the problem is those, those savings are in the future. And we know that we’ve got, and they’re not, this isn’t a bad thing. They are serving the needs of their community. So before we open this Pandora, they’re looking at this as well. We don’t want to come out losers in the end here. We don’t want to come out with a lower, with a smaller share of the pie. They see that as a loss, even though overall it can be a gain.
to the state in general. So how would we approach this and get past that entrenched resistance? Do we need to come up front and say, look, we’re going to make sure that in years one through five, you are held harmless under this new formula?
That’s my idea. And I think it can even go beyond years one through five. I would say there could be a held harmless provision in perpetuity. Nobody, no agency that’s now receiving act 51 funds will receive any decrease in the future. But as we look forward to finding more revenue or moving funding from other state programs to increase the size of our state road budget.
those new fundings will be applied to where they’re needed the most. And over time as that funding increases, it will be needed with inflation and things like that. Eventually it would come out equivalent.
So we know there’s going to be resistance from the entrenched interests. One of them was quoted, think it was Crain’s Detroit Businesses saying, well, we can’t reform Public Act 51 because we don’t know where it’s flawed because it’s never been fully funded. Which is a little bit like saying, well, we can’t talk about carving up the pie differently until we get a bigger pie.
Guy Gordon (13:01.848)
But it kind of, I found that to be a real light and a real window into the thinking of those that say, we don’t want to end up on the wrong side of this. It was a little bit like the old Nancy Pelosi, we got to pass it to see what’s in it. You know, we’re going to need a bigger pie just to see how public act 51 was supposed to work. If you don’t know after 74 years, for goodness sakes, then I don’t know how.
you know, another billion into the pot is going to make a difference.
Yeah, I would turn that around and say we don’t know what it looks like fully funded. We don’t know what full funding for a statewide road program should be because we haven’t been distributing the money as we should be.
Thank you. Yeah, a little crazy, but I mean, I understand to some degree what he’s saying, that there are needs that aren’t being met. And with a funding increase, we could meet those needs and that might change the equation, which I think would be their way of looking at that. What else is you check off these lists, making it more needs based, Public Act 51.
What is there a local road funding mechanism that needs to be fed here?
Eric Paul Dennis (14:24.558)
Um, yeah, let me back up to your previous comment though. So there are absolutely areas of the state that are drastically underfunded. Uh, but like say Macomb County should have legitimately 30 % more funding, which might be true. To get Macomb County 30 % more funded, you have to increase the entire state budget, uh, 30 % more.
And there are areas of the state that I think are probably pretty appropriately funded now. So it would be better to make sure that these areas that have greatest need are addressed without spreading it everywhere, just to avoid the problem of thinking about where those needs are, which should be done. They’re right in that we don’t know.
We don’t know what a fully funded road program looks like because we have never put that funding to where it is most needed.
So how long do you think this process would take? If we said, I mean, right now we’ve got the Democrats promoting a $3 billion increase in the road funding budget based on some new taxes. We’ve got the Republicans who, many of whom have taken a no new taxes pledge saying, well, we’re going to do it with some revenue shifting. I would think that at this point in time, you could say, Hey, before you do that.
Mm-hmm.
Guy Gordon (16:00.002)
Before you promote any new taxes, before you start recarving up the entire general fund pie, let’s look at spending the road dollars we have smarter. But how long would that process take?
I think it would require at least a couple of years. Research studies take a while. And I think it should. a couple of months ago, I was contacted by a legislator who read my research and looked at all the things that I claimed road funding should be based on and essentially started with a blank sheet and just started
picking percentages of how funding should be distributed based on things like centerline miles of federal aid eligible roads, population, truck traffic. And that was terrifying to me because if you just start doing this without having a much better understanding than we currently have about precisely how those factors impact the pressure put on different
road agencies, it is, I think it would be almost as easy to do more harm than good. And fortunately, I think that legislature, legislator gave up on that. But I think there should be a study in the legislature fund studies like this all the time. In the last few years, they’ve put about $10, $15 towards trying to find new revenue sources.
Well, it’s crazy. had what was Governor Snyder’s, what was the 21st century commission. And we’ve had the just recently the forward looking, you know, building a better Michigan, I think, campaign from Governor Whitmer and Hillary Doe was involved in that. Shouldn’t this be all part and parcel of that, given the importance of our infrastructure?
Eric Paul Dennis (17:54.062)
I think absolutely. And I think the reason that the Act 51 formula has not been part of the discussion recently is largely because of the institution of the Transportation Asset Management Council. Before that council, one of the problems the legislature had was they would have dozens, hundreds of individual road agencies coming up to them and claiming they need this much more money and they know it in this way. And so one of the objectives of creating that council was that
It could speak with one voice for the entire Michigan Road community. We need this much more money. Ideally, they would also say we need it allocated in this way. But because of the way the legislature designed the council, made up of people whose full-time, their volunteer appointees that represent various Michigan Road interests, most of whom are lobbyists working full-time for road agencies.
that council never
They have not advised the legislature on how to do anything better. What they’ve been able to do is with one voice talk about how much more money is needed. And so I think the council has actually become kind of a mega lobbying group more than, and they do some transportation asset management. But I think the main outcome of that is that it’s a louder, more
in theory, more justified voice telling the legislature how much more money they need. And so the inefficiencies and inadequacies of Act 51 have just been pushed off to the side completely.
Guy Gordon (19:43.778)
Well, it perpetuates the idea that the only avenue is an avenue that’s paved with more gold, right? And that the idea of really reforming this. the funny thing is, in all my years as a talk show host, the one thing that I heard again and again from my callers was, look, we understand that we underfunded years ago, but we still have this gnawing feeling that our road dollars are not being spent well every time we cross into Ohio and Indiana.
And granted, it is a very narrow perception based on pavement quality as you cross the state line. Not exactly an objective reference, but they’re not wrong in that perception. And in fact, when you look at the scatter point graph that you have, and for those of you that look at the published article at CRCMich.org, it’s chart D.
And I mean, it really drives home the point that Michigan is looking up in terms of pavement quality in a number of states that fund at a much lower level, significantly lower level than we do. So it isn’t all about funding. you kind of kicked a hornet’s nest with this one, Eric. But I would say that you got the conversation started. I just wish more people would join in the conversation. I think there’s room here for some lawmakers to sit down with you and say,
Okay, how would we start? And certainly, and maybe some of those that are looking to become governor to say, hey, this is this is a way we can approach this. Appreciate your scholarship, my friend. And we should point out that that Eric received a very prestigious award from the governmental Research Association, the most distinguished research award for this 2025 report that he released back in March.
detailing these issues and these challenges. So again, thanks for being with us in the weeds, Eric. In the weeds is a production of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. I’m Guy Gordon. We want to remind you that the CRC does not receive any government funds. We do not lobby. We are donor funded. We rely on you to make sure that this kind of
Eric Paul Dennis (21:41.73)
Thank you guys.
Guy Gordon (22:00.126)
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on X. I’m Guy Gordon. Thanks for joining us. Until next time.
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