Wednesday afternoon the Senate General Government Appropriations Subcommittee reported its Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget recommending a 4.8 percent funding increase in the EVIP program, totalling an additional $10.8 million for cities, villages and townships who qualify.

In addition the Senate made some changes to the EVIP program language. In accordance with the Governor’s proposal the accountability and transparency language (dashboards) would remain similar. The only change would be a requirement to also add a debt service report to a dashboard.

The subcommittee recommends including privatization and innovation in category two (consolidation plans). The subcommittee also does not have a requirement to submit a new plan. Senator Pappageorge was clear during testimony that once a community has consolidated or shared services, that should count. Period.

The recommendation does change category three (employee compensation) to require local units to submit a plan to show how they are dealing with unfunded liabilities. It eliminated last year’s category three language.

You can find the specific recommendations here:Senate EVIP recs.pdf (711.77 kb) (EVIP boilerplate begins on page 117)

The committee did NOT include the language as passed the House committee, in particular additional posting requirements and penalty language for settling contracts from December 12, 2012 to March 28, 2013.

We are grateful to the subcommittee chair, Senator Pappageorge, for showing leadership and increasing the amount of EVIP funding.

This budget is expected to be taken up by the full Senate appropriations committee next week.

Samantha Harkins is the Director of State Affairs for the League. She can be reached at 517-908-0306 and sharkins at mml.org.