A Republican road funding proposal that could mean a whopping $1.44 billion in new county road dollars was the focus of this week’s episode of Podcast 83.

“If (the House GOP plan) goes through, it would mean a significant influx of dollars into the county road system,” said Deena Bosworth, MAC’s governmental affairs director.

“What the bills basically do is they allocate the gas tax, the tax on that you pay at the gas pump, and take the sales tax and turn that into a gas tax, then dedicate all of that revenue to the roads,” she explained.

“Counties will get about $340 million of that revenue to go toward their roads,” Bosworth said. “But, in addition to that, they're also talking about taking General Fund dollars and switching around some business taxes, finding some savings elsewhere and then putting an additional $1.1 billion into the county road system, which is a huge windfall.”

Of course, there’s a potential catch: “The only thing that we're might be concerned about is the hit that it's going to take on the state's General Fund,” Bosworth noted. “Counties are reliant on a lot of General Fund appropriations: our revenue sharing, our court funding or what goes to public health departments. ... So, we'll have to wait and see … if the state's going to really be able to balance the budget, still maintain all of those priorities and do this huge influx into the roads.”

Also in the episode:

Bosworth noted the need for counties to keep wary eye on state budget politics this year after passage of an “essentials” budget in the Michigan House that would cut into revenue sharing: “It's definitely not what we want to see … on revenue sharing, because what they did was they take that $30 million that we were getting in those adjusted taxable value payments for revenue sharing. … In fiscal year 25, it's $30 million they did not include that in their budget (for fiscal 2026). And then they took the base revenue sharing amount, which we were getting $261 million of, and dropped that down to $256 million … This is a long budget process, and we know the Senate was not happy with what came over. So, I think it just is more setting the stage, doing the infighting, before we get actually down to figuring out what the real budget is going to be.”

Governmental Affairs Specialist Jimmy Johnson discussed MAC’s activities at the 2025 National Association of Counties’ Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.: “Sen. (Gary) Peters (D-Michigan) was very gracious with his time (at a MAC-arranged briefing). And one big thing that he touched on was the Selfridge Air Base and how important that is,” Johnson said.