The intersection of a huge new road funding plan and MAC’s work to create a dedicated Revenue Sharing Trust Fund is the focus of this week’s episode of Podcast 83.

“(On) Friday, future speaker of the House Matt Hall proposed a plan of $2.7 billion annually (for roads), and $1.8 billion would be coming from corporate income tax revenue, and then just shy of $1 billion would come from the sales tax on gas at the pump,” said Madeline Fata.

While the plan says that schools and others now getting that $1 billion from the sales tax would be held harmless, there are potentially damaging implications for MAC’s efforts on revenue sharing.

“If we got our Revenue Sharing Trust Fund through, (the $1 billion shift) could impact there somehow. But he has said that there will be a replacement mechanism there, but it's kind of unclear at this stage what that reimbursement mechanism is,” Fata explained.

“Probably there needs to be another tax of some form, or potential cuts to General Fund are really the only two options, right?” asked host Stephan Currie.

“I could see an increase in the gas tax being that reimbursement mechanism, yeah, or they'd have to find $1 billion in the General Fund to shift around,” Fata replied.

But Deena Bosworth noted that shifting sales tax sums affects MAC’s plan to use a dedicated portion of the sales tax for revenue sharing.

“If we get those trust fund bills enacted that are based on a percentage of the state sales tax, they will go into their revenue sharing trust fund. So, if they switch the sales tax revenue from going to cities, villages, townships and schools and dedicate that to roads, then that lowers that pot of money available for our Revenue Sharing Trust Fund,” she explained.

“If they do that, we're going to have to revisit the percentage and make sure that there's a hold harmless provision for us as well,” Bosworth added.

And all such considerations must be made in a rapidly shrinking legislative calendar.

“We're thinking there's a 7 to 9 lame duck session days coming up in the next few weeks,” said Samantha Gibson. “But a lot of it, as we've said many times, is contingent on whether House Democrats can have their majority in Lansing. If they don't show up, anything that happens will have to be bipartisan. Otherwise, not much will be getting done. So, it remains to be seen what kind of lame duck we'll have.”

“Still, we are expecting a pretty active lame duck over the next three, four weeks here,” said Currie. “Everyone should stay close to their emails, phones. We may need help, as you see people back in district over the Thanksgiving holiday, make sure you bring up some of these issues that we've talked about week over week, because now's when the rubber meets the road.”