Gov. Gretchen Whitmer refuses to cut corporate welfare to fulfill her campaign promise to “fix the damn roads.”

Thirty-three days after House Republicans approved bills to pump $3.1 billion into fixing the state’s crumbling roads, an effort that relies heavily on diverting funding from corporate welfare programs, Whitmer told the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce it’s a bad idea.

“I don’t think we should stop competing against other states and nations to bring jobs back home to Michigan,” Whitmer said in a “Road Ahead Grand Rapids” address on Monday. “We’ve got to build up our advanced manufacturing economy, and we’ve got to be able to be competitive to do that.”

The governor reiterated her insistence that addressing the state’s $3.9 billion annual road funding shortfall must include increased taxes, or what Whitmer refers to as “new resources.”

“To do this right, we’ll all have to recognize some tough things,” Whitmer said. “To my friends on the Republican side of the aisle, I’ve continued to say that fixing roads in the long term means that we’re going to need new resources to help that.

“To my fellow Democrats, I have acknowledged many times we’re also going to need to tighten our belts and find some savings in the budget,” she said.

Republicans on March 19 approved a plan to boost annual road funding by $3.1 million by diverting about $2.2 billion from corporate income taxes and welfare programs, all motor fuels tax revenue, and higher-than-anticipated income taxes to roads. Seven House Democrats voted in favor of aspects of the legislation, including former House Speaker Joe Tate, D-Detroit.

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Whitmer, meanwhile, has promoted her own $2.7 billion plan that would instead increase corporate sales taxes to squeeze Michigan businesses for $1.6 billion, and impose $470 million in new taxes on wholesale marijuana, among other new taxes.

While Whitmer’s plan is light on specifics, legislation introduced by House Democrats aims to hike the state’s corporate tax rate from 6% to 8.5% to fund road repairs, which would put the state on par with California with one of the highest rates in the nation.

Officials with the Detroit Regional Chamber told MLive the proposed tax hike “penalizes the entire economy and creates a new challenge for doing business in Michigan.”

Michigan Chamber of Commerce President Jim Holcomb shared a similar perspective, pointing to Whitmer’s proposed record $86 billion budget for the next fiscal year, a jump of roughly $30 billion since she took office.

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“When you have over an $80 billion budget, we just want to make sure that the current resources are being properly allocated and then have a conversation about how best to move forward,” he said.

Instead, Whitmer has vowed to work with Democrats who control the Senate to craft a “compromise.”

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, D-Grand Rapids, described Republicans’ no tax road funding plan as a “nonstarter” in comments to Bridge Michigan.

“Republicans are asking you to pay more but get less,” Brinks alleged without elaborating.

Whitmer was elected six years ago on a promise to “fix the damn roads,” but was forced to borrow $3.5 billion when lawmakers rejected her plan to hike the state’s motor fuels tax by 45 cents to the highest rate in the nation.

That money is now gone, and “roads are deteriorating faster than the agencies can repair them,” according to an annual road and bridges report.

Michigan taxpayers are spending $340 million this year to pay off the $3.5 billion the governor borrowed for road repairs, which came with $2.5 billion in interest, according to Michigan Department of Transportation data cited by The Detroit News.

“The money is there. We don’t need higher taxes to fix our roads,” Rep. Ann Bollin, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “We need leadership that respects taxpayers, spends responsibly, and makes roads a priority.”

Three years after lawmakers created the Strategic Outreach Attraction Reserve Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said would “create tens of thousands of good paying jobs” through corporate welfare deals, not a single one has materialized.

Michigan taxpayers shelled out more than $670 million to five multibillion companies to prop up the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries in Michigan with a promise to create a total of 8,812 jobs, but a report from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation that oversees the spending shows zero “actual qualified jobs created.”

Those business incentive deals were negotiated in secret by the Whitmer administration and select lawmakers through non-disclosure agreements mandated by the MEDC, which is controlled by an executive committee appointed by Whitmer.

The deals are also just the latest in a long line of corporate welfare deals in Michigan dating back decades that have promised big returns that far exceeded reality.

A Mackinac Center for Public Policy analysis of front page news stories about subsidized job deals touting a total of 123,060 promised jobs between Jan. 1, 2000 and Dec. 31, 2020 found those deals created just 10,889 jobs, a success rate of just 9%.