Sen. Ken Horn, R-Frankenmuth, has introduced "dead on arrival" legislation that would replace the road funding plan Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law in November with a sales tax hike. The tax increase, from six to seven percent, would be the same as was in Proposal 1, which Michigan voters rejected last May by more than an 80 to 20 percent margin.

Horn said that the plan he outlined in Senate Joint Resolution M is less complicated than the ill-fated Proposal 1. It would repeal the recently passed and enacted road funding plan, hike the sales tax rate and dedicate all new revenue from the increase to roads.

“After the debacle of Proposal 1, the Senate worked very hard on this issue,” Horn said. “There was polling and studies — I think one was by the Business Leaders of Michigan — showing that 72 percent of voters would likely have voted for Proposal 1 if it had been a simple sales tax increase with all the money we pay at the pump going to roads.”

Senate Joint Resolution M would need to be passed by a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate and then be approved by voters in a statewide election. Its chief sponsor, though, does not see that happening.

“Frankly, I don’t expect this legislation to move forward,” Horn said. "It is legislation I put in for the people I’ve talked with in my district who weren’t happy about what we ended up doing on road funding.”

Just two months ago, the governor and the Legislature agreed to, passed and enacted a $1.2 billion road funding plan. It relies on increases in fuel taxes and registration fees for $600 million while tapping into existing revenues for another $600 million. It also bolsters the Homestead Property Tax Credit and includes the potential for income tax relief.

The deal came together after years of squabbling and the voters’ unambiguous rejection of Proposal 1, which raised the sales tax rate from six to seven percent. Because it was the result of legislative bargaining and deal making, Proposal 1 also included other provisions that raised its price tag to $1.9 billion.

Former Rep. Tom McMillin, who was among the leaders of Concerned Taxpayers of Michigan, a group that actively opposed Proposal 1, is skeptical of the idea that a clean tax increase would be popular.

If Proposal 1 had been a simple tax hike, with all the new tax money going to roads, “It might have only lost by 75 to 25 percent instead of 80 to 20 percent," he said. He added, “Maybe they would have gotten support from a few more Democratic voters. But basically, they would still have been asking voters to raise taxes on themselves.”

Does Horn think that Michigan voters are ready for another public debate on taxes and road funding?

“I’ve had some people in my district tell me they would rather have had the sales tax increase than the increases in the fuel tax and registration fee,” Horn said. “Basically, those who earn $70,000 a year or more are more impacted by a sales tax hike and those who make about $40,000 or less are the ones who don’t like the fuel tax and registration fee increases. So I put this in to simply repeal what we did and make that change to the sales tax. It’s only to show that we have that option and would only move if there was some sort of grass roots support.”

While Horn is the chief sponsor of Senate Joint Resolution M, three other Republican Senators have signed on as co-sponsors: Sen. Darwin Booher of Evart, Sen. Mike Green of Mayville, and Sen. Rick Jones of Grand Ledge.

“I can tell you this legislation is dead on arrival,” Jones said.

Jones added that Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, has already told Senate Republicans that the legislation “isn’t moving.”

“Proposal 1 was overwhelmingly defeated because it was loaded down with a Christmas tree of stuff the voters didn’t want that the Democrats forced on us,” Jones continued. “I co-sponsored this legislation because there were so many people in my district who told me they’d rather have had the sales tax hike than the increased registration fee and fuel tax increase. I signed on to this to represent those constituents.”

Neither Booher nor Green returned phone calls to explain why they co-sponsored the resolution.

James Hohman, the assistant director of fiscal policy with Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said Senate Joint Resolution M represents the side of the road funding argument that sought additional dollars by means of tax hikes only.

“Senator Horn is correct that the sales tax would be less regressive than fuel and registration taxes,” Hohman said. “But the enacted roads plan also finds money from current revenue sources to pay for road improvements while his proposal funds the roads exclusively with tax increases.”

In recent years, pollsters have wrestled with how to deal with the growing number of cellphone users. The problem is how to gather accurate polling data now that a majority (53 percent) of U.S. phone users have cut the cord to traditional landlines and depend solely on cellphones. Unlike landline numbers, cellphone numbers can’t readily be accessed through phone books and other listings used by pollsters.

There are some alternative methods available. The Pew Research Center announced last year that 75 percent of its polling contacts were from a list of cellphone users. However, the added costs and complications can be significant.

“With polling, the bottom line is, the more you’re relying on landlines, the older the population of your respondents will be,” said Ed Sarpolus, director of Lansing-based Target-Insyght, Strategic Consulting and Research. “In Michigan, we have a generally older overall population. You can still do a lot of accurate polling just calling landlines. If you’re polling on primary elections, in particular, just calling landlines can be very accurate because it’s the older voters who vote in primaries. It really all depends on what it is that you want to poll. If you want to reach people on their cell phones, it will cost more.”

“Can you get access to cellphone numbers? Sure you can,” Sarpolus continued. “I can get 4 million numbers with all the information needed, addresses and so on, if I want to spend the money. And some of the cell phone numbers you’d get will be the same numbers those people had for their landlines — they just switch the number over to their cell phones. However, you get a lower response rate from cell phone users, a lot of them switched to cell phones, in part, because they didn’t want to get those kinds of calls.”

Steve Mitchell, of East Lansing-based Mitchell Research and Communications, said the issue of calling cellphones for polling really comes down to what the client wants to have polled and what they’re willing to pay.

“When we do operator-assisted polls we could call a quarter, one-third, 50 percent, or even some higher percentage of cellphones, depending on what our client is willing to pay,” Mitchell said. “Each call to a cellphone costs twice as much as just accessing a landline. Automated polling only accesses landlines. When you only access landlines you (the pollster) might need to do more adjusting, based on the assumption that you’re reaching a high percentage of older voters.”

“Quite frankly, primary election polling is much easier to do than general election polling because primary voters are older and calling landline users can get good results,” Mitchell added. “But again, it’s really about what the client wants and what they’re willing to pay.”

Mark Grebner, president of East Lansing-based Practical Political Consulting, echoed what the other pollsters said about the topic and purpose of a poll dictating the degree to which it is necessary to contact cellphone users. He also said there are issues involving polls and cellphones that the average person probably wouldn’t consider, and summed the challenges as follows:

"Someone who lives in a particular district of Michigan you might be polling could have a cellphone number from Chicago. They could be getting calls from someone doing polls in Illinois. And, of course, someone a pollster calls who has a cellphone number that would indicate they live in the Michigan district might actually live in Chicago. Cellphones haven’t made things easier for the people who want to do polls."

"If you’re talking about a primary election — let’s say for instance the Michigan presidential primary — in which there will be about 2 million voters, you’ll do all right, even with all or mostly landline calls."

"The average person responding to poll questions on a landline phone is 65 years old or older, and it could sometimes even be 70 years old. But that can still work for primary election polling. However, when it comes to the general election, when there will be 5 million voters, you’ve got a problem. How do you poll those additional 3 million voters who aren’t regular voters in other types of elections?"

“In that situation you better have some way of accounting for those people. But contacting their cell phones gets expensive; for one thing, many cell phone users don’t like responding to poll questions, so you’d have to make a lot of calls. Actually, even the number of people with landline phones who are willing to respond to poll questions is decreasing. Response rates are down across the board, which is making it increasingly difficult to do a poll.”