By Paul Egan and Kathleen Gray

Detroit Free Press

Tuesday’s passage of the Detroit bankruptcy bills in the Michigan Senate puts the spotlight back on fixing roads as the No. 1 issue for the Legislature to deal with before it breaks next month for the summer.

The House has passed a package of bills that propose to raise about $450 million a year to fix crumbling roads and bridges.

The Senate is considering a more ambitious plan that could raise fuel taxes 25 cents by 2018, and raise close to $1.5 billion a year — close to what many experts say is needed just to keep Michigan’s roads from getting any worse.

If the Legislature passes a road package before its summer break, it could well be something in between.

“The main thing is let’s get something done, because the potholes are awful and they’re not going to get better,” Gov. Rick Snyder told reporters Tuesday.

Among the options under consideration is passing a package that includes a significant gas tax hike, but offering voters the choice of instead opting for a 1- or 2-percentage point increase to Michigan’s 6 percent sales tax, with the extra money raised going to roads.

But Snyder said he isn’t keen on that.

“My preference is to get a solution legislatively,” he said. “Let’s get a solution in place and then if further discussions lead us to other options that may include the ballot, then that can be done at a later time.”

Business leaders are split on Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s gas tax proposal, which would eliminate the 19 cents per gallon tax on gasoline and the 15 cents per gallon tax on diesel and replace both with a new tax at the wholesale level.

Richardville’s proposal would start the tax at 9.5 percent in 2015 and gradually increase it to 15.5 percent by 2018.

By comparison, the House version backed by Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, set a wholesale gas tax of 6 percent.

Richardville, R-Monroe, said Tuesday his proposal is “a very responsible slow increase in gas taxes” that is widely misunderstood.

“I’ll explain that more over the next few days,” he said.

“There’s a possibility, too, that we could come back and let the people vote on something different,” Richardville said. However, “I don’t want to go home for the summer without having some sort of mechanism to fix these roads.”

Votes from Democrats would be needed for any significant increase in the gas tax. They want relief for low-income residents who would be hard-hit by the increase.

Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing, was among those Tuesday who praised the bipartisan leadership in passing legislation to help settle the Detroit bankruptcy case, including the appropriation of about $195 million from the state.

But it’s not clear whether that cooperation will carry over to the roads issue.

Whitmer met with Snyder on Tuesday, but “unfortunately he was not willing to engage in a real discussion of some of the changes we would like to see made,” said Whitmer spokesman Bob McCann.