Hall Says Brinks Didn't Hold Up Her End Of The Deal On Transparency

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 10/23/2025) Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) said today an earmark transparency deal that House and Senate leadership agreed to as part of the new budget compromise was not held up with legislation the Senate passed Tuesday. 

Hall said as part of the budget negotiation, the night that the one-week continuation budget passed, Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) and Hall signed an agreement that said there would be no changes to the budget that was being drafted, and they would “finally disclose the pork”. 

“We were successful in getting them to agree to pass HEAT (Hall Ethics, Accountability and Transparency) in the Senate. Now, maybe we should have shut down the government longer to force the bills to come up earlier, but I really felt like it was important, once we got that agreement, to move a continuing resolution,” Hall said at his press conference Wednesday. 

Hall referred to the Senate's earmark transparency bill, SB 596 , as a smoke screen, or “fake HEAT”.  That bill requires earmark request information to be online and available to the public at least 10 days before the Legislature votes on a budget, but Hall has been saying that a 90-day requirement would be better. SB 596 is tie-barred to Rep. Tom Kunse (R-Clare)'s HB 4420 which lists the information that would have to be included in the disclosure, and also lists April 1 as the date by which the disclosure would need to be done. HB 4420 hasn't been taken up for a vote in the Senate, yet. 

“The Speaker likes to mischaracterize private conversations to fit his own narrative. We mutually agreed that earmark transparency is important," Brinks said in a statement to MIRS. 

Hall said if legislators can work with the public and the reporting of journalists, then they can learn a lot about them and they won’t make mistakes. 

“Some of these Democrat members don’t have the integrity that others do,” Hall said. “It’s so much more helpful if we get (reporters) these documents early.” 

Getting HEAT done is Hall's top priority. He said at one point during his hour-long press conference that any Senate priority will have a “hard time moving forward” in the House" without HEAT passing the Senate. 

Meanwhile, Hall promised that a second version of HEAT is coming, and he will consider ideas like requiring conference reports be available 48 hours before either chamber votes on them.  

Hall said he didn’t want this year's final budgets to go to conference committee -- where new items not previously in any chamber's budget proposal – can be inserted into the final product. He said he believes the best practice is for the House and Senate to each defend and fight for what’s in each of their own budgets. 

Outside of hammering out agreeable earmark transparency legislation, Hall said he'd like economic development reform to be next on his to-do list. He wants to statutorily eliminate the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) and the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) programs, even though both were not funded in the budget. 

On the topic of negotiating budgets, Hall unveiled a new poster in the style of the Ghostbusters movie, meant to highlight the “ghost employees” or unfilled FTEs that were cut in the budget. 

When asked which Ghostbusters character he would go as for Halloween this year, Hall said, "Dan Aykroyd was in that movie. So that’s probably the one . . . I thought (Rep.) Ken Borton (R-Gaylord) looks kind of like Bill Murray a little bit, doesn’t he?” 

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