MN Legislature running out of time — or is it?

Dave Orrick, Pioneer Press
·3 min read
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Facing a looming midnight deadline, the Minnesota Legislature sputtered on Sunday, leaving unclear whether a major series of tax breaks and long-sought spending plans — or anything of widespread significance — would get done.

Senior lawmakers’ opinions were all over the map Sunday afternoon, when asked to predict what was the most likely — or best — course of action. Finger-pointing and frustration broke out in some quarters, while guarded optimism persevered in others, and a spectrum of election-year political calculations hung in the air of the state Capitol in St. Paul.

Minnesota is one of two legislatures in the nation with control split among Republicans and Democrats, and lawmakers’ primary task was how to address a record budget surplus of more than $9 billion.

On Monday, Gov. Tim Walz, House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, announced a grand bargain for how it all should work, but hammering out many of the details has proven problematic.

Perhaps the biggest question: Would a bipartisan $4 billion package of major tax breaks agreed to Saturday actually get done, or would it become legislative roadkill splattered by disagreements over unrelated spending plans?

Another question: Would a separate aspect of the grand bargain — $1.5 billion in public works projects — ultimately be approved, or would it fall by the wayside as well?

By afternoon Sunday, a few things had become relatively clear:

  • Not everything generally agreed to by the state’s top leaders last week in the grand bargain was likely to get done. There simply didn’t appear to be enough time for several large bills — hundred of pages of legal language — to be processed by the constitutional deadline at midnight.

  • Among the most likely casualty: a health and human services spending plan that had held the prospect of a range of initiatives, from increasing pay for caregivers and funding other programs to help keep nursing homes and long-term care centers afloat to approving millions of dollars for Ramsey County to stave off a feared burst in homelessness.

  • Vast swaths of the $4 billion in spending envisioned in the grand bargain had been agreed to. However, tens or hundreds of millions in sticking points threatened to upend it all.

  • Nothing has to happen. The state is operating under a two-year, $52 billion budget approved last year, so there’s no risk of parts of the government shutting down if no additional legislation passes this year.

  • There appeared to be a growing sense that the limited appetite for a special session — a legislative overtime of sorts — was fading. Only Walz, a Democrat, can call a special session. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t want to. Even if he changed his mind, he would most likely require buy-in from leaders of the House and Senate before doing so, and Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate didn’t appear enthusiastic about the idea. It wasn’t clear where the Democratic-Farmer-Labor-controlled House stood.

Among the issues that remained in dispute:

  • Lawmakers struggled to agree on how to spend some $450 million in public safety, which could include recruiting hiring police officers, as well as funding community-based crime prevention strategies.

  • Negotiators appeared at loggerheads over how to spend $1 billion on schools, as demands for special education and mental health needs dominated discussions.

  • A years-long disagreement on transportation funding emerged as a potentially intractable sticking point: whether all proceeds from sales taxes on auto parts should go into the state’s dedicated trust fund for state highways. Currently, half of those funds do, while the other half goes into the state’s general fund.

Another possibility: a “must-haves” bill that seeks to combine numerous priorities that both sides agree to. It was unclear which issues that might include. Discussion on this idea were being held in backrooms and alcoves among lawmakers seeking a pragmatic resolution and lobbyists imploring them of the necessity for their particular issues.

Here’s a summary of many of the issues lawmakers were grappling with Saturday.

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