For more information contact: Joan Nichols 651-29X-XXXX

NEWS COLUMN

2010 Legislative Report & Pre-Session Survey

MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS


EXTENDING FORECLOSURE PROTECTION FOR HOMEOWNERS
Each year for the last three years I passed laws that are among the leading laws in the country on foreclosures. This year, the law I authored extends the period for reinstatement of a mortgage from a minimum of three months to a minimum of eight months. In reality, because it takes some time for both lenders and their attorneys to process files, homeowners will have roughly 11 or 12 months in which to pay the arrearages on their payments. In talking to experts around the country, they believe we now have by far the longest period for reinstatement of any state in the nation (two months is standard around the country). For instance, the national office of ACORN celebrated when they extended the reinstatement period in Texas from 20 days to 50 days. The said my law was “fantastic". My new law will be of great benefit to those innocent homeowners who have been laid off from work or have undergone a sustained injury or illness that kept them from working for some months. Since a laid off worker is usually able to find another job in roughly five months (according to a fairly recent survey), my law will give them the time needed to accumulate enough money to take care of the past due payments on their mortgage so they don’t lose their home through foreclosure. Of course, this law will also be good for neighborhoods because it will help maintain home ownership.

Working with the Attorney General, I passed a law to prevent fly-by-night “mortgage counselors” from ripping people off. These so-called counselors would take fees to “negotiate” modifications of mortgages, then not do the work.

Two years ago, my Mullery Foreclosure Working Group produced 12 bills that became law, and some were leaders in the country. One of my issues, on which we couldn’t reach agreement, was mediation. I was going to bring it up again this year but the Attorney General stepped out ahead on it and introduced a bill. Some lawyers from the Bar Association and I thought the bill as introduced was unconstitutional. I worked with the Attorney General and we made changes that made it a good bill. I was able to convince the lobbyist for the largest lender in the state not to block it, but some lenders got the governor to veto it anyway.

NEIGHBORHOOD PRESERVATION
With the huge numbers of foreclosures on the North Side and certain other areas, the fabric of our neighborhoods has been greatly stressed. Two of my ideas for bills were backed by the lobbyists for Minneapolis and several other cities. The first one was to allow an exception to the ban on the use of eminent domain. Under the bill I authored, in low income areas experiencing high foreclosure rates, a city could use eminent domain to take properties that are run-down and abandoned and turn them over to a developer, such as the Greater Metro Housing Corporation, to redevelop that property for market-rate housing for homeowners. That would help stabilize our neighborhoods.

The second bill would allow a city with high numbers of foreclosures in low-income areas to require that the foreclosed home be sold to an owner-occupant if the owner foreclosed on was an owner-occupant. The North Side has some areas with very high percentages of rental property. When owner-occupied homes have been foreclosed, a high percentage of them have been sold to unscrupulous landlords who don’t care about the tenants who rent from them and don’t worry about what it will do to the neighborhoods. In general, there is proof that it’s important to have a certain amount of owner-occupied homes to have stable neighborhoods, rather than becoming mostly rental units, which means a more transient population with no stake in the community. This idea of mine seems to be the first in the country.

LEGISLATOR OF THE YEAR
I was greatly honored when the National Alliance on Mental Illness named me as their “Legislator of the Year”. One of my new laws was a provision that allowed 9-1-1 phone operators to directly order a mental health crisis intervention team to the scene of an incident where a person overcome with mental illness may be an immediate danger to themselves, law enforcement, or others. Another bill I authored would have funded training for law enforcement officers to understand how to deal with people suffering from severe mental illness; unfortunately, while we passed the policy committee with no opposition, the finance committee did not put in the necessary money.

As chair of the Civil Justice Committee, I held hearings on several issues, which brought to the forefront just how much mental health issues permeate the criminal justice and education systems. Many legislators highly praised the hearing for opening their eyes to these important issues. As I’ve looked into the criminal justice and education systems, I realized that mental health issues affect over half the people in our criminal justice system (and an even higher percentage among youth in the system) and relates to many issues that interfere with the effectiveness of our education system. In fact, my committee and the Education Committee will be holding a hearing at Patrick Henry on February 16th regarding mental health issues in Minneapolis schools. Recent national studies have shown that mental health has a huge affect on educational learning, juvenile justice, and health. I’ve tried to get other legislators to understand that once a person’s mental illness is addressed, the incidences of crime, chemical addiction, and failure in school will significantly lessen, thus resulting in less stress on our schools, courts, and prisons. For instance, recent studies show that we can save huge amounts of money in the juvenile justice system if we treat the mental health issues immediately and develop soft skills, like judgment, character, socialization, etc. However, we’re finding it’s extremely hard to get legislators (and agencies) to think “outside the box”; they’re used to concentrating their efforts on addressing the symptoms and resultant behavior, rather than trying to fix the root cause.

YOUTH JOBS AND JUVENILE JUSTICE
I was the author of the bill that obtained $24 million for jobs for Minneapolis youth. Of that, $600,000 went to the Park Board’s Learn-to-Earn program that combines classroom learning with work experience.

I’m on numerous juvenile justice groups (from local to national) and author bills they support. Much of our effort tries to take a smarter approach to problems (based on research data). Studies show that when youth are first minimally involved with the criminal system, the most effective way to keep them out of crime in the future is to promptly put them in intense diversion. A team of social workers, law enforcement, probation officers, educators, etc., looks at their lifestyle and determines what kind of intervention is needed. However, it’s hard to get legislators and agencies to look at new ways of doing things. Change is hard for many of them, as well as the public.

ADVISORY BOARD ON YOUTH FOR NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF STATE LEGISLATORS
Due to my extensive work on youth development, I was invited to be on the Advisory Group (less than two dozen legislators from around the country) for the National Conference of State Legislators. I was one of two co-founders of the Children and Youth Legislative Caucus in Minnesota. We realized that efforts in this state had become very fragmented and we needed to break down all the silos in order to have a cohesive and effective overall effort on youth development issues. We are trying to break down those silos that exist in government agencies, the legislature, non-profits, etc., where each entity works on one narrow issue affecting youth, independent of anyone else. Our NCSL Youth Advisory Panel is working closely with the Forum for Youth Investment. The Forum is the leader in the country on the Ready-by-21 program, which takes the approach that we don’t just need to give youth a good classroom education; they also need a stable home environment, access to health care, etc. Most of all, they need to develop judgment, character, attitude, socialization skills, commitment to others, etc.

Two of my bills this year seem to be strongly supported by anyone who hears about them, but the Education Committee won’t pass them. One would require high school students to volunteer service to the community in order to graduate. The other would require a few hours of coursework in middle school that would explain how easy it is for youth to get involved with the criminal justice system for the most minor infractions; the course would also explain the consequences of involvement in the criminal justice system with regard to its impact on the student’s present schooling, as well as future prospects (or lack thereof) for college and good-paying jobs.

DWI
I passed a law a year ago for a pilot project in Hennepin County that allowed repeat DWI offenders to drive with an ignition interlock device on their vehicle (paid for by the offender) so they can continue to work and provide for their families, thus not becoming a burden to taxpayers. The program was so effective that I was able to pass a law this year that expanded it throughout the entire state. The success rate in Hennepin County was nearly 95 percent.

BUSIEST COMMITTEE
Every year since I have been a committee chair, my committee has heard more bills than any other policy committee. The first two years of my chairmanship, we heard more bills than all policy committees and fiscal committees, with the exception of one fiscal committee, which had an extra month-and-a-half to hear bills. This year, once again, my committee heard more bills than any other policy committee.

BLOCKING BAD BILLS
One bill from a big contributor to Democrats sailed through the Senate committee unanimously. Once it got to my committee, however, I decided to spend some time to see what affect the bill would actually have and realized that it would effectively take away the rights of environmental and neighborhood groups. Our leadership initially strongly questioned why I blocked the bill until I explained to them the affect on the environment and neighborhoods. The bill would have allowed developers to sue neighborhood and environmental groups who object to the developer’s request for zoning exceptions, etc., from the local government. It would have also required that any neighborhood, environmental, or union group challenging a city’s zoning decision for a developer would have to pay for a bond to cover the millions of dollars the developer claims would be lost due to the delay caused by the appeal filed by the group. The bill would have effectively prevented citizen groups from ever appealing adverse decisions made by a city for a developer. Once I informed the environmental groups of the affects of this bill, they made it one of their highest priorities to support my efforts to block the bill. They were joined by some unions and we were able to stop the bill, despite the blind support of the bill in the Senate.

Another bad bill I was happy to block was one which treated public employees as second-class citizens. If a janitor for the state had a part-time job at McDonald’s, the wages for the McDonald’s job would have been disclosed to the world if the government knew about them. We need to prevent serious conflicts of interest, but not treat public employees in ways we wouldn’t want to be treated.

POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
As you probably recall, my bill became law a year ago (there’s only one other bill on this subject in the country) that dealt with veterans who returned from war with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and got into trouble with the law. I was the legislator who, for several months, led prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, law enforcement, veterans service officers, veterans groups, and legislative staff from California in developing our Minnesota law. Recently, our Minnesota law was cited positively by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that set aside a death sentence in Florida. My law set up a system to screen for PTSD in some cases and get treatment. However, in the last year the federally-run Veterans Hospital said its staff wouldn’t come to a locked facility, such as a jail. In response, local law enforcement took the veteran from jail to the Veterans Hospital. The VA then said they wouldn’t treat anyone released from lock-up. It seems the federal government is avoiding the cost of treatment for veterans. We are trying to get the federal government to take care of their responsibilities to help these honorably discharged veterans who have mental health problems because of their war experience.

SMALL BUSINESS
I passed a law for the National Federation of Independent Businesses that they said was one of the most important for small businesses. It allows a small business that is the subject of a wrongful action by a government agency to collect their attorney’s fees from the agency if the case is decided in favor of the small business. Another one of my bills, which was included in the Omnibus Tax Bill, was beneficial to small beginning technical businesses by allowing them to take income tax deductions for research and development, just as large corporations can now do. However, the Senate would not go along with this provision. I’m also a member of the new Small Business Legislative Caucus which is trying to learn what is needed for small business development. There are plenty of lobbyists for large businesses at the Capitol, but almost none for the very small businesses.

VICTORY MEMORIAL DRIVE
I was able to get the funding into the House of Representatives’ bonding bill for improvements to Victory Memorial Drive. Moreover, because of my past close working relationship with the Commissioner of Veterans Affairs, I was able to persuade him to personally talk to Governor Pawlenty so he wouldn’t veto the appropriation for this memorial to veterans.

Another bill I authored became law. It provides $44,000 to purchase 200 new disease- and insect-resistant elms for Victory Drive.

HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Minnesota has been experiencing a huge amount of human trafficking (which is much like slavery), especially involving youth. New tough criminal laws were passed on human trafficking, but the Senate blocked a bill I carried that would have created civil penalties. Only California has civil penalties; I worked with Civil Society (a well-known anti-trafficking organization) to develop a civil liability bill. After considering the problems, I realized that what we needed was mandatory minimum damages so that the people who were trafficked wouldn’t have to prove actual dollar amounts of damage. Without my extra provision for mandatory minimum dollars of liability, the civil penalty approach was not very effective. However, with my mandatory minimums on civil liability, the law would have been very effective for those traffickers who would be found not guilty in criminal cases because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. If the Senate had not blocked my bill and it had become law, we could have had a real legal tool to use against many traffickers because there was enough evidence to prove by a “preponderance of the evidence”, (the civil standard), even though there wasn’t enough evidence to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt”, (the criminal standard).

ANTI-DISCRIMINATION IN THE COURTS
I was able to get a law passed, even though the Senate committee wouldn’t hear it, that put into law as a state policy that the entire criminal justice system will eliminate all racial, ethnic, and gender unfairness. This law was strongly supported by the Minnesota Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee as their most important effort of the session.

DISPARITY IN HIRING PEOPLE OF COLOR
About 8 years ago I pressured the Department of Employee Relations for the state to set up an effective system to recruit people of color (the percentage of people of color working for the state was far below their percentage of the population). An expert was brought in and staff was assigned to set goals for agencies and establish effective recruitment and retention systems. Unfortunately, they are far from meeting the goals, partly because the administration no longer assigns people to work on affirmative action, and partly because of the statewide hiring freeze. I’m holding a hearing on this issue on January 25 at Folwell and will keep pursuing it. The head researcher for the Council on Black Minnesotans is assisting. I think whoever the new governor is will be more helpful. I’m also meeting with agencies regarding people of color contracting with the state.

WOMEN AND ASIAN JOB TRAINING
After many years of working on them, I finally got funding for two important job initiatives. The first would recruit, train, and place women into non-traditional jobs. It’s an opportunity for low-income women and women on welfare to get livable wage jobs (or much better) in a short time. The second would train Southeast Asian immigrants in occupational English so they can earn a decent living long before they learn general English. Unfortunately, the governor vetoed the second bill.

PUBLIC OR PRIVATE RECORDS
Many really passionate issues at the legislature involve whether government records of a specific kind should be kept private or open to the public. Records on adoptions, criminal history, housing, and many health records all evoke high passion. Most people line up at the two extremes on these issues, which come under the purview of my committee, and it’s almost impossible to reach agreement on them.

CONSUMER FRAUD
A bill I worked on and authored would have provided that if a business commits consumer fraud, the business would have to pay the attorney’s fees for the consumer if the consumer prevails in the case. Consumers often cannot afford to pay their attorney’s fees, plus the money to correct the damages caused by the fraudulent actions of the business. In other words, if a court awarded money from the business to the consumer for the fraud the business committed, after paying their attorney’s fees consumers often don’t have enough money to restore their house or whatever was damaged to the way it should have been in the first place. Unfortunately, the court system claimed it would have $1 million in extra costs, and we could not find a way to pay for it because of the budget deficit. Thus, this great bill for consumers couldn’t become law.


OTHER LEGISLATIVE ISSUES

BUDGET DEFICIT
By far the biggest issue facing the legislature this year was the fact the state had the largest budget deficit in history. The deficit of nearly $6½ billion was just under one-fifth of the state’s total budget. Over $4½ billion of that was caused by revenue shortfalls, mostly due to lower tax payments than expected.

The federal government’s stimulus package helped reduce the state budget deficit by roughly $2½ billion, leaving roughly $4 billion.

Many tell me to cut the bureaucracy and welfare. That doesn’t work. People are already complaining that the state no longer provides services they need and that’s because we’ve already made huge cuts to state agencies. All of state government comprises only 10 percent of the entire state budget and what used to be called AFDC is only half of one percent of the budget. Half of the state budget actually goes to education and a quarter goes to health care.

The legislature and governor agreed to just over $½ billion in cuts, mostly to health and human services. Of the remaining $½ billion, the legislature and governor agreed to $1¾ billion in shifts to education. These shifts were mainly delayed payments to school districts, etc., for a few months so they would be made in the following two-year budget rather than the one enacted in this legislative session, which was for the two-year budget beginning July 1, 2009. About $¾ billion came from governor vetoes, delays of rebates, etc.That still left about a $1 billion shortfall at the time of the end of the legislative session.

The governor, because of his promise to the Taxpayers League eight years ago that he would not raise taxes, refused to consider any form of present revenue increase. Instead, the governor proposed to borrow $1 billion by selling what are called “appropriation bonds”. This would actually be a loan for current operating expenses, which has never before been done in Minnesota history and has not been done by almost any state. The bonds would have been paid off over 20 years but the actual cost to the state in repayment would have been twice what we received from the bonds now. The bonds probably would have negatively affected the credit rating of the state also. Moreover, because of our constitution, future legislatures could have refused to pay back the bonds, thus we would have had a high interest rate on the bonds because of the lack of security. The legislators in the House from both parties denounced the governor’s proposal. In fact, the Republicans probably used even stronger language against the governor’s proposal than the Democrats.

Instead, the legislature decided to pass a revenue bill to fill that $1 billion deficit. Thus, the legislature sent a balanced budget package of bills to the governor for his signature. He signed all of them except the revenue bill of roughly $1 billion that would have balanced the budget. While that revenue bill the governor vetoed would have raised taxes on certain people, especially those making high incomes, overall it would have meant an actual reduction in the amount of state taxes over the biennium beginning July 1, 2009, compared to the biennium that ended on June 30, 2009. Thus, it was actually a decrease in total taxes collected by the state.

Our Minnesota Constitution requires the legislature and governor to enact a balanced budget. Every legislature and governor in Minnesota history has complied with that, but this governor decided not to. Instead, he vetoed the budget-balancing revenue bill from the legislature, which would have put the budget in balance combined with the decreases they had agreed to, and instead he said he would balance the budget by making unallotments of roughly $1 billion, a small portion of which was to his executive branch. [more about unallotments below]

It is very important to note that while many of the cuts (not including the roughly $1 billion that the governor planned to unallot) were agreed to by the legislature in order to help balance the budget in this time of severe recession, certain cuts were made by the governor through his line-item veto of expenditures. The most notable line-item veto that aroused the ire of the legislature and the public was his veto of General Assistance Medical Care. [GAMC will be discussed below]

UNALLOTMENT
Many people have asked me what unallotment means. There’s a good reason almost no one knows the term or understands how it works. The law giving a governor the power to unallot was enacted 70 years ago and until our current governor, Pawlenty, it had only been used three times throughout our history, and only in small amounts of dollars. In all of those cases previous to this year’s unallotment by Pawlenty, there had been a balanced budget enacted by the legislature and governor. It was only when the state ran short of money because of not enough revenue coming in as believed when the balanced budget was passed, that other governors used the unallotment procedure.

The nonpartisan staff I’ve talked to feel there’s a strong argument that Governor Pawlenty’s actions this year were unconstitutional, but we won’t know until there’s a Supreme Court decision on this. The reason it appears to be unconstitutional is that he never complied with the constitutional requirement of enacting a balanced budget. I also believe that his actions were unconstitutional because of those reasons.

Governor Pawlenty has never really tried to work with the legislature for what could be termed mutually-agreeable solutions to the budget problems. There has not really been the give-and-take of normal negotiations with Pawlenty that occurred with previous governors and the legislature; instead, this governor has almost totally said, “I’ll negotiate as long as you take what I want.”

During the summer, the governor announced what his unallotments would be for this biennial budget. In essence, the word “unallotment” means take away the authorized funding. His announcements indicated he would be taking away the funding for specific programs that he himself and the legislature enacted in May. Most of the programs he wanted to take the money away from were in health and human services as well as in the area of local government aids. Of course, those local government aids go directly to the local governments so they can reduce your property taxes. Thus, the amounts of local government aid he is taking away will probably increase our local property taxes by that amount.

FUTURE BUDGET PROBLEMS
When the legislature and governor enacted its budget bills, and the governor announced unallotments, they were in line with the predicted revenues at the time. Since then there has been a huge decline in revenue received by the state, mostly a decrease in taxes paid, and the state now faces a $1¼ billion deficit projection for its current budget. That will have to be accounted for in the upcoming legislative session or the governor will make additional unallotments of $1¼ billion on his own. Moreover, the outlook is worse for the future. The current budget runs until June of 2011. The predictions by the state’s panel of financial experts indicate that the budget starting on July 1, 2011, will be at least $5½ billion in the hole unless major changes are made to our current spending and/or taxing structure.

UNANNOUNCED SEARCHES OF A CONVICTED SEX OFFENDER’S COMPUTER ALLOWED
A convicted sex offender cannot access or maintain a personal website or user name for any social networking site that allows persons under the age of 18. There is also a new crime for soliciting children through texting or email over cell phones.

DRIVING
Motorists can be pulled over and ticketed for not wearing a seat belt, even though they have not committed any other traffic offense. Drivers can also be stopped for not having children under the age of 8 and shorter than 4’ 9” in a booster seat. Motorists can go 10 miles over the speed limit while passing on a two-lane highway if the posted speed limit is 55 mph or higher.

HEALTH CARE
Our COBRA law changed so people who qualify, but didn’t enroll, can now enroll and the federal government will pay 65 percent of the premium. If they are low income, Minnesota will pay a 35 percent subsidy. The governor and his staff did such a poor job of planning the proposed cuts for the budget, that they would have flushed down the toilet hundreds of millions of dollars of federal aid. Because the legislature and its staff looked at specific proposals that would lose federal aid and those that would bring federal aid, we were able to access a lot more federal money to pay for the costs of health and human services, as well as other parts of the budget. We were even able to allow 23,000 additional children to receive health coverage. Governor Pawlenty’s original proposed budget would have cut off health care for 113,000 Minnesotans.

GENERAL ASSISTANCE MEDICAL CARE (GAMC)
The governor vetoed the funding for General Assistance Medical Care. Once again, this seems to have been done without understanding all the complicated fallout from his move. About 36,000 extremely poor Minnesotans are on this health care program (they earn less than $8,000/year). What happens is that instead of going to a doctor at a cost of $100-$200 to the state, they will go to the emergency room at a cost of thousands of dollars to the state. Moreover, many of them have mental health needs and they won’t be getting their medications. In turn, they will be costing the court system a lot of money, along with extra time in the emergency room and in a mental health facility until they are readjusted and able to function on their own again. However, once they’re on their own, they are without the medical support they need to remain functioning, so they will likely re-enter the high-cost criminal justice and health systems. The governor said he would get them onto MinnesotaCare. However, first of all, there is a waiting period; second, many won’t be able to pay the premiums required; third, many who are chronically ill will quickly go over the cap on MnCare; fourth, it will drain the money out of the MnCare fund and we will end up having to increase the provider tax (a tax on all of us when we visit the doctor). Moreover, the estimate is that Hennepin County Medical Center will lose $55 million/year because of this proposal, and we will have to pay for that through property tax increases.




2010 PRE-SESSION LEGISLATIVE SURVEY

PLEASE FILL OUT THIS SURVEY AND RETURN IT TO ME BY MAIL OR SCAN AND SEND IT TO ME VIA EMAIL. THANK YOU.

Question Voter 1 Voter 2
1. Should the state build a new stadium for the Vikings by increasing taxes?
Yes
No
Not Sure
2. Should the state balance the budget by increasing taxes or cutting spending?
Raise taxes
Cut spending
Both
3. If we raise taxes, what taxes should be raised?
Income
Sales
Don’t raise taxes
4. If the sales tax is increased, should we:
Increase from 6½% to 7%?
Expand to:
Clothing
Services (haircuts, auto repairs, etc.)
Other (specify)
5. If we cut spending, which programs should we cut?
Higher education and job training
E-12 education
Health care
Human services (mostly nursing home care for elderly and disabled)
Pollution control and environment
Public Safety and corrections
Other (specify)
6. Should we change the date of the primary election from September to mid-summer?
Yes
No
Not Sure
7. Should marijuana be legalized if prescribed by a physician?
Yes
No
Not Sure

COMMENTS/CONCERNS/QUESTIONS: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________