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Minnesota House of Representatives

State Representative Jeanne Poppe

487 State Office BuildingState Office Building
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
651-296-4193

For more information contact: Jenny Nash 651-296-4122

Posted: 2012-04-27 00:00:00
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NEWS COLUMN

2012 SESSION UPDATE

The clock is winding down on the 2012 legislative session. The situation remains fluid at the State Capitol in these waning days while high profile issues – bonding and a new stadium for the Vikings – have yet to be addressed as a body. Three bipartisan omnibus bills passed on the House Floor this week and will go to the Governor for his signature.

Omnibus Health and Human Services Bill

The Omnibus Health and Human Services bill reverses two of the most ill-advised cuts that were enacted in last year’s budget. First of all, it restores the 20 percent wage cut to Personal Care Attendants (PCA) providing care to a family member. This cut would have forced nearly 7,000 Minnesotans into the choice of leaving their job or earning less than $10 an hour. At that wage, many PCAs would fall below the poverty line. It also restores the cut from last year to emergency Medical Assistance for chemotherapy and dialysis patients. Both these cuts are reversed for this fiscal year only and are scheduled to go into effect in the next biennium unless the legislature takes future action.

Additionally, it contains several provisions to support families and children dealing with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This bill reforms foster care options for people with autism who are currently receiving home and community-based services. The state will work with counties on pilot autism-specific group homes, provided by people specifically trained to meet the needs of this specific population. The Department of Human Services is directed to explore creative residential models aimed at providing a better integration of services for children diagnosed with autism in the hope of combining that knowledge and the results of the pilot project toward continued reforms in the coming years. There are also two studies on autism in the bill.

Omnibus Agriculture Bill

The Agriculture bill makes food safer and improves the Department of Agriculture’s overall efficiency. It creates a new consolidated food safety chapter to put all food safety duties and responsibilities of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture into one section of law. In addition it contains provisions to enhance the safety of food supply including making it a violation of law to sell food that is from a business located outside Minnesota that has not been appropriately licensed, inspected or approved. It also authorizes the Department of Agriculture to pursue more cost effective administrative enforcement procedures in food safety violation rather than current criminal processes and extends the sunset date for the Food Safety and Defense Task Force to June 30, 2017.

Other policy provisions, include:

· extending for two more years the ethanol minimum content dates set to expire in 2013;

· directing the NextGen Energy Board to study whether the definition should remain focused on ethanol or be expanded to other biofuels;

· pushing the effective date to eliminate a seven-year “use-it-or-lose-it" provision on wind easements out to June 1, 2017;

· allowing a microloan fund to expand to include persons of a protected class who want to grow specialty crops or own livestock for production of products to market; and

· creating a Dairy Research, Teaching and Consumer Education Authority.

Omnibus Legacy Bill

The Omnibus Legacy bill funds special accounts established by 2008 legislation, including: Outdoor Heritage, Clean Water, and Arts and Cultural Heritage. Unlike other Legacy funds, the Outdoor Heritage Fund is set up for annual, not biennial, appropriations with the majority of those funds allocated for public land acquisition.

Using most of the recommendations from the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council, the Omnibus Legacy bill makes distributions for fiscal year 2013 as follows: Outdoor Heritage Fund - $99.9 million; Clean Water Fund - $6 million; and the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund - $1.6 million. The Parks and Trails section did not receive any new funding in the bill.

The Outdoor Heritage Fund is allocated as follows: $24,640,000 for prairies and grasslands; $15,300,000 for forests; $31,140,000 for wetlands; $28,620,000 for habitats, and $220,000 for administrative purposes.

Southeastern Minnesota benefits from the wetlands funding used to purchase permanent easements and restore wetlands through the Reinvest in Minnesota (RIM) Reserve program and the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP). These programs have been successful in helping our area mitigate and prevent flooding. Also contained in the House Legacy bill is funding to fight the spread of Asian Carp and other invasive aquatic species. It contains $7.5 million for construction of Asian Carp barriers and $1.8 million for new aquatic invasive species research at the University of Minnesota (coupled with $2 million from the Environmental Trust Fund.) This funding level is much more than in the past. Asian Carp, Eurasian milfoil and zebra mussels aren’t just a threat to our enjoyment of our state’s natural treasures; they threaten our tourism industry, responsible for bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars into our state.

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