Accessibility menu
State Representative Paul Anderson
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
651-296-4317
For more information contact:
GUEST COLUMN
Streamlined committee structure in Legislature
By Rep. Paul Anderson
Legislative leadership has announced a new committee structure for the upcoming session. It will make the process more streamlined and transparent, in addition to saving the state several hundred thousand dollars. A total of 21 committees has been eliminated, 12 in the House and nine in the Senate. That means there will now be 24 House committees and 16 in the Senate.
Among the committees I served on last year, several major changes have been made. Veterans Services has been dropped from the Agriculture Committee and becomes a separate division of State Government Finance. Ag. and Rural Development will now stand on its own as a finance committee, with Ag. and Environment having its own policy committee.
The other major changes on the House side come in the areas of education, health care, and regulation. While in the past each of those had policy committees, the new structure calls them “reform committees.” That’s particularly interesting in education, where reforms to better apply for federal funding last year were not instituted. Look for some of those same ideas to come up again in the Education Reform Committee.
Another area that will be looked at closely next year is pensions and retirement, where the Joint Legislative Commission on Pensions and Retirement will deal with a potential multi-billion dollar shortfall in funding.
In looking at the make-up of the new Legislature, 59 of the 201 members will be freshmen. That works out to 29 percent, which is a very large percentage. In the House, where there are 35 freshmen, 33 are Republicans while only two are members of the DFL.
Those attending a meeting Nov. 16 in St. Cloud concerning the adult farm management program heard discussion about the “haves” and “have-nots” in agriculture this year. Longtime instructor Brad Burkland used figures to show that dairy producers, coming off two very challenging years, are facing at least several more months of below-the-cost-of-production prices for their milk. Grain producers, on the other hand, have seen the prices they receive go up all through harvest, although corn and soybean markets have been extremely volatile the past few days.
According to figures from dairy producers enrolled in the adult program from the counties of Stearns, Benton, Mille Lacs, and Morrison, the overall cost of producing milk is just below $17 per hundredweight. That figure includes direct costs of $13, along with overhead expenses of nearly $4. A look at the futures price of milk on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reveals the problem. As of Nov. 15, the price for November milk was $15.42 … and it gets worse. It quickly drops into the $13 range and stays there all the way through April of next year. The price inches back up over $14 in May, and not until July does it get back above the $15 mark. The average futures price of milk for the entire year of 2011 is $14.56.
Unless things change dramatically, an average sized dairy farm with 100 cows will continue to lose money all of next year. Using production costs from 2009, the loss could be over $2 per hundredweight or approximately $43,000 for that average-sized herd. And that’s before any increased cost of higher grain prices is factored into the equation.
News Items
- ANDERSON TAKES HOUSE OATH - (Posted: Jan 8 2013 12:00AM)
- Legislative begins this week - (Posted: Jan 11 2013 3:36PM)
- Current surplus allows K-12 repayment - (Posted: Dec 10 2012 12:00AM)
- Archived News Items
- Subscribe to RSS News Feeds
- Read more about RSS.