Dear Neighbor,
Before getting to this week's legislative news, I want to wish a happy Mother's Day to moms. Thank you for all you do.
Much of my focus the next two weeks will be reconciling the House and Senate versions of the supplemental budget. I am co-chairing this conference committee, which is comprised of five members from each the House and the Senate (the Senate Chair is Democrat Dick Cohen of St. Paul). Since we have no net new spending in the House (we last year passed into law bills that funded state government for two years), and the Senate has nearly $600 million in new spending, there is a lot of negotiating and reconciling to do.
The House so far has passed three omnibus bills which cover eight topics: K-12 education, higher education, health and human services, state government finance, public safety, jobs, agriculture and the environment. The Senate passed similar components in a single bill of 611 pages. The House bills also total nearly 600 pages (there is a lot of policy language in the House bills that is not in the Senate bill).
Together we need to negotiate one single identical bill out of the different bills of the House and Senate that is also acceptable to the Governor, and can be passed before our constitutional adjournment date of May 23. So that is what I will be spending a lot of time on over the next two weeks. I should also mention there are numerous Saint Cloud area provisions in these bills.
Efforts continue regarding transportation, tax relief and bonding. A transportation meeting took place this afternoon in St. Paul where the House and Senate exchanged proposals for a long-term plan. Look for more on this soon. The tax committee is basically awaiting an agreement between the House and Senate leaders and Governor on how much tax relief they agree upon before they move forward. The bonding bill failed in the Senate this week so there will now need to be further negotiations.
In other news, you may have seen that I am suspending my efforts to extend the Northstar Corridor to St. Cloud this session. This is in response to recent comments from the Dayton Administration, and the refusal by the DFL-controlled Senate to give this bill (H.F. 3691) a hearing.
Minnesota Department of Transportation Commissioner Charlie Zelle and Metropolitan Council Commissioner Adam Duininck recently wrote a letter to the Times opposing my plan.
I am disappointed that the Dayton Administration has come out in opposition to my plan, which passed the House Transportation Committee with bipartisan support on a 17-3 vote. The Dayton Administration has never proposed a plan to extend Northstar to St. Cloud, nor allocated any money in their current budget for it. My plan would open negotiations with BNSF Railroad and suggest cutting back on Northstar service in the Twin Cities in exchange for extending two trains per weekday to St. Cloud, and using the existing Amtrak station. I have believed this could be done without additional cost because the additional operating cost of extending the train to St. Cloud would be offset by the mileage savings from not operating some trains in the metro area that are under capacity. The latest attack on my plan, by two key transportation commissioners who would be involved in negotiating with BNSF, make me reluctantly conclude my time is better spent on working on other St. Cloud priorities.
I certainly would be willing to reverse my position if the Dayton Administration or the DFL-controlled Senate express interest in my bill or a variation of it.
One upcoming issue for next week is a hearing I will be co-chairing with my Senate counterpart Dick Cohen. I have been frustrated for a long time with how things always drag down to the last minute at the Legislature, with just about everyone waiting for the top few people (Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, and Governor) to come to the agreements necessary to end session.
I approached Senator Cohen last year about having a joint hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee to look into alternate ways of establishing the so called "targets" of spending which need to be established before conference committees can get serious with their negotiations. We will be having some experts from the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) in on Tuesday for a joint hearing to hear about how other states approach this issue, and see what we can learn (they are free because the state pays dues to this group).
While this will probably not bear fruit this year (I would have liked to do it earlier but the NCSL experts were unavailable), this will hopefully give us new ideas that can be implemented in later years to avoid the last minute rush that seems so prevalent each year. One of my provisions that sets up an interim study of this is part of the conference committee I am co-chairing.
Thank you for your continued correspondence as we make our way into the final full two weeks of the 2016 session.
Sincerely,
Jim