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Legislative News and Views - Rep. Jeff Howe (R)

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Update from the House

Friday, March 24, 2017

 

Greetings,

Nice job, Dan and Crystal Ley of Richmond, for being named the Stearns County Soil and Water Conservation District’s 2016 Outstanding Conservationist. Their no-tilling, drilled/aerially seeded cover crop practices are to be commended and, again, congrats to the Leys for their good work.

Cold Spring-Richmond Interim Police Chief Jason Blum and canine Riley deserve special recognition for placing third out of 37 teams in the K-9 competition at the Regional Narcotic Certification in West Fargo, N.D.

The headline issue this week at the Capitol is the House kicked the budget process into high gear by putting out its plan for the next two years. It includes $1.35 billion in tax relief, $450 million in new funding for roads and bridges and $1.1 billion in new funding for K-12 schools compared with the 2016-17 biennium.

The House transportation proposal would put $6 billion toward Minnesota’s roads and bridges infrastructure over the next 10 years. The House bill also dedicates $12.5 million over each of the next two years to the popular small cities funding program, which allocates dollars to cities with fewer than 5,000 residents for local road improvements. It also creates a special fund specifically for bridge projects.

The $450 million for road and bridge infrastructure throughout the state would come from redirecting existing transportation-related funding streams to a Transportation Priorities Fund. The fund would be made up of funding from the existing taxes on auto parts, repairs and rentals and leases.

As for tax relief, the $1.35 billion proposed by the House is larger than the governor and Senate are offering. One of the most important pieces would reduce Social Security taxes on seniors by about $270 million over the next two years.The House budget total also limits government spending more than either of the plans from the governor and the Senate.

Look for more details on these parts of the budget – and a whole host of other areas – as respective finance bills make their way through the process and take final form.

On a final note, the subject of Real ID remains a work in progress. It is disingenuous for the governor to now admonish simply codifying into state statute a policy that was enacted in 2003 on the heels of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on our nation. It seems like common sense to make this practice official, so it is hard to understand why the governor would resist this and want to keep the door open for bureaucrats to change things in the future.

The House’s attention is going to be put more and more toward passing bills for various parts of the new state budget during the coming weeks. Look for more news on that soon as we look to find agreement with the governor and the Senate.

Regards,

Jeff

Rep. Jeff Howe
527 State Office Building
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55155
651-296-4373
rep.jeff.howe@house.mn