Dear Neighbor,
Greetings and I hope your summer has been going well. The Scott County Fair had good attendance, the LeSueur County Fair is next week, the State Fair which is just around the corner, and there's another celebration I hope you can attend: The grand re-opening of the State Capitol this Friday through Sunday.
Festivities will take place on the Capitol grounds in St. Paul to mark completion of a four-year, $310 million restoration project which returned the building from a state of deterioration to the grand Minnesota icon it is.
The current Capitol originally opened in 1905 and 112 years had taken its toll, both in function and form. The restoration project itself included repairing a deteriorating marble exterior, addressing life safety concerns, increasing access for the disabled, updating mechanical systems and generally making the building more user-friendly to the public.
As for this weekend’s events, a wide range of festivities is scheduled. A blessing of the building will be given at 8:30 a.m. Friday, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony will kick things off at 9. Events will start early in the morning last well into the night all three days. There are offerings planned for citizens of all ages, including everything from a Kids Zone to cocktails on the Capitol’s newly reopened balcony. Tours will be available and a number of musical performances are scheduled. The Capitol chandelier will be raised each day at 8 p.m. and a fireworks show will take place at 9:30 p.m. Saturday.
Organizers are estimating 100,000 people could attend the weekend festivities. A complete itinerary and more regarding the August weekend of grand opening events is available at this link.
As for legislative business, I recently submitted a letter to area newspapers to share my thoughts on the relatively good news that changes the Minnesota Legislature made earlier this year could end the four-year trend of double-digit premium increases since the implementation of MNsure – our state’s version of the federal Affordable Care Act. As I noted in the letter, more work remains to improve the long term affordability and accessibility of health insurance, but it was a refreshing twist to recently receive better news regarding those issues at the state level than has been the case for the past few years.
I'm also using time away from session to gather and analyze financial and debt information because I continue to believe those issues could be very disruptive for both us – and more likely our children and grandchildren – if they are not addressed now while there still may be time to do something about them. Although these issues are very seldom discussed in detail by the media, I believe they have the potential to pose one of the greatest threats we have into the future and therefore my hope is to bring more attention to them.
Click here for the full text of my letter on health care costs where I dive deeper into that subject.
Sincerely,
Bob