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Legislative News and Views - Rep. Ben Lien (DFL)

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Legislative Update - April 21, 2017

Friday, April 21, 2017

Greetings from the Floor,

The Legislature returned from the Easter/Passover break this week with floor sessions on Tuesday.  Now that the large omnibus finance bill have been passed by both bodies, the conference committees will begin meeting to work out differences between the House and Senate bills.  With four weeks left in the session, this is the time of year when final budget discussions begin.

The House passed six bills off the floor yesterday (all of the votes were nearly unanimous).  Summaries of the bills are as follows:

HF 593: Makes technical changes to the Department of Commerce’s regulation of real estate appraisers

HF 676: Pertains to lawn care contracts for landscaping application (fertilizer and pesticide) companies

HF 1294: Expands changes made in 2014 to state law around wholesaler sales representatives’ contract terminations to include more sales representatives who work for wholesalers based out of state

HF 1397: Allows for group life insurance companies to limit payments to beneficiaries when the insured person died while furthering terrorism

HF 1477: Allows credit unions to send out meeting notices electronically

HF 1732: Makes technical changes to the Department of Commerce’s actions around market conduct exams (investigations by the department to determine whether an insurance company has followed laws related to distribution of products to consumers and settlement of claims)

The Department of Employment and Economic Development released jobs numbers yesterday for the month of March, 2017 and revised numbers for the month February, 2017.  The March numbers show Minnesota added 5,300 new jobs, and the February numbers were revised to show 6,200 jobs were added.  The unemployment rate for March was reduced from 4% to 3.8%, and the state has added over 48,000 jobs in the last year.  This continues the steady trend of overall job growth in the North Star State, however; the bigger news in all this is that, for the first time ever, Minnesota has surpassed 2.5 million private sector jobs.  This is incredible news!  To read more, please go to: https://mn.gov/deed/newscenter/press-releases/?id=290459.

Thank You for the Opportunity to Serve,

Ben