I'm a journalist with 12+ years covering Minnesota communities, local, state and federal government, politics and elections. Currently living in St. Cloud and writing freelance for different publications. I graduated from Carleton College in 1993 with a degree in Political Science.
DFL lawmakers could send a slightly different version of a state construction borrowing bill Gov. Tim Pawlenty previously threatened to veto to his desk this week. A working group of state lawmakers came up with the $986 million bonding bill proposal last week to replace a $1 billion bonding bill both houses have passed but which hasn’t been sent to Pawlenty, who promised to veto it if it reaches his desk. You can see the changes this revised bill would make to the DOA bonding bill here. Among them were:
* $44 million in cuts to educational facilities in Alexandria, Canby, Worthington, Marshall, Dakota County and Anoka Ramsey and North Hennepin Technical Colleges. * Elimination of $5 million for a garbage incinerator for Pope and Douglas counties. Continue Reading
More than a month into the session, the Rules Committee of the Minnesota House of Representatives set deadlines by which all bills are supposed to have been heard and acted on in committee, if they are to have a chance of receiving general approval on the House floor.As far as I can tell, the Minnesota Senate’s Rules Committee still has not set those deadlines.These deadlines are supposed to offer an impartial means of sorting the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the 1,000+ bills lawmakers introduce during every two-year session cycle.For the House, a bill must first have received a favorable committee recommendation by the end of the day on March 12, then on March 14 bills that originated in the Senate and met that body’s first committee recommendation deadline must have also received committee approval in the House to remain under active consideration.Finally, by 5 p.m. on March 29, finance committees in both the House and Senate must have acted favorably on the big spending bills.Usually, these rules are used to explain to a lawmaker why their bill no longer stands a chance of being passed. “Sorry, but you missed the deadline.” For fans of the film “Office Space,” it’s the legislative equivalent of failing to put a cover on your TPS report.But look closer and rules for all become rules for some. They don’t apply to the Taxes, Finance, Ways and Means, Capital Investment or Rules committees. The reason for this is because everybody knows that the final deals are going to get done in the last minute and they’re usually going to require moving a bunch of bills through these committees before getting them passed in the waning moments of the session.This means that, inevitably, lawmakers are going to be voting on bills that they’ve had little or no time to read beforehand, and which haven’t gone through committee hearings in order for the public to examine them more closely.So what we’re left with is simply a crowd-control tool for legislative leaders, who make up the membership of the rules committees. Continue Reading
Dozens, if not hundreds, of new bills are introduced at the Minnesota Legislature every week, and the lucky ones that progress toward becoming laws first have to make it through several committee hearings in both the Senate and House of Representatives, where they can be gutted, killed, transformed or beefed up.So, how to keep track of the bills that are important to you? The Minnesota Legislature’s answer is called MyBills, a free subscription service that allows you to keep track of bills based on their topic or their author.Once you select a bill to start following, you can receive e-mails (sorry, no texts) notifying you of any modifications or movement of that bill through the legislative process. You will even receive alerts that let you know beforehand when the bill you’re following has been scheduled for a committee hearing or put on the House or Senate calendar for a possible floor vote.Be warned, however. It’s easy to sign up to follow so many bills that you’ll quickly suffer from information overload. At last count, 3,024 bills had been introduced in the Senate and 3,386 in the House during this two-year session. Continue Reading
The discussion began when Minneapolis Ward 2 City Council member Cam Gordon posted a University of Minnesota Police crime alert about a robbery that took place the previous day to E-Democracy.org’s online Minneapolis Cedar-Riverside Neighbors Forum. The police report contained language indicating the suspects “spoke with an east African accent,” and the next day, neighbors had questions about the report for Gordon, who represents the near-campus neighborhood.
Should the police have used that description? What is an “east African accent?” Was it a helpful description or racial profiling? As a result of the discussion, Gordon offered to convene a meeting with U of M Police Chief Greg Hestness, Minneapolis Police, the Somali Student Association and West Bank Community Coalition Safety Committee to discuss concerns and see if the crime alerts can be improved. Continue Reading
Minnesota voters will head to the polls a month earlier to vote in the state’s primary elections, after Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Wednesday signed SF 2251, a bill moving the primary election date to the second Tuesday in August, into law. The bill, from Sen. Terri Bonoff, DFL-Minnetonka, and Rep. Steve Simon, DFL-St. Louis Park, brings Minnesota into compliance with federal elections laws that require that overseas and military voters have adequate time to fill out and return absentee ballots for the general elections in November. Local elections officials often couldn’t guarantee that took place under previous state law, which set primary elections for the middle of September. They couldn’t print up the general election ballots until the results of the primary elections were known, and then often sent out those ballots to overseas and military voters knowing there was little if any chance they would be returned on time. Continue Reading
When news came on Tuesday that Minnesota’s economic and financial situation had improved a little bit from the $1.2 billion state budget deficit lawmakers were told they’d need to plug this year, two men named Tom were the ones charged with delivering that news in a press conference you can watch here.Tom Stinson, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Applied Economics, is Minnesota’s State Economist, a position he has held for more than two decades.He’s the one who crunched the numbers and came to the just-released conclusion that the state’s deficit for the remainder of this budget cycle through next June has improved to $994 million.His February update also includes dire warnings that the state’s next two-year budget cycle could rack up a $5.8 billion deficit, without factoring inflation and assuming that ugly cuts Gov. Tim Pawlenty made unilaterally last year hold up.Stinson is a contract employee for the state and has come under fire in the past from Pawlenty’s administration for warning that the state’s budget problems are more severe than the turmoil caused by the current recession, for saying that government spending through the state bonding bills and federal stimulus bills can and has helped create jobs, and that government spending today is taking less of Minnesotans’ personal income than at any time in the last 15 years.Tom Hanson, on the other hand, is Pawlenty’s commissioner of Minnesota Management and Budget, the state agency charged with putting together Pawlenty’s budget proposals and monitoring how the money is spent.Hanson is a lawyer and political appointee of Pawlenty’s who has served Pawlenty or the Republican Party most of his career, including his previous job as Pawlenty’s deputy chief of staff and director of cabinet and legislative affairs.It’s his job to argue for Pawlenty’s budget priorities at the Capitol, both in committee hearings and behind closed doors with state lawmakers, and also to put the best possible face on the Pawlenty agenda.While Stinson is occasionally the subject of derision from within the Pawlenty administration for his dour predictions about the future (see this presentation he and State Demographer Tom Gillaspy gave lawmakers last fall), Hanson is regularly the subject of scorn by House and Senate DFL leaders for his optimistic takes on the impact of Pawlenty’s budget cuts and creative math skills. Continue Reading
With the number of uninsured Minnesotans reaching nearly half a million in 2009, and others in danger of being cut off by the state’s planned phase-out of the General Assistance Medical Care program for the state’s poorest, the question becomes, what can Minnesota do to keep its residents insured?
More than 100,000 more Minnesotans went without health insurance in 2009 than in 2007, according to a survey conducted by the Minnesota Department of Health and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health released this month. “The economic recession has had a clear impact on health insurance access and affordability,” Minnesota Commissioner of Health Dr. Sanne Magnan said after the survey was released to the public. “While it is not surprising that we found a higher rate of uninsurance in 2009, these study results highlight the need to sustain Minnesota’s health reform efforts that are designed to contain rising health care costs.” The facts:
Minnesota historically has had one of the lowest rates of uninsurance in the country, but the number of uninsured is growing as the number of Minnesotans who have health insurance through their employer decreased from 62.5 percent in 2007 to 57.2 percent in 2009. Over the same period, the percentage of Minnesotans who were uninsured increased from 7.2 percent to 9.1 percent. Continue Reading
The Minnesota House of Representatives on Monday came up three votes short of overriding Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a bill that would provide a short-term fix to keep thousands of the poorest Minnesotans from being kicked off public health insurance beginning this month.The House vote was 86-47 to override Pawlenty’s veto of SF 2168, a bill that provides funding for the General Assistance Medical Care program for the next 18 months. To get the two-thirds majority, 90 votes were needed.When no Republicans joined 87 DFLers in voting to overturn Pawlenty’s veto, House Majority Leader Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, changed his vote to “no” in a procedural move that allowed him to table the bill for possible reconsideration.What the result means is that, beginning today, automatic enrollment notices will start going out to tens of thousands of Minnesotans enrolled in the safety net public health insurance program to notify them that they will have to find other means of insuring their medical costs.Sertich’s vote and maneuver means that negotiations could continue with Pawlenty’s administration and House Republicans to find another solution.Pawlenty has said that many will be able to enroll in other public health programs such as MinnesotaCare, but DFLers say that many will slip through the cracks and that the additional burden on MinnesotaCare will bankrupt the Health Care Access Fund that pays for it.House Republicans initially supported the bill, which passed the body on a bipartisan 125-9 vote. But after Pawlenty’s veto, House Republican leaders said they were voting to send the bill to conference committee for improvements and continued negotiations with Pawlenty.When the Senate received the bill from the House, however, DFL leaders there voted to accept the House bill without changes, meaning no conference committee was needed. The bill went straight to Pawlenty, who vetoed it, saying it did not reform the GAMC program enough and did not control spiraling costs. Continue Reading
Next week will see fireworks in the House of Representatives and the final word on how bad Minnesota’s state budget situation is before lawmakers have to get to work fixing it.On Monday, House DFLers could attempt to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of SF 2168, a bill the Legislature passed overwhelmingly that would have preserved public health insurance under the state’s General Assistance Medical Care program, which is set to expire on March 1 due to Pawlenty’s budget unallotments last year.The Senate voted this week to override Pawlenty’s veto, but House DFLers must find three Republicans to joint them in order to complete the override, and House Republican leaders have promised their caucus will stand with their governor.Pawlenty and legislative leaders are expected to negotiate over the weekend to find a compromise that would keep an estimated 33,000 of the poorest Minnesotans on the health insurance plan, at least for another year.In a press conference on Friday, House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, said she would prefer a negotiated agreement, but if one did not materialize, the veto override effort could take place Monday.On Tuesday, Pawlenty’s budget gurus will release the state’s February economic forecast, which is the last piece of financial information lawmakers will have as they settle in to balance the state’s budget before they go home this spring.Minnesota Management and Budget Commissioner Tom Hanson and State Economist Tom Stinson will release the forecast at a press conference at the Capitol at 11:15 a.m. that will also be streamed live on the Senate Media Web site here.The previous official forecast from November put the state’s budget deficit for the current budget cycle ending next June at $1.2 billion, even after Pawlenty’s unilateral budget slashing, and there hasn’t been much evidence that things have gotten much better or worse since then for the state.The forecast will also give another hint as to how big the next two-year budget cycle’s deficit is going to be for the state. The November forecast predicted a $5.4 billion deficit, not counting inflation. Continue Reading
The Minnesota Senate will meet in session Thursday morning with one big item on its potential agenda: overturning Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a bill that would save public health insurance for the poorest Minnesotans.The bill, SF 2168 from Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, would have modified the state’s General Assistance Medical Care and MinnesotaCare public health insurance programs to preserve insurance for 33,000 Minnesotans enrolled in the GAMC program.That program is scheduled to phase out by March 1 if nothing is done, because Pawlenty cut it last year in his unalottment actions to eliminate the state’s budget deficit. He maintains most of the people kicked off GAMC could move to MinnesotaCare or other programs.Pawlenty vetoed the bill, saying that it did not address cost issues with the program and did not represent significant reform, despite the fact that the Minnesota Hospital Association and Minnesota Medical Association had agreed to cuts in reimbursement through the program to help keep it solvent.DFLers have a veto-proof majority in the Senate, so today’s vote is not expected to be dramatic. But it moves the action to the House, where DFLers would have to convince three Republicans to join with them to overturn the veto.The bill passed with veto-proof majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives before going to Pawlenty, but House Republicans have said they will stand with their Governor to enforce his veto.DFL lawmakers have met with Pawlenty and his officials to try to hammer out an agreement before that vote would take place, possibly sometime next week.UPDATE: On a 45-21 party line vote, the Senate voted to overturn Pawlenty’s veto. Now it’s up to the House of Representatives. Continue Reading
