Session adjournment forecast: Looking sunny
"MN Legislature"04/09/2006
Progress on a wide range of initiatives has House Speaker Steve Sviggum speculating legislators will get home sooner rather than later.
Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
Last update: April 08, 2006 – 10:25 PM
To hear House Speaker Steve Sviggum tell it, this session is going so swimmingly that legislators might even return home early.
“I’m going to suggest we’ll finish well in advance of the deadline,” said the Kenyon Republican, flush with optimism last week after landslide House votes to build a Gophers football stadium and rein in government’s power to seize private property.
Sviggum said the wrap-up could come as much as two weeks before the adjournment deadline of May 22.
There’s some serious horse-trading left to do, however. At the top of the to-do list is the public works bonding bill, a centerpiece of most election-year sessions.
The House completed the initial round of bonding bidding last week with a $949 million plan that the Taxpayers League of Minnesota called “Tammany Hall-like.” It’s the biggest pork-barrel bill offered by House Republicans since they captured the majority in 1998, $104 million richer than Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s proposal but $41 million short of the DFL Senate bill that scrapes the state’s unofficial credit limit.
“Legislators are trying to buy their way back into the good graces of the voters,” kvetched League president David Strom. “This bonding bill is looking like a giant taxpayer rip-off.”
Fiscal conservatives had even more to complain about last week. The Senate passed a constitutional proposal for a three-eighths percentage point boost in the state sales tax to fund outdoors and arts projects. And committees advanced long-debated plans for Twins and Vikings stadiums to be subsidized by sales tax increases in Hennepin and Anoka counties, respectively.
Social conservatives were howling, too, after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and its legal equivalent. For most bills, that would ring a death knell. With this one, expect efforts by Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, to bring it up on the Senate floor.