Conservation bill stalls in MN House Taxes Committee

05/16/2007

By Dennis Anderson,
Star Tribune
Last update: May 15, 2007


Majority Leader Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, walked out of his second House Taxes Committee hearing in as many days Tuesday afternoon, having failed again to ask for a vote on his dedicated conservation funding bill.

"I'm pretty frustrated," he said later. "We've been passing the bill through all the House committees in a bipartisan way, and right now we're one or two votes short on the Taxes Committee. And I can't get one Republican to support it."

Sertich also is having trouble with his party. Seventeen of the 26 members of Taxes are DFLers, and Sertich doesn't yet have enough of them on board to gain a majority vote.

He plans to wait until he has sufficient votes before asking for a show of hands.

"I don't want to lose momentum," he said. "We have a week left in the session. There are a lot of great [environmental and conservation] groups working on this. I know they're talking to legislators who are on the fence."

After Taxes, Sertich's bill would go to the Ways and Means Committee, and the Rules Committee. It's expected a surplus of votes can be found on the House floor to pass it.

Opponents of the measure say they don't believe dedicating funds through the constitution is good public policy.

"I had that opinion once, but I've become a convert to the idea," Sertich said.

If approved by the Legislature, a proposal to amend the constitution by increasing the sales tax 3/8 of 1 percent and dedicating the approximately $300 million raised annually to fish and wildlife habitat, clean water and the arts would go before voters in 2008.

The bill is needed, proponents say, because the state has failed to properly fund conservation for generations. Lost and degraded wetlands, polluted waters and fragmented forests have been the result.

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