Editorial: Senate bonding bill sends a strong message

03/28/2006

House should emulate Senate’s higher education emphasis.

Star Tribune
Published: March 28, 2006

All the partisan spinning at the Legislature had some Republican observers so dizzy last week that they decried the Senate’s timely approval of a strong bonding bill as a diversionary tactic.

Fortunately, most GOP senators were seeing straight. Two-thirds of them joined the DFL majority last Thursday in a no-nonsense vote to borrow nearly $1 billion for public works projects. That vote sent a tacit message to the GOP-controlled House: Get moving on the real work of this session.

The House seems ready to comply. House Speaker Steve Sviggum said Friday that a bonding bill will be on the House floor before the Easter/Passover recess. That’s well before the constitutionally required May 22 adjournment. Keep to that schedule, and Minnesotans might see something they have not seen in years: a timely and orderly finish to a productive lawmaking session.

The Senate bill delivers another important message to the House and Gov. Tim Pawlenty: Don’t shortchange higher education. Buildings requested by the state’s colleges and universities account for most of the difference between the $845 million in general obligation bonds Pawlenty proposes to issue and the $990 million total approved by the Senate.

The Senate bill authorizes 75 percent of the amount requested by the state’s two higher ed systems, the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Pawlenty proposed to fund 62 percent of the university’s request and a meager 45 percent of the amount sought by the MnSCU system.

Many MnSCU campuses are dominated by the buildings in which baby boomers studied in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the students they served, those buildings are showing their age. They need the repairs, remodeling and replacement that the Senate bill would fund.

Unlike the governor, the Senate honored the priorities chosen by the governing boards of the two higher education systems, rather than picking and choosing among them. The Senate’s confidence in the systems’ judgment is well placed. Leaders of both systems come up with their project list through detailed, elaborate review processes that are driven by merit, not favoritism or politics. The same cannot often be said about decision-making at the Capitol.

The Senate said yes to the project that may be more important to Minnesota’s future than any other on this year’s lists—a $60 million medical biosciences building at the University of Minnesota, of which the state’s share would be $40 million. That was the most grievous omission from Pawlenty’s list. The proposed facility is integral to the university’s proposal to hire 50 new biomedical science researchers a year for the next 10 years—the number needed to secure Minnesota’s place as one of the world’s bioscience industry leaders.

The biosciences building the university seeks is one of at least five such buildings needed in the next decade to house the research that feeds the biomedical industry. The Senate is taking that need seriously. The House and the governor should too.