Senate DFLers come up with budget counteroffer

05/23/2005

Mark Brunswick and Dane Smith, Star Tribune
May 24, 2005

With a clock signaling the deadline for the legislative session literally ticking down in a hallway nearby, Senate DFL leaders presented a budget counteroffer to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s office this morning that they said would at least speed up an inevitable special session.

“It is not our intent to drag this into the summer and into the fall. That is not a good thing. The public should be irritated but not overly angry,” said Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar.

One thing noticeably absent from the Senate proposal was mention of the 75-cent-a-pack cigarette charge proposed by Pawlenty last week as his answer to break the logjam of a stalled legislative session.

Johnson and leaders of his Senate DFL Caucus met Sunday to set the parameters of their proposal. He delivered it to Pawlenty’s office in a sealed envelope at 8:45 this morning.

In the proposal, the Senate agrees to cut an additional $61 million from its Health and Human Services proposal and an additional $5 million from state agencies to put toward an agriculture, environment, and jobs bill. But it maintains the Senate platform on no new property tax increases to fund education and full $35 million funding of a proposal for an early childhood education initiative.

On a Minnesota Public Radio call-in show, Pawlenty said of the Senate DFL response: “It was basically a repackaging of their earlier positions. In light of the big move we made on Friday, I was hoping for something more.”

At his press briefing, Johnson cited earlier passage of a bonding bill, increases in funding for methamphetamine programs and increased penalties connected to the drug, funding for sex offender programs and increases in subsidies for ethanol use. In light of those achievement, he pronounced the legislative session generally successful, even as it was winding down without budget agreements.

“This is a good-faith effort to move us forward. It would bring forth quite a good legislative session,” he said. “The only problem is we haven’t balanced the checkbook yet.”

Under the state Constitution, the Legislature must adjourn by midnight tonight. A special legislative session must be called by the governor, but once one is called, only the Legislature can determine when it is concluded.

Coming up

Today, the House and Senate will probably pass a $1.7 billion public safety spending bill and other miscellaneous measures, then head home to await high-level negotiations and eventually a call from Pawlenty for what would be the eighth special session in 11 years. Those special sessions correlate with more than a decade during which the House, the Senate and the governor’s office have never been controlled by a single party.

Nobody in the mix claims to know exactly how this latest post-session drama will play out.

Leaders could stay on task this week and continue to meet in summit talks and conference committees with a goal of reaching agreement and holding the special session as soon as possible.

But typically in such situations, a cooling-off period ensues and leaders get back to serious negotiating sometime after Memorial Day.

Time, however, is a problem. The current budget period ends June 30, and state programs and services could face at least a partial shutdown without legislation authorizing spending for the next two-year period.

Preparing for OT

DFLers and Republicans are already moving to mobilize public opinion as they prepare for overtime, and the signals suggest that the sides may be more interested in fighting than compromising, at least for now.

House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul, appeared on the Capitol steps Sunday afternoon with public school teachers and other advocates for public education to demand that Minnesota opt out of the federal “No Child Left Behind” program.

Noting that Pawlenty’s latest budget-and-tax offer came with a set of four demands, including a ban on teachers’ strikes during the school year, Entenza said DFLers had a right to renew their call for withdrawing from a federal program that is proving to be expensive and a bureacratic nightmare.

Education Commissioner Alice Seagren will fly today to five outstate cities to promote Pawlenty’s K-12 education bill. Disagreement over that part of the budget is one of the obstacles to closing the session.

Seagren issued a statement arguing that opting out of the federal program could cost the state $200 million and that the law’s testing standards are producing increased scores in low-income urban schools.

Although DFLers contend that Pawlenty is short-changing K-12, Seagren and administration officials contend that their bill provides an increase of almost 5 percent in each of the next two years.

Disappointed as Pawlenty and top leaders are at their failure to get done on time, they have been emphasizing a glass-half-full message for a couple of weeks. Among the accomplishments: the $945 billion bonding bill for construction projects, tougher penalties and treatment facilities for methamphetamine users, an increase in the ethanol content of gasoline, and an increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour.

On the budget side, two major appropriations bills, for higher education and public safety (law enforcement, courts and prisons) will probably be approved and signed into law by Pawlenty. Six other major spending bills and the tax bill remain. The biggest chasm is a health and human services bill, on which DFLers want to spend about $500 million more than Republicans.

Sharply different tax bills also must be reconciled. Senate DFLers are proposing $1.3 billion in higher taxes on top income-earners and on corporations that take advantage of various tax avoidance mechanisms. The House bill also contains some revenue increases, but no direct rate increases or expansion of the state’s sales or income taxes.

On Friday, Pawlenty proposed a compromise, a Health Impact Fee of 75 cents on every pack of cigarettes sold at the wholesale level that would raise about $380 million a year. Typifying the fizzling end of the 2005 regular session, Pawlenty spent part of the day digging dandelions out of his yard at his home in Eagan, using a new electric gizmo designed for that purpose. “He’s pretty excited about that,” spokesman Brian McClung said.