Session down to hard part

05/23/2005

Dane Smith, Star Tribune
May 23, 2005

The state Constitution says they can’t hold floor sessions in the House and Senate chambers after today, but Minnesota legislators and Gov. Tim Pawlenty have lots of unfinished budget work to do and a special session awaits.

Lawmakers will convene this morning for what should be an anti-climactic final day of the regular legislative session. 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.

“It’s moving, but at a slow pace,” Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, said of the session over the weekend.

“It’s a product of the divided government sent to us by people at the election box,” Johnson said.

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.

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. Unlike last year, when almost no major pieces of legislation were approved, a number of important measures have been agreed on.

Among the accomplishments: a $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.