Now Comes Time For Compromise At Minnesota Capitol
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Minnesota lawmakers aimed to put the finishing touches on their wildly different plans for a $900 million budget surplus Thursday with adjournment looming in less than a month.
The Democrat-led Senate was set to take up a mammoth budget bill that would devote the surplus to tax cuts, a new preschool program and measures meant to tackle racial disparities. Meanwhile, House Republicans queued up a vote on a funding bill for state agencies that includes slashing commissioner pay and imposing a hiring freeze across state government. Votes were expected later Thursday.
Once those pieces are in place, the real bargaining can begin behind closed doors, where legislative leaders and Gov. Mark Dayton will determine whether a compromise is in sight. The two-year, $42 billion budget passed in 2015 left nearly $1 billion unspent, giving lawmakers a second crack at tax cuts, transportation fixes and other unfinished spending priorities.
But the plans advanced this session in each chamber are worlds apart.
The Senate budget would draw down much of the surplus, while pursuing a stalled proposal to raise gasoline taxes for road and bridge repairs. The GOP-led House wants to save the leftover cash, splitting it between a transportation bill and tax cuts while drumming up some extra money through budget cuts to boost public school spending.
Looking at some of the provisions in the House's budget, such as eliminating the state's Film and TV Board, Dayton expressed exasperation: "I'm not going to revisit budgets that were passed last year. If that's their position, I don't know why we need to spend taxpayer money for the next three and a half weeks. Pack up and go home."
Both parties agree that more money is needed for broadband Internet infrastructure, but the Senate's budget put $85 million into the state fund, more than double what was passed in the House this week. Senate Democrats also included $25 million for a voluntary preschool program and funding for schools to hire more school counselors -- both things absent from the House GOP budget.
But Republicans in the Senate took issue with the lack of funding for road and bridge repairs, trying to reroute more than $450 million of the surplus into dedicated transportation accounts. Democrats blocked it, arguing that would hardly make a dent in the billions of dollars needed over the next decade.
"It funds everything but transportation," Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, said. "There isn't a penny in this bill, not a penny, spent on roads."
There's still more to work out. House Republicans haven't specified how much of the surplus they'll earmark for taxes versus transportation. And while neither side has released their lists of public construction projects they hope to fund via borrowing this year, a scope has been set: Senate Democrats have promised to unveil a bonding bill that's $1 billion or larger; House Republicans set the mark at about $600 million.
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