Four Minnesota state reps today weighed-in on the $1 billion bonding bill.  The bill was kept alive when by a legislative trick on the part of Speaker Margaret Kelliher which prevented it from going to the governor's desk.  Governor Pawlenty, who earlier this week promised to veto the bill, now appears to have agreed to engage in further negotiations with DFL leaders on the bill.

It is irresponsible for lawmakers to add another $1 billion of debt to Minnesota's balance sheet at a time when we cannot make the payments on our existing debt.  Minnesota Majority is urging Governor Pawlenty to demonstrate fiscal responsibility by keeping his commitment to veto the bonding bill in its entirety.

TAKE ACTION: Call Governor Pawlenty at 877-37-VETO-IT and urge him to keep his promise to veto the bonding bill in its entirety.

 

The governor has announced that he will veto the bonding bill in it’s entirety, but House Speaker Kelliher may have one last trick up her sleeve. She said she intends to send the bill back to the Senate for “further consideration.” This is simply a stalling tactic to buy time to pressure the governor into negotiations.

 

After a conference committee reached agreement on the $1 billion bonding bill, reconciling minor differences between the House and Senate versions, the House took up the final bill for a vote after 7:30 last night, passing it 85-46. Eight Republicans who’d voted to pass the initial bill withdrew their support. 

Republican Representatives Bud Nornes (10A), Paul Anderson (13A), Greg Davids (31B), Jim Abeler (48B), Tony Cornish (24B), Tom Hackbarth (48A), Mary Liz Holberg (36A) and Torrey Westrom (11A) changed their votes on the bonding bill to no. Democrats Bill Hilty (8A) and Al Juhnke (13B) also had a change of heart, withdrawing their support for the bill.

Representative Paul Kohls (34A) was home recovering from a concussion when the bonding bill first passed. When he returned to work, he added another "no" vote to repassage of the bonding bill.

The Senate took up the amended bill after 9:00 PM and also passed it, but again, some Republicans changed their votes from yes to no. The final vote in the Senate was 47-19.

Republican senators Bill Ingebrigtsen (11), Joe Gimse (13), Gen Olson (33), Pat Pariseau (36), Mike Jungbbauer (48), and Julie Rosen (24) changed their votes from yes to no. Democrat Tony Lourey (8) also changed his vote to no.

It looks like the bonding bill debate isn’t over yet. How long Speaker Kelliher can keep the bonding bill from the governor’s awaiting veto pen is uncertain. The best case scenario for the taxpayers is no bonding bill at all, but Governor Pawlenty has indicated willingness to sign a bonding bill in the $750 million-range if it includes certain items he considers priorities, like the Moose Lake Sex Offender facility and Vermillion State Park. If legislators rework the bill toward those ends, the governor may still approve more borrowing this session.

Click here to see all new House votes.

Click here to see all new Senate votes.
Read the Conference Committee Engrossment
New Forgetful Fifteen Six Flyer

 

• Contact your elected officials and express your opinion on the billion-dollar bonding bill.
• Call the Governor's Office Toll Free at 1-877-37-VETO-IT (877-378-3864). Tell the governor there should be no bonding bill this session unless the deficit is solved first.

 

Both the Minnesota House and the Senate have passed similar versions of a bonding bill equaling about $1 billion in general obligation bonding. In the House, Speaker Kelliher pushed the bill through without allowing debate.

 

Right now, minor differences between the two bills are being reconciled in a conference committee.

 

Minnesota is already in debt over $7 billion. Making the payments on that borrowed money consumes over 3% of the state’s biennial budget, and we’re running a deficit of over $1.2 billion this year, with deficits projected to be over $5.4 billion in the next biennium. This means we can’t afford to make the debt payments we are already obligated to make. Taking on more debt in a financial crisis like this, one might think the money must be for something pretty important. Some of the money is for worthy projects like improvements to public facilities, but these improvements can wait and there is absolutely no excuse for some of the appropriations. Legislators in the conference committee have decided a criminal sex offender facility in Moose Lake isn’t important enough to borrow money for this year, but they will use the taxpayer’s maxed-out credit card for:

This bill will probably emerge from conference committee today. The governor will have three days to veto or sign the bill.

Take Action: Call Governor Pawlenty right now at (toll free) 1-877-378-3864 to urge him to veto the bonding bill. Tell him we have to solve our current budget crisis before we borrow any more money.

• Click here to see how your state representative voted on the bonding bill.
• Click here to see how your state senator voted on the bonding bill.

Update: Governor Pawlenty has issued a statement, saying he intends to veto the entire bonding bill.

 

Citing the state’s current $1.2 billion biennial budget deficit (not even mentioning the looming deficit of over $5 billion in the next biennium), Pawlenty told legislators that the state can’t afford the $170 million appropriated by the GAMC bill. “This legislation utilizes $170 million that I previously identified in my supplemental budget to help resolve the current $1.2 billion deficit. Those same dollars cannot be used twice,” he explained in his veto letter.

 

Indeed, legislators seem to have failed to consider where the money was going to come from and according to the governor, they did not address GAMC’s fundamental cost structure problems.

 

The bill initially passed 45-20 in the Senate, but after conference committee, the vote was 47-16. The House passed it by a huge margin, the vote being 125-9. All 87 DFL representatives voted in the affirmative and only 9 Republicans voted no. Dissenting votes were cast by Representatives Bruce Anderson, Mark Buesgens, Steve Drazkowski, Tom Emmer, Tom Hackbarth, Mary Liz Holberg, Paul Kohls, Dan Severson and Ron Shimanski.

 

With these margins, a veto override looks like a distinct possibility. If Republicans who voted for the bill will now stand with the governor’s veto, the override will not happen. Democrats in the House will need the support of at least three Republicans to prevail. 

House Minority Leader, Kurt Zellers is confident that the Republicans will stick together and sustain the veto. Zellers said he thinks any GAMC solution should be part of a comprehensive budget solution package that addresses the current deficit as a whole. “This should be a part of it, the GAMC fix or a new program should be a part of that fix. We're going to work together again, just like we did with this version of it to find a solution that not only the governor can agree to but the house and senate can agree to as well,” he explained.

It should be noted that recipients of GAMC are not being thrown off of public medical assistance. Current GAMC enrollees are scheduled to be moved onto the more cost-effective Minnesota Care program on April 1st. It's not as generous, but it will provide medical insurance on par with the private plans most Minnesotans utilize - at a far lower cost to the taxpayers.

Click here to read an excellent Op-Ed by Senator Julianne Ortman: The State Can't Afford GAMC. 

Take Action: Contact your elected officials and tell them to go back to the drawing board on GAMC and uphold the governor’s veto of SF2168.

NEW! Click here to Download the Forgetful 41 Flyer

Some people find voting on Election Day to inconvenient to make the effort - How much should we accommodate everyone's individual whim, at what price?

Last year, Governor Pawlenty vetoed an omnibus elections provision bill that would have made some pretty radical changes in the way elections are conducted in Minnesota. Our system is in need of an overhaul, but the bill passed on an entirely party line vote by Democrats in the legislature last year was the opposite of what’s needed. 

There were some good points in the bill, but it’s overall effect was to loosen up an already very liberal and trusting election system.

 

One element of the bill was early voting. The proposal would have opened up elections to a one-week window instead of holding elections on a single day. Minnesota Majority objected to the plan for several reasons.

 

While we think voting is a civic duty and want to encourage every eligible voter to get informed and exercise their right, we also don’t believe that the integrity of our elections should take a back seat to convenience. Convenience is really the only argument in favor of early voting, but there are many compelling reasons to reject it.

 

On Election Day, citizen oversight is a critical process to instilling confidence in the fairness of the process. Trained citizen election judges administer the ballots and report results, while volunteers from the political parties are permitted to observe the process. With early voting, both of these safeguards and guarantees of transparency are impossible. We could never find and pay enough citizen election judges to take a week off work to administer 7 days of voting, so we would have to rely entirely on election bureaucrats to collect and count ballots. Likewise, volunteer poll watchers from the political parties would no longer be viable. Who can afford to take a week off work to watch municipal election offices all day, day in and day out?

 

Right now, the potential for abuse of our permissive election system is somewhat minimized by time constraints. A person intent on fraud could only do so much damage, traveling from precinct to precinct attempting to cast multiple ballots, because of the time constraints. Allowing in-person ballots with no ID requirement for an entire week opens the window for fraud alarmingly wide.

 

On Monday, the state Senate Committee on State and Local Government Operations and Oversight held a discussion on early voting. Senator Katie Sieben arranged for four people to testify in favor of enacting early voting in Minnesota. Two were citizens who had received a phone call from either the Franken or Coleman campaign informing them that their absentee ballot had been rejected.

 

Tami Carpenter of Plymouth was told her ballot was rejected because the signature on her absentee ballot didn’t match her application. Dennis Hansen of Woodbury wasn’t given a reason. They said their absentee ballots were wrongly rejected. Without examining the absentee ballots in question, it’s impossible to know why election judges rejected the ballots, but rejected ballots were gone over with a fine-tooth comb during the Coleman-Franken recount.

 

They asserted early voting would reduce the number of absentee ballots, save time money and prevent confusion. Mr. Hansen noted that had he been able to vote early in person instead of mailing in his absentee ballot, any errors would have been caught and corrected right away, thereby ensuring his vote was counted.

 

What Mr. Hansen apparently doesn’t know, and Senator Sieben failed to mention is that Absentee ballots can already be cast in person at municipal election offices, with help from election staff. The solution being sought already exists.

 

Laura Fredrick-Wang of the League of Women Voters also testified before the committee. She said that current absentee voting laws “compel people to misstate their reason for voting absentee,” because some people who want to vote absentee don’t fall under one of the 4 legally defined acceptable reasons. Essentially, this argument is that the laws established to prevent abuse of the absentee voting privilege force people to commit voter fraud.

 

Fredrick-Wang went on to say that the requirement to state one of four reasons to vote absentee create a “necessary barrier” to voting. She cited examples of people who may not know for sure whether they’d be in, or pregnant women who could wind up in the hospital delivering a baby on Election Day.

 

Senator Gerlach countered by reading the statute on absentee ballots, pointing out that those circumstances are already provided for in the law, under the “reasonable expectation” language.

 

Fredrick-Wang responded that it doesn’t matter if those situations are covered by the acceptable excuses for absentee voting, saying, “it’s just easier to vote early than to vote absentee.”

 

At that point, Senator Gerlach had an “ah-ha” moment. “So this isn’t really about barriers to voting. I’m disappointed. You stared out talking about absolute barriers but now you are saying it’s really just about convenience. While I’m all for making things convenient – we shouldn’t erect needless obstacles to voting – we have to balance convenience with confidence in the outcome of elections. Confidence, in my view has to take precedence.”

 

Senator Gerlach is right. Minnesota already enjoys the nation’s highest level of voter participation. There’s no need to further simplify voting at the potential expense of integrity.

 

While all citizens have the right to vote, there is not necessarily a right to absentee ballots, but our society has decided to create the privilege as a convenience. We are already taking the step of accommodating people who choose to be out of the country on Election Day, the obvious exception being military service, where a person could be deployed overseas and have no other choice but to be absent on Election Day. We certainly have no obligation to change the date of an election to accommodate certain individuals preferences.

 

Early voting creates a host of potential issues, like the afore mentioned larger window for abuse and the elimination of citizen oversight of voting. In addition, circumstances change. When Senator Wellstone was unexpectedly killed in a plane crash during the campaign, new ballots had to be hastily created for Election Day. If early voting had been allowed, the people who cast votes for Wellstone in advance of the election would have wasted their ballots in the Senate race. With everyone voting on the same day, we all have access to the same information before casting a ballot and in the case of Absentee ballots, they can be overridden by a subsequent absentee or in-person ballot. Early voting would not accommodate that circumstance.

 

Time for another bonding bill: How much are those gorilla cages going to set me back?

Without allowing any debate or minority party input, Speaker Kelliher pushed through HF2700, essentially a carbon copy of the Senate bonding bill, but with 4 amendments adopted in the House. It passed by a vote of 92-37, mostly along party lines. Republican representatives Abeler, Davids, Howes, Nornes, Lanning and Paul Anderson broke ranks and voted for the bill. 

Representative Emmer had introduced an amendment to undo previous legislation that set state-level climate change goals based on a paper produced in part by the controversial Center for Climate Strategies. The amendment failed on a party line vote.

 

Representative Seifert decried the lack of opportunity for debate on the bonding bill, saying “What we’ve just witnessed was the passage of a bill without any opportunity to represent our constituents.”

 

The bonding bill is headed for a conference committee to work out the minor differences between SF2360 and HF2700 and will be heading for the Governor’s desk in short order.

 

Governor Pawlenty has three options:

 

We’re encouraging the governor to veto the entire bill. The spending projects in this year’s bonding bill can wait until Minnesota’s fiscal house is back in order. We have already exceeded the traditional state debt limit and currently owe over $7 billion and have a general fund deficit next biennium projected to be over $5.4 billion.

 

Like the Senate bill, the House bonding bill aims to borrow half-a-billion to renovate and buy new buildings for the U of M and state colleges as well as:

 

 

• Contact Governor Pawlenty now and encourage him to veto the bonding bill.
• Contact your state representative about his or her vote.
• Forgetful Fifteen Flyer

Bonding Bill Exceeds Debt Limit

The most pressing matter before the state legislature this year is closing a budget shortfall of over $5.4 billion, but that doesn’t seem to be the priority. Instead of reigning in spending, many legislators want to whip out the state’s credit card, but it’s already maxed out. 

Our state legislature has historically held debt service to no more than 3% of general fund revenues. Last year the legislature voted to ignore that debt limit and borrow another $300 million, on top of the previous year’s nearly $1 billion bonding spending spree.

 

Minnesota is now in debt to the tune of $5,033,950,000, with another $2.3 billion authorized bonding that hasn’t been issued yet (but it will be), bringing our total debt to over $7 billion.

 

The payments and interest on that enormous debt add up to $452 million a year.

 

We’ve exceeded the 3% credit limit. In 2012, the debt service is projected to be nearly 4% of the general fund budget and still the legislature can’t put away the credit cards. Another bonding bill is set for a vote in the Senate as early as today. This time they want to borrow another $1.2 billion for such immediate necessities as:

 

Read the Entire Bonding Bill here

Do we really need to spend money on these amenities during an economic recession? Are new jogging and ATV trails a high priority when the state budget is in the red by billions of dollars and when 10% or more of the workforce can’t find employment? 

They’re spending our money. They have an obligation to do so prudently.

Update: The Senate passed the bonding bill by a vote of 52-14.