Eight or nine minutes before the Minnesota House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance started a joint informational hearing on bills to be considered in the coming special session, the House committee posted the 209-page bill.
Associated Press staff writers Kyle Potter and Brian Bakst report in Minnesota lawmakers finally go public with hefty budget agreements they struck in private:
. . .A revamped budget for agricultural and environmental programs provided some comfort to Democrats who, like Dayton, took issue with the original regulatory change allowing companies that self-report pollution violations to escape penalization. The bill unveiled Friday waives penalties once companies work with the state to remedy their infraction.
Despite some improvements, Steven Morse with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership said it didn't return substantially better after the governor's veto, noting it still abolishes a citizen oversight board at the state's pollution control agency.
"This bill is a step backward for Minnesota," he told lawmakers.
But Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis) noted another problem with the bill: the tendency to approach environmental policy, like the Clean Water Act, from a negative perspective. In the clip below, he discusses how "bad process leads to bad policy," citing a provision to have cities hire economists to look at the costs of water quality, but not biologists to measure the benefits of clean water.
Here's Rep. Hornstein's observation:
We'll have more tomorrow on what's in the new bill and the reaction to it.
Photo: Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis): One does not simply walk into policy making about water quality only wanting to gut the Clean Water Act, but bad policy decisions are guarded by more than just orcs.
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