Early Saturday morning, Mankato-area DFL state representative Jack Considine tweet a bit of information at his area media:
During the session the DFL controlled Bonding Committee heard 165 Bills many of them emergency bills. How many did the republican Senate Bonding Committee hear?..It was a trick question, in 5 months they did not meet ONCE. #MNLEG @greatermankato @mnhouseDFL @Mankatonews @ktoenews
— Jack Considine (@jackconsidineMN) June 1, 2019
A Bluestem source had pointed out this fact in a call yesterday, and as we check it out, it's indeed true. A visit to the Minnesota Senate Capital Investment Committee "Meetings" page, where minutes and such records would be available, reveals a simple three-word message, "No meetings found." In the Minnesota House, the minutes, Audio and Video files from meetings are available at the link (five pages of material) and read the 27 Meeting Minutes at this link.
Rochester Republican Dave Senjem chairs the Minnesota Senate Capital Investment committee, and in a March 31 article by J.D. Duggan, ‘Vanilla ice cream’ bonding won’t fund University infrastructure, Senjem revealed his philosophy behind not meeting at all during the session:
While the state’s primary task this session was passing a two-year budget, many lawmakers and stakeholders hoped the Legislature would also approve statewide public infrastructure funding.
Without a capital investment bill, many stakeholders, including the University of Minnesota, did not see infrastructure or public works funding. While the Republican-controlled Senate never introduced a capital investment bill, lawmakers managed to allocate $160 million for basic needs like housing and roads in other bills. . . .
Sen. David Senjem, R-Rochester, chair of Senate Capital Investment Committee, said the Senate never intended to create a capital investment bill. But near the end of session, legislative leadership and state officials asked his committee to put together an agreement, he said.
Discussions were “slow and arduous” in the final days, Senjem said. Even the housing infrastructure bill was pushed until the last hour of the special session Saturday. Legislative leadership declared the one-day session to finish necessary legislation after the regular session ended Monday.
“We ran out of time,” Senjem said. “We sort of came to a ‘well, let's just get some bill off the floor,’ so to speak in … basically the last hour.”
The University of Minnesota’s $232.3 million capital investment request was among those to fall to the wayside as the daylong special session concluded at dawn Saturday. This leaves projects, such as the Institute of Child Development building on the Twin Cities campus and renovations for A.B. Anderson Hall on the Duluth campus, without state funding for the upcoming fiscal year.
With more time, Senjem said Republicans may have passed further bonding projects, such as allocating the University and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system $60 million each.
Republicans clung to a bare bones “vanilla ice cream” fix-up bill to fund basic needs, Senjem said. House Democrats wanted to additionally fund a variety of local projects throughout the state, which can be a time-consuming process that requires hearing various testimonials.
“There was no intent to do it this year, and if you have one public hearing on one project, where do you end?” Senjem said. “You get an endless amount of requests to hear my bill, too, and as the House did, you consume a lot of time and a lot of energy by a lot of people that drive distances to tell their story.”
It's curious that while the committee never met and no Senate companion bill was ever introduced, because the committee process just takes too much doggone time what with testimony and requests from local folks for what they need, Senjem found time at the end of the session to respond to "legislative leadership and state officials [who] asked his committee to put together an agreement, he said. Discussions were “slow and arduous” in the final days, Senjem said."
But have that in public committee hearings on the record? Heaven forbid.
In early April, Senjem told the Star Tribune's Jessie Van Berkel:
Senjem said he has heard the low-interest-rate argument for a long time, and it doesn’t sway him. He said the real crux of the debate is finding something “passable.”
“You need bipartisan support on these things. So you have to find that narrow little gap; it’s not too big for one group and it’s not too small for another,” he said. “That’s what really dictates how you get a bonding bill done.”
By not ever holding a committee hearing.
There's more. In Bar Buzz: Real estate bills make it, bonding didn’t, Minnesota Lawyer's Kevin Featherly reports:
In other news, the StarTribune has disseminated a draft of the 2019 bonding bill that never got off the ground. The newspaper reported it appeared briefly on the House’s website, then vanished.
A $500 million bonding package—with much of the money steered to housing—was part of the budget accord announced on May 19 by the governor and the two House and Senate heads. But the bill quietly died without being introduced during the recent one-day special session.
“We thought that that was going to get done,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-Nisswa, said Tuesday. “I’m not sure what happened in the House.”
He said the bill apparently died sometime during the last 30 minutes of the 21-hour special session.
According to the StarTribune, the House didn’t have enough votes to assure passage as the 7 a.m. Saturday deadline for ending the session approached. Passing bonding bills requires a two-thirds majority of each chamber.
There were a couple of items of interest in the draft bill:
- St. Peter: The bill would have sent $10 million to the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center for Phase 2 of a project to develop more residential, programming and ancillary facilities for the Minnesota sex offender program on the center’s lower campus. The money would have been used for design, renovations, furnishings and equipment at the facility.
- Corrections: The bill would have given $19 million to the state Department of Corrections for asset preservation improvements and betterments of a capital nature” at Minnesota prisons across the state. There is no itemization on what specific projects would receive funding.
Gazelka said the Legislature might revisit bonding in 2020. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the bonding bill got bigger for next year,” he said.
The StarTribune reported that it got the draft bill from Bradley Peterson, government relations practice lead for the Flaherty & Hood law firm.
Perhaps the good citizens of Rochester could elect a new state senator who understands that the job actually entails being on committees that met, hear expert and citizen testimony, and review proposed legislation. It's sometimes exhausting to watch the process, but lawmakers are in fact paid to do these jobs.
Now, whomever might replace Senjem would not chair a committee, given a lack of seniority, but surely Rochester, Minnesota's third-largest city, has a few infrastructure needs, enough to understand showing up.
Screengrab: Senator David Senjem's own private cone of silence, the Minnesota Senate Capital Investment Committee "Meetings" page.
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