After last week’s busyness, I’ve been thinking of this week as being kind of slow at the capitol, but it definitely is not.  Here are some of the things happening this week:

Biofuels bill – The Clean Energy Minnesota biofuels legislation received hearings yesterday and today in a Senate and House committee, respectively.  The legislation is advancing on to the Senate Energy Policy committee and the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

Global Warming Mitigation Act of 2007 - The Senate Energy policy committee took testimony on the bill last week and has put it aside temporary for various stakeholders to converse.  It is expected to come back up later next week.  In the mean time, the House Environment and Natural Resources committee will begin taking testimony on the bill this Thursday, with a possible vote on the bill next week as well. 

Protect Our Great Outdoors Amendment – the “dedicated funding” portion of the Protect Our Great Outdoors initiative can now be found in legislation.  It is House File (HF) 1449.  Currently the sponsors are Hansen; Tingelstad; Scalze; Atkins; Morrow; Carlson; Johnson; McNamara; Peterson, A.; and Moe.  The Senate version is expected soon.  That’s not to say that a dedicated funding bill isn’t being discussed.  SF 6 passed out of the State and Local Government Operations Committee yesterday and is on to a finance committee. 

Funding – speaking of money, Conservation Minnesota has their new analysis out on environmental and conservation funding.  There is also a hearing on Friday in the Senate Environment Finance committee to talk about budget issues. 

update – I should have also mentioned the fact that the House passed the LCCMR funding bill yesterday (which spends a small portion of money collected from lottery proceeds) and the Senate Judiciary committee passed the E-Waste bill on to the State and Local Government committee today. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 5:37 pm by admin and is filed under Legislature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.