By MEP Lobbyist John Tuma 

“To anyone who has spent a winter in the north and known the depths to which the snow can reach, know the weeks when the mercury stays below zero, the first hint of spring is a major event. You must live in the north to understand it. You cannot just come up for it as you might go to Florida for the sunshine and surf. To appreciate it, you must wait for it a long time, hope and dream about it, and go through considerable enduring.”
–Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness

I admit that sometimes during the long meetings while waiting for that point on the agenda when the bill that I am watching is finally reached, I let my mind wander into dreaming of summer canoe trips into Sigurd Olson’s beloved Boundary Waters. We love the depth of beauty of our North Country. To understand the full breath of the North Country’s grip on our soul, you have to live it. I love the truth of this quote from the first paragraph of the first chapter of Olsen’s classic, The Singing Wilderness; a must read before you can claim you are a true Minnesota environmentalist. Just like the need to experience the struggles of the North Country to understand the depth of its beauty, one can never understand a lobbyist’s anticipation for the last week of session unless you have gone through the long hours of the tedious legislative process.

Anticipation of the last week of legislative session always gets lobbyists’ blood flowing like the first signs of spring to a cabin-fevered, wearied Minnesotan. There will be amazing twists and turns over the final ten days of the legislative session which will give us stories for the next several months; but to fully understand the depth of what those stories mean, you would have to sit through the long dark winter of endless committee meetings and hundreds of appointments with policymakers. To the casual observer walking into the last week of session at the Capitol, it would seem like the typical chaos. Nonetheless, to paraphrase Sigurd, to really appreciate the last week of a session you must have waited a long time, spent endless hours with the players hoping and dreaming for a positive finish, and have gone through considerable enduring.

This last week of the legislative session will be critical for a couple of our key legislative initiatives as they await completion: (1) the Constitutional Dedication of a Portion of the Sales Tax for the Great Outdoors and Clean Water; and (2) the Global Warming Mitigation Act. By the time most of you have read this report, which I put together on Thursday evening, there will be significant activity changing the course of these issues. But it is worth recapping what happened in this extremely busy week so you can more fully understand the news you read over the next few days.

Dedicated Funding. A couple of weeks ago the issue of dedicating an increased portion of the state sales tax towards conservation, clean water, and our parks looked like it was fading into being a casualty of the legislative session for lack of time to get through all the necessary committees. Fortunately this last week, working on the dedicated funding bills started to feel like finishing that last difficult leg of a canoe trip when suddenly you pick up a wonderful tailwind to push you home. After sitting inactive for a couple of weeks in the House, HF2285, authored by House Majority Leader Tony Sertich (DFL- Chisholm), passed through a couple of critical committees. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support out of both the Environment and Natural Resources Policy Committee and the Minnesota Heritage Finance Division. The percentage breakdowns of the House bill are not at the level which will reach the $100 million for Conservation and $100 million Clean Water Legacy which is the position of MEP, but we are optimistic that the bill will continue to improve. The legislation also includes funding for cultural heritage issues such as arts and historical preservation. We are optimistic that this bill will continue to improve and recognize it is the best chance we have to get anywhere near the dedicated funding our environment desperately needs.

The House bill will receive two hearings on Friday morning in a finance division and the full finance committee. It will also be in one of the more difficult committees it will face on Monday morning, the House Tax Committee. Special thanks this week in the House has to go to the Environment and Natural Resources Committee chair, Rep. Kent Eken (DFL – Twin Valley). Despite being opposed to constitutionally dedicated funds, he graciously agreed to hear the bill in his committee. He certainly could have refused to schedule a hearing which at this late date could have potentially killed any chance of dedicated funding surviving the session.

In the Senate, the dedicated funding bill (SF 6) had some significant action with some very interesting bends in the river. After being defeated on a voice vote a couple weeks ago in the Senate Tax Committee, it looked like the dedicated funding legislation would have to be modified significantly in order to move forward. On Wednesday morning, the Tax Committee reconsidered its vote on which SF 6 was defeated and in fact did substantially change the character of the bill. The committee amended the bill to make it a statutory dedication of the sales tax and passed the bill out. It has been MEP’s position that we support the more cherished constitutional dedication of the sales tax as opposed to a statutory dedication of the sales tax. The environment community has always been willing to accept statutory dedications, but it has been far too common in the past that these statutory dedications are easily raided during a budget crisis. That is why funding for our natural resources has now fallen to a 30 year low.

Fortunately, before the ink even dried on the Tax Committee’s report, the river took a sharp bend back in a favorable direction. After the full Senate met on the floor, allowing the bill to be re-referred to its last Senate committee stop in the Committee on Rules on Wednesday, a hearing was quickly scheduled for that same afternoon. The Senate Rules Committee of course is a bit friendlier since it is chaired by the Senate Majority Leader and chief author of SF 6 Sen. Larry Pogemiller (DFL – Minneapolis). Also on the committee is one of the Senate’s great statesmen and environmental champions Sen. Dennis Frederickson (R – New Ulm). It was Sen. Frederickson who offered an amendment to put it back to a constitutional dedication and worked closely with some key members of the committee to make sure the amendment passed.

The Senate bill now goes to the floor for a final vote in a form that is closest to that desired by MEP. As of the writing of this report, the Senate was planning on taking it up Friday morning. The vote will be close and will probably be remembered as one of the key votes of the legislative session not only on the environment, but will be one of the watershed votes that will define the character by which this year’s Senate will be remembered. If everything plays out to the good, the bill will be in conference committee by midweek and will provide some of the better drama during the last week of the legislative session.

Global Warming Mitigation Act. The cluster of MEP organizations that make up the team we know as Clean Energy Minnesota (CEM) was very busy this week behind the scenes. In order for any piece of legislation to be successful, it requires careful face-to-face lobbying with the policymakers prior to the critical vote to identify those things that need to be done for a successful final vote. That critical vote will come in the House of Representatives on a provision in the bill we know as “Section 5″. The overall thrust of the global warming mitigation is to establish economy wide standards for all major global warming pollution sources and identify the methods to make significant reductions in those sectors by 2050. The goal is an 80% reduction in these pollutants. In order not to make the problem any worse before we actually get the full economy wide reduction plan in place, the House bill has a section (section 5) that says in the areas we can control we should not make things worse. The area we know we can control is a regulated industry we know as electrical utilities. Section 5 says that if the utility is going to build a new power plant to supply electricity to Minnesota that would produce global warming pollution, they should offset those new emissions by reducing emissions from other plants. This provision of the House bill has caught great opposition from electric utilities, particularly those wanting to build a large new coal burning power plant in South Dakota to sell the power to Minnesota.

Understandably, the labor unions oppose this portion of the CEM supported bill because they fear loss of construction jobs as a result of the plants being permitted. The CEM team privately reached a landmark agreement with the state’s leading labor unions with ties to electrical utilities last week. The labor unions agreed that Minnesota should have a future that is not based on coal burning power plants producing more global warming pollution. Therefore, the unions have consented to the passage of the House bill with the present section 5 with the understanding that we will continue to work to create a win-win situation for the environment and the labor unions. It is now up to the DFL-controlled House to deliver on passage of the Global Warming Mitigation Act. With two of their major constituencies in agreement, the bill should move forward in its present form. A final vote on the floor has been delayed for several days due to scheduling crunches and could face a vote as soon as Friday morning. Just like the vote on dedicated funding, this bill will define how the Senate is remembered for this session, this vote in the House on the Global Warming Mitigation Act and the preservation of its section 5 will be some of the defining votes for how this session’s House of Representatives will be remembered.

Given the victories that the Legislature has already with the nation-leading Renewable Energy Standard and the Great Lakes Compact, it is pretty impressive to be involved in the final week with two of the defining issues for the legislative bodies. Not too bad for a ragtag team of citizen activist organizations paddling canoes. Thanks for all your help this session. It has made all the difference as we move into this critical final week. One last request for help, since I am dreaming of a positive end to the session soon–if you know of any good camping sites and fishing holes out of BWCAW entry point #14, taking the Little Indian Sioux River north, your advice is welcome.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 2:01 pm by Sierra Club North Star Chapter 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.