John Tuma’s Capitol Update for May 14, 2010

“It’s very confusing, and very wonderful.  People disagree, they get angry — and they do it in public and nobody dies.”
- Idil Abdull, May 11, 2010

On Wednesday, Warren Wolfe of the Star Tribune provided us with one of the more pleasant stories from the State Capitol, that of 36-year-old Somali-born Idil Abdull.   She is a citizen lobbyist from Burnsville working to make some changes in a bill to protect Somali autistic children.  “Lobby of one: Making sense of Legislature” provides an interesting perspective of our American legislative experiment in democracy, Minnesota style, through the eyes of a newcomer to our land of immigrants.  Ms. Abdull provides us with a refreshingly honest citizen’s perspective. 

I enjoy stories of courageous citizens making a difference in this crazy place.  This grizzled old lobbyist, who was a House member at one time, particularly enjoyed her realization of how the Senate schedule works. “Ah, I get it. They work on African time.  Five o’clock doesn’t mean five o’clock.”

No doubt Idil is now learning another valuable lesson regarding the last week of the legislative session here in Minnesota.  This is the week that the proverbial political bullets start flying with greater intensity around the Capitol as legislators take shots at each other and the Governor, as they battle to the end of session.  She will likely learn that it eventually will come to an end in something called the global agreement. Hopefully, as she so astutely observed, it will all be done in public and no one will die.  She also will learn that they do about a month’s worth of legislative work in a single day during the last week of session.  Most of what we do in all the months leading up to the last couple weeks of legislative session is to try to get our positions ready to survive the final rush before it all comes to a sudden crashing end.

As you know most of these reports have a historical twist.  This current story of Ms. Abdull was just too compelling for me to pass up, but there still is a historical twist to this article.  The historical twist is this very legislative update because it will be ancient history by the time you read it, given the pace of session this time of year.  Therefore, to put it in historical context, I’m writing this on Thursday evening.  Most of the information provided below will substantially change so stay tuned.  We will give you an update when and if the session ends.  With that said, here’s a quick update on where some of the MEP priorities are as of this Thursday evening:

Complete Streets.  Legislation to provide more comprehensive street planning that will help reduce air pollution and make roads safer for all users is now part of the larger Omnibus Transportation Policy Bill (SF2540).  The conference committee for SF2540 finished its work on Saturday and the bill was repassed by wide margins in both houses: Senate 58-3 and House 109-25.  The bill was presented to the Governor on Wednesday, May 12 and under the Constitution he has three days to sign or veto the bill.  The Governor has traditionally vetoed this particular omnibus bill in past years, but the chief authors of the omnibus bill, Sen. Steve Murphy (DFL-Red Wing) and Rep. Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis), have been working closely with the Department of Transportation and lobbying the Governor hard to have this year’s bill signed into law.  Hopefully he’ll sign it before he gets on the streets heading north for the fishing opener. 

Protecting Investments in Our Great Outdoors.  Three major things in the funding area happened this week.  First, the conference committee on the LCCMR bill (HF2624) appropriating the lottery proceeds finished its work Monday afternoon.  This is the bill in which Rep. Tom Rukavina diverted over $4 million intended for land purchases to preserve important environmental lands to go instead to state park maintenance, for the purpose of creating more jobs.  As a compromise, the conference committee reduced that to $850,000 and agreed to some language requiring the Department of Natural Resources to review all land purchases to make sure that they are of the highest priority for conservation.  This appropriation of more than $26 million in critical investments in our Great Outdoors also passed by overwhelming margins in both bodies (Senate 59-7 and House 95-36) and was presented to the Governor on Wednesday, May 12 for his anticipated signature.

Second was legislative approval of environmental financing in the Omnibus Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Policy and Finance Bill; Outdoor Heritage Appropriations (SF3275).  As the tortured title of the bill indicates, it is a mixture of the Legacy sales tax appropriations and the remaining environmental and energy appropriations from other dedicated accounts, i.e., Game and Fish Fund and Environmental Fund – essentially the non-general fund appropriations.  The conference committee finished its work on Thursday and the result was very satisfying for those who have worked hard on the Legacy Amendment.  The bill contains $58.9 million of Legacy appropriations and all the recommendations of the councils were followed.  The bill repealed the definitions of “protect, enhance and restore” and left it to the selection process to follow the Constitution language.  This change was supported by many conservation organizations.  Both bodies suspended their rules to allow for the bill to be voted on Wednesday night where it also passed with solid bipartisan backing (Senate 59-7 and House 107-25) and was presented to the Governor on Thursday. 

Finally, the Governor vetoed the Legislature’s balanced budget proposal on Tuesday as soon as it hit his desk.  Part of that proposal was an additional $43 million in budget savings from environmental accounts, but they were not actually cuts in new services.  The Legislature recommended authorizing a little over $3 million in the Governor’s unallotments in the environment area.  Those are cuts that already have been absorbed by our agencies.  The remaining $40 million comes from reserves in the “closed landfill account,” which are set aside for future use in helping close landfills.  In April, the Legislature approved a one-time transfer of $8 million from the $48 million investment account that has been put into place to address the environmental impacts of closing our state’s landfills and placed the money in the general fund to lessen the deficit.  Since $8 million was easy money in April, they decided to take the full amount to help wrap up the session. The Legislature did include language in the bill that would require them to pay back this raid starting in 2014, with interest. 

Even though the Governor vetoed this bill, these additional savings from the environment area will likely be part of any global agreement to end the session.  They simply need cash to cover their obligations.  It’s like robbing your kid’s piggy bank to pay the light bill, but it is indicative of the dire straits our state budget is in right now.  Even though these temporary raids are concerning, most of the Green Team is very thankful to the voters for adopting a constitutional amendment last election because we know things would have been substantially worse had not the voters sent a strong message to our Legislature about how they value continued investments in our Great Outdoors.

The Moratorium on Nuclear Reactor Construction.  The repeal of the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear reactors in Minnesota was added to SF2971, a bill making technical changes to energy law.  Rep. Bill Hilty (DFL-Finnlayson) offered an amendment repealing the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear reactors in Minnesota because he felt it necessary to make a preemptive strike by requiring some conditions to be met if the moratorium was to be lifted.  Those conditions were protection for ratepayers and taxpayers from cost overruns from the construction of nuclear reactors, but unfortunately did not include any requirements to find a permanent storage site for radioactive waste.  The Senate version of this bill does not include the repeal and the Senate committee responsible for energy issues sent a strong message earlier this session that they wanted more expanded conditions, including permanent storage of waste.  We are still awaiting the meeting of this conference committee.  Hopefully things will be a little too busy for this conference committee to meet.

Coal Power.  There were attempts to repeal the moratorium on new energy coming from coal power plants in Minnesota or imported from other states as amendments to energy bills in both bodies.  In 2007 Minnesota approved a law that does not allow for the construction of coal power plants or the importation of dirty coal power from our neighboring states until there is a regional or national energy policy regulating carbon emissions.  Both the House and Senate rejected these amendments to repeal this common sense vision for our energy future.  Therefore, efforts to embrace dirty coal are likely dead for the session.

Protecting Our Water from Toxic Mining Pollution.  As reported earlier, the PolyMet project in northeastern Minnesota would result in the largest wetland destruction in Minnesota history if it goes forward.  The industry wanted to reduce their wetland replacement obligations by attaching an exclusive exemption to the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR) technical fix bill.  HF3494 contains a special exemption for mining companies and the Green Team has been working aggressively to ensure the integrity of our wetlands laws by not allowing a change to give a special exemption to a particular industry.  The bill has yet to pass off the House floor, and we are working with the authors and BWSR to resolve this issue.  Hopefully this effort will also die with the end of session.

Again, by the time you read this post it will be ancient history when viewed through the hourglass of the last week of the legislative session.  We will do an update soon after the last body adjourns “Sine die.”  Ms. Abdull, “Sine die” means the legislative shooting has stopped for the year with hopefully only bills dying, but it also signifies the beginning of the shooting we call the political election season.  That is a whole other wonderful American political experience you should learn about.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 7:24 am by Tuma, Minnesota Environmental Partnership and is filed under Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, Energy, Funding for the Environment, LCCMR, Legislature, Sulfide mining, Transit and Transportation. 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.