John Tuma’s Capitol Update – February 26, 2010

“There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace.  The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten.  It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways in ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfaction.  When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.”

-Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness, 1956

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update – February 19, 2010

“There is Governor Ames himself.” 

These were the words whispered in a low husky voice from one of four horse riders wearing long white cattle dusters as they rode across the bridge into Northfield, Minnesota, on what would become a fateful day in September of 1876.  Unfortunately for the would-be bank robbers, the words were overheard by Adelbert Ames as he walked past the riders on well-bred horses as he was leaving town from a meeting at the First National Bank. 

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update

“We, the people of the state of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty and desiring to perpetuate its blessings and secure the same to ourselves and our prosperity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.”

-The preamble to the Constitution of the state of Minnesota, August 29, 1857

On Thursday of this week, Governor Pawlenty, following the time-honored tradition for over 150 years, delivered the gubernatorial State of the State address to a joint convention of both the House and Senate within the House chambers.

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update

As the legislative session opens this week, legislators and Gov. Pawlenty have taken some positive early steps for the environment with the capital investments bill.  Hopefully they will take some lessons from the leadership of former Governor Floyd B. Olson in 1933.

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update – The Pre-Session Version

“There is a basic law of nuclear waste often overlooked – all waste remains where it is first put.”
 
- Richard Wilson Riley, Then Governor of South Carolina, 1982*
 
This little bit of southern frankness from South Carolina happened to find its way into Minnesota history when it was quoted by administrative law judge Allen W. Klien in his opinion advising the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to reject Northern States Power’s (NSP, now Xcel Energy) petition to store nuclear waste at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in April 1992.  One of NSP’s central arguments was that storage outside of Prairie Island would only be temporary.  It appears that former Governor Riley’s “Law of Nuclear Waste” was truer than the predictions of the high-priced experts hired by NSP who claimed back in the 1992 at the administrative hearings that the waste would be removed by 2010.

By the way, it is still there and still causing problems. 

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update – the Pre-Session Version

“This place is now feeling the pressure of hard times… they have not found bottom yet…they have recently voted to loan the credit of the State for $5,000,000 & have thus hung a millstone around their neck, which they will doubtless have to bear for [m]any years to come…”

John P. Bardwell
Agent of the American Missionary Association
From St. Paul on May 7, 1858*

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update – The Pre-Session Version

“Even Mr. Schwartz, the expert sponsored by NSP, conceded that 2010 was optimistic”
       Allen W. Klien
       April 10, 1992

Allen W. Klien was the Minnesota Administrator Law Judge appointed in 1992 to collect evidence and provide an opinion to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) as to whether Northern States Power Company (NSP, now known as Xcel) was allowed to store spent nuclear rods in dry casks outside its Prairie Island nuclear power plant.  The Prairie Island power plant is located just outside of the city of Red Wing on an island at the mouth of the Cannon River that had been used for centuries by the Dakota Indians as a village.  The first accounts by white explorers of this village go all the way back to Father Hennepin.

It’s what happened on this island in the early 1990s though that set the stage for one of the most dramatic political battles in Minnesota state history. (more…)

John Tuma’s Capitol Update – The Pre-Session Version

Most Minnesotans think the nuclear debate in Minnesota began with the 1994 battle dealing with the storage of nuclear waste in dry casks at Prairie Island just outside of Red Wing. The essential result of that debate was the compromise allowing limited storage of nuclear waste in exchange for a moratorium on the construction of new facilities in the state.

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Capitol Update from MEP’s lobbyist at the Capitol – John Tuma

 ”That’s different is indispensable in Minnesota… That’s different means you have an opinion, but you’re holding back the details.”

Howard Mohr

How to Talk Minnesotan*

Having five generations of roots here in Minnesota, I enjoy Howard Mohr’s little book on how to speak Minnesotan.  It is absolutely hilarious and so true – ya know.  We definitely have some unusual ways of putting things.  So when those of us from Minnesota say that “they’re different”, we pretty much know what we’re saying without having to say it.  It would be so un-Minnesotan to delve into the details, but we all know what we mean.  There is no need to expound on the term “different”; it is always in relation to something that is in the negative.  Mohr didn’t clearly explain that negative thing in his paragraph on the subject, but maybe that’s because it’s so understood.  It’s on pages 3 and 4 of his book if you care to read it. (more…)

John Tuma’s Capitol Update – The Fall Version

The third installment in a series about Minnesota’s role, now and in the past, in the local food movement. This week John traces the history of a little-known legislator’s efforts more than a century ago to protect the rights of farmers to sell their products.

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