Despite the LEA report in 2023 being the largest in decades, we did not have room to score some major legislation.
by John Augustine

Before LEA turns all its energy toward promoting the 2024 LEA Report (soon to be delivered to the hands of supporters and already available online), we want to make sure that all the substantial changes made to MN government in 2023 are not forgotten. (This article won’t even get into addressing the various marijuana legislation that was passed to decriminalize marijuana but created such a convoluted regulatory “equity” framework that no one can agree on how to implement it.)

The 2023 Report (also accessible on the Reports Page of our www.lea-mn.org website) was our largest in decades, both in terms of number of pages and number of bills scored. Yet there was so much pushed through that year, we had to leave out bills that still merit attention, if we want to hold elected officials accountable for all the legislation they passed.

Part of one bill has recently gotten national campaign coverage. SF2995, an 841-page bill deceptively described as “omnibus health appropriations”. Within that bill is language that created a new Department of Children, Youth and Families, and many other identity-group bureaucracies such as the Office of African American Health, and the Cultural and Ethnic Minorities Infrastructure Grant Program. The same bill repealed language that prohibited most abortions from being covered by Minnesota Care or other medical assistance aid and increased abortion and family-planning services coverage reimbursement rates by 20 percent. The part getting national attention is the language that removed medical protection for babies born alive during an abortion and also removed monthly reporting requirements of these occurrences and other abortion data to the MN Department of Health.

A couple of other 2023 bills worth mentioning were SF3035 (the omnibus jobs, economic development, labor and industry appropriations bill), and HF2310 (the omnibus environment, natural resources, climate, and energy finance and policy bill). HF 2310, which passed with some bipartisan support, includes language that greatly increased licensing fees for virtually all types of watercraft, and phases in permit and test requirements for any operators of personal watercraft. It also creates within the Department of Commerce an Electric School Bus Deployment Program and Local Climate Action Grants. SF3035 created Earned Sick and Safe Time mandates. It also created a new state banking corporation called the MN Climate Innovation Finance Authority, overseen by 13 appointees of the governor and given $20 million for start-up funds, and an Office of New Americans, established with the Department of Employment and Economic Development to “foster immigrant and refugee inclusion”, and to facilitate equitable access to all government services and grants. There is no language accompanying this new law that makes distinctions based on legal citizenship status. SF3035 also has an article specifically banning non-compete agreements in employment contracts, with just a couple of exceptions; that will certainly have an impact on interstate commerce and could therefore be challenged as unconstitutional at the federal level.

Finally, though the 2023 LEA Report scored the HF669 omnibus capital investment bill that included $1.5 billion of new bonding projects in a time of budget surplus, we did not score HF670, which approved projects totaling a little over $1 billion of cash appropriations straight from the general fund. Many of these projects should have been funded at the local level rather than the state level, or not been publicly funded at all, as is clearly evident from this partial list of projects included:

• $1.7 million for community tree planting grants
• $4 million for skate park grants
• Approximately $44 million for local fire station or police station construction
• $12.8 million for local road improvements to the city of Madelia, $5 million to improve a couple of streets in Saint Louis Park, and $7.5 million to improve a 5-mile stretch of a road in Stearns County that is not even a county road.
• $11 million to Saint Paul to redevelop a site that was formerly a golf course, and $13 million to Duluth to construct new facilities and renew existing facilities at Spirit Mountain, a city-owned ski area that competes with other privately-owned ski areas and recreational businesses.
• $1 million to construct a community wellness and rec center for the city of Litchfield, $4.5 million for a community and multicultural outreach center in North Saint Paul, $24 million to build three health and wellness centers on the Leech Lake Reservation, $7 million for a freight rail car storage facility in the city of Lakeville, and $7.5 million to remodel Woodbury’s Central Park Building to add a 12,000 square-foot multipurpose event space that can hold 350 people.
• Over $200 million for grants to various politically-connected nonprofit groups, including $1.5 million to Appetite for Change (to construct an urban agriculture facility for building health, wealth, and social change in Minneapolis), $4 million to Every Meal (to construct a facility to serve as a statewide distribution hub for sending weekend meals home in backpacks for students), $3.5 million for the Latino Economic Development center in Saint Paul, $5 million to PROCEED for building a community center on the east side of Saint Paul, $3.9 million for a Somali museum in Minneapolis, $15 million to V3 Sports (for a community aquatic, sports, and event center in north Minneapolis), and $3.5 million to the We Win Institute (for capital improvements to provide culturally specific programming for Black students in Minneapolis).

Besides the waste and inefficiency that come from funding local and nonprofit projects with state general funds, there were also procedural errors made by staff putting the projects into the wrong bills that were agreed upon as part of a “global” deal reached in the last days of the 2023 session. Some local projects that were supposed to be part of the bonding bill, which needed bipartisan support to pass, ended up in the cash bill that also included all the funding for nonprofit groups. Therefore, both parties agreed to excuse members from voting on the HF670 cash bill, so they wouldn’t have to vote for all the nonprofit group funding or vote against projects in their local districts. This deal insulated incumbents from accountability nicely, but did not improve the state’s fiscal accountability to all its citizens. Despite the deal, the HF670 bill with the nonprofit group projects funding still received bipartisan YES votes. Legislators that actually voted for this bill chose to put state funding for local projects ahead of any claim to being serious about reining in wasteful spending.