House Speaker Melissa Hortman said I overstated it a few weeks ago when I criticized the Legislature for failing to pass a bond bill this spring.
A state needs a three-fifths vote to borrow money, but Democrats don't have large majorities in the state legislature.
“It's very unusual to have such a large majority, right? So it's the minority that decides whether the bill becomes law or not,” Hortman said last week.
One of her Republican colleagues, Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, again placed the blame on Democrats.
“We've been exploring mechanisms to do this, but the Democrats' own actions have closed the door,” he said in a separate interview last week. “We've made legitimate proposals to the Democrats many times in good faith, but they've never made a counterproposal that was more than contemptuous of us.”
The government has no net benefit figures, no bottom line results to show stakeholders whether they are getting value for their money.
Some state agencies in Minnesota have implemented some accountability through website “dashboards” that display metrics about the things they oversee, but most Minnesotans measure government performance by a much simpler notion of whether things are going well.
When the bond bill failed to pass this year, I saw it as a warning signal about government performance, perhaps even a sign that some of the extreme rhetoric and tactics that have stalled Congress were emerging in St. Paul.
Both Hortman and Johnson told me that extremism is taking root in Congress — though not in their own party, but in each other's.
“I think Demus and Johnson were interested in getting it. [bonding bill] “That's been done,” Hortman said, referring to House Minority Leader Lisa DeMuth, D-N.Y. “I don't know if the far-right wing of their caucus would allow that.”
“They're starting to understand that,” Johnson said. [Washington] It's spreading among the elites on the Democratic side. I know that sounds very biased, but when they control the entire agenda, they have the opportunity to compromise.”
Accountability in St. Paul is coming under scrutiny: Earlier this month, the state Legislative Auditor's Office sharply criticized the state's oversight of the nonprofit Feeding the Future and its distribution of bonus checks to frontline COVID-19 workers.
“State agencies do not always approach their work with a sense of oversight or regulation,” State Legislative Auditor Judy Randall told a bipartisan committee of lawmakers in presenting her findings.
In other words, the people in those agencies are not doing their jobs.
Part of the reason, she says, is business mentality and jargon: The Minnesota Department of Education, which oversees Feeding the Future, calls the organization a “client” rather than a “grant recipient,” Ms. Randall noted.
The bond bill was moving along smoothly this session until mid-April, when a Democratic senator was arrested and indicted for allegedly breaking into his mother-in-law's house. Until then, the four senators had been getting along “like a buddy cop movie,” Hortman said.
The arrests changed the balance of power in the Senate, where Democrats held a slim one-seat majority. “Everything was going well until that robbery happened,” Hortman said.
The Legislature's pattern is to write budgets in odd-numbered years and create capital outlay measures, or bond bills, in even-numbered years. As I noted two weeks ago, lawmakers approved a bond bill last year, but it was a massive one that covered $2.6 billion in capital projects. This comes after the 2021-22 Legislature ended a two-year period without a bond bill.
Technically, the state only has one bond measure per four years, which is out of sync with the spending cycle: Lawmakers had expected state agencies, universities and towns to approve about $900 million more in bonds for capital projects this year.
Two weeks ago, I quoted some local government leaders discussing the impact of the delays on their own projects, but statewide, the delays may not have much practical impact, especially if lawmakers decide to pass a bond measure next year.
One way to smooth out capital spending in the state would be to eliminate the three-fifths vote requirement for borrowing measures, which would make the bond market and voters the primary limiters on capital spending in Minnesota.
That would require an amendment to the state constitution, and Hortman said the idea should be discussed along with other proposed reforms to state government, such as whether to create a full-time state Legislature and whether to ban lawmakers from being lobbyists.
Johnson made a firm case for maintaining the three-fifths vote requirement, saying it would force the majority party to adopt projects pushed by the minority party.
“If we lower our standards and become the governing party, we can have it all and not have to compromise on anything. That idea quite scares me,” he said.
