Greetings from the Capitol!
We are in the home stretch of the 2013 session and bills to set a new state budget for the next two years remain works in progress.
May 20 is the scheduled date of adjournment. Since the majority has yet to unveil a finished budget, we will be working through the weekend. It will be a daunting task to get a budget in place before the deadline. It concerns me these important bills will be rushed to passage with a lack of transparency if the majorities are unable to bring them to our respective floors soon.
Read more: Rep Mack: Still no budget; survey results released
Greetings from the Capitol!
We are wrapping up business at the Capitol and heading into the final week. The 2013 session is scheduled to end May 20, but the House and Senate majorities have yet to produce a final budget.
Democratic leadership in the Minnesota House and Senate met with Governor Dayton this week in hopes of breaking the state budget log-jam. Both legislative bodies have approved budget bills that will dramatically increase state spending and taxes over the next two years, but have been unable to agree on a final budget target number.
In the meantime, we continue to work on a variety of policy bills including ones dealing with energy and our local schools.
Dear Friends,
We have just ten days remaining here at the legislature to complete our work for the 2013 session. We are constitutionally required to adjourn on May 20th. If we don't complete our work and pass a budget by May 20th, we would be forced to go to special session.
We still have yet to see any of the final budget bills, or even the budget target agreements from the Governor and leaders in the House and Senate.
I will do my best to keep you informed on the final budget bills -- with one week left this Monday, it's sure to be an action-packed final week here in Saint Paul!
Greetings from the Capitol!
House-Senate conference committees are now in the process of putting budget bills into finished form so they can receive consideration for final passage. Our focus on the House floor has shifted to policy measures as we wait for the return of those finance bills.
Dear Friends,
With all budget bills passed, this week members of the House and Senate began conference committee work to resolve the differences between the two respective budget bills in each budget area.
Once their work is complete and the differences have been resolved, identical bills known as conference committee reports will be sent to the House and Senate to be adopted or rejected. If adopted, the bills will then be debated and very likely passed, at which point they will head to the Governor's desk for signature.
Dear Friend,
With only three weeks left to go this session, we remain hard at work here at the legislature. Our committee work has been completed, and we are in session nearly every day of the week, even occasional Saturdays, debating and passing the bills that will make up the 2014-2015 biennium budget. Below are a few of the Omnibus bills that we have passed out of the House chamber recently.
Greetings from the Capitol!
We spent most of this week on the House floor, where we received the Democrat majority’s budget bills, including a tax bill that provides revenue for the spending. Here is a snapshot:
Read more: Capitol Update: Taxes/fees would cost us all $550
Greetings from the Capitol!
It has been a very busy week at the Legislature as House Democrats unveiled their tax bill on Monday. In addition most of the bills that create the new state budget (what we call Finance Omnibus Bills) for the next biennium are moving through the final steps of the committee process and coming to the House floor. There are around a dozen bills that cover different areas of state government such as K-12 Education, Public Safety, Higher Education, etc.
We are scheduled to adjourn the third week in May, so the pace is really picking up as we head into the last month of the legislative session. We are spending more hours as a full House body in the chamber to discuss these bills and currently are sitting on the House floor on Saturday afternoon discussing the State Government Finance bill.
The common thread we are seeing among the budget bills is increases in state spending which are paid for with the large tax increase of $2.67 billion proposed in the Omnibus Tax Bill. What is discouraging (in addition to the tax hikes) is that these large finance bills lack measures to help our state operate more efficiently by cutting waste.
As for the budget bills we have seen on the floor this week, one pertains to jobs, another addresses agriculture and the environment and the last one that we voted on yesterday was the Public Safety Omnibus Bill. Here is an overview:
Dear Friends,
This week, the omnibus budget bills are nearing completion, taking us one step closer to completing our work on the 2014-2015 biennium budget.
The three omnibus bills I've worked closely with during the committee process are the Education Finance bill, the Legacy bill, and the State Government Finance and Veterans Affairs bill. I wanted to give you a brief update on each of those bills.
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