The Minnesota Legislature never really adjourned. It just went behind closed doors

Addressing a boisterous crowd at the Capitol rotunda from her wheelchair, Jillian Nelson, policy director for the Autism Society of Minnesota, laid out the case for Minnesota not cutting disability services in its biennial budget. 

“We cannot and will not allow this state to balance its budget on the backs of disabled people,” Nelson said. “You are cutting into our life. You are cutting into home care that keeps us out of institutions.”

Nelson was alluding to a budget bill that passed the Minnesota House earlier this month. The measure seeks a $427 million cut compared to budget forecast on long-term care waivers, which mostly go to Medicaid recipients who get treatment at their homes. 

The Senate budget and Gov. Tim Walz’s budget recommendations suggest alternative ways to cut Medicaid spending. 

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Luckily for me, just as Nelson was speaking, lawmakers from the House and Senate Human Services committees were meeting on the Capitol’s third floor to go over these different budget proposals.

Attending this meeting would be a good chance to see how disability advocates’ concerns are being incorporated into the state budget. Maybe I would hear counterarguments for why disability service cuts must be made.

However, I was told to leave the meeting the moment I arrived. 

Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis and co-chair of the House Human Services Finance and Policy Committee, explained the session was private because they were a “working group” going over a “budget roadmap.”

Technically, the Legislature adjourned late Monday night. 

In reality, lawmakers have continued to meet. It’s just in private. 

What is happening right now with the budget

In the place of committee meetings, lawmakers are meeting in working groups to go over the budget. With the exception of a taxes bill working group, the date and time of these meetings have not been made public, despite Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, telling reporters late Monday night that the sessions “should be public.” 

The groups are the outcome of the Legislature adjourning without passing spending bills for health care, K-12 education, transportation, and the environment, among other areas. 

From the outside, working groups appear to be like a conference committee, which is where House and Senate lawmakers iron out their differences. Except conference committees meet in public. 

By Wednesday night, the working groups are expected to report their progress on bills to House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and Murphy. Those meetings with the state’s legislative leaders are also behind closed doors. 

Eventually, legislative leaders will meet with Walz. That meeting will be public. I’m just kidding, of course. It’ll also be behind closed doors. 

At some point, it would seem, when these budget bills have been hammered out, Walz will call a special session of the Legislature. 

There, lawmakers are expected to rapidly pass these budget bills they have been negotiating in private. Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, compared this anticipated process to speed-dating, with budget bills and amendments instead of eligible singles.

Doesn’t all this violate some type of public meetings law?

It doesn’t. 

In 1990, the Minnesota Legislature passed a bill making their body exempt from the Minnesota Open Meeting Law. 

Under the legislative exception, lawmakers are only subject to the open meeting statute, “When a quorum is present and action is taken regarding a matter within the jurisdiction of the group.”

The key phrase here is “action is taken,” said Don Gemberling, spokesperson for the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, and action means whether lawmakers vote on something.

“They will vote in the open meeting for what they already decided in the closed meeting,” Gemberling said. 

Other states have laws similar to Minnesota’s, Belladonna-Carrera said, particularly when it comes to budget negotiations.

“There are instances where a level of privacy is needed for a particular section or phase of negotiations,” Belladonna-Carrera said.

However, hammering out over 80% of the state budget in private may be stretching the use of the legislative exemption. 

“We are talking about education funding and changes in health care eligibility,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “This is not wonky accounting stuff.”

Editor’s note: This story was written by Matthew Blake for MinnPost.com.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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