Minnesota lawmakers grit teeth, pass state budget in crammed special session

An incensed Minnesotan took to the state’s House floor Monday night to rail against a bill to fund transportation. 

“I just kind of want to get this off my chest here a little bit first. This bill is a result of a broken deal.”

Another speaker pointed out holes in legislation outlining spending for the environment and natural resources. 

“There is no happiness in this bill. It truly was a compromise bill, and as I like to tell my children, when you compromise that means everyone is unhappy.”

These dissenting voices were not irate members of the public or even renegade legislators. Instead, they were, respectively, Rep. Kristi Pursell, DFL-Northfield, and Erin Koegel, DFL-Spring Lake Park, the co-authors – alongside two Republican House co-chairs – of the very bills they were railing against. 

Like a college sophomore completing their tardy term papers in one night, the Minnesota Legislature met Monday for a one-day only special session called by Gov. Tim Walz.

Related: What to know about Legislature’s Monday special session to finish the budget

Lawmakers grinded through 14 bills in nearly 16 hours that comprise about 90% of the state government’s $67 billion two-year budget, the time spent on each bill dwindling into the night as legislators increasingly cleared their hoarse throats. 

(The Legislature passed the other 10% before adjourning from their regular session on May 19.)

While the House adjourned before 11 p.m., the Senate stretched until 2 a.m. Senate lawmakers boasted of infrastructure projects near their districts as part of the bonding bill and Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope and chair of the Senate Taxes Committee, teased colleagues on the Senate floor, including calling Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, “a woke flower child.” 

It marked the end of a budget writing process where a split House forged a powersharing agreement that was not hashed out until February. Then, once the regularly scheduled legislative session ended three weeks ago, lawmakers began to meet privately to reconcile their differences. 

“It was a terribly worked out process,” Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville and chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters after the Senate adjourned. “It’s not the way we want to do things. We care very much about transparency and this was not transparent.” 

During the special session’s daytime portion, the focus was on a standalone bill that bars undocumented immigrant adults from accessing reduced cost health care from the state. 

My colleague, Shadi Bushra, covered that story. Here is what else to know about a special session that was occasionally illuminating and exhaustively long. 

Legislators were pretty frustrated

If nothing else, the special session laid bare the testiness that occurred in the closed-door meetings of the past few weeks. This was especially the case in the House, which has 67 DFL and 67 Republican lawmakers. 

Take transportation. 

Koegel, the co-chair of the House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee, thought she had a deal with the legislative leadership troika of Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, in which $93 million from a transportation sales tax would go to the Metropolitan Council.

The Met Council would use the money to design a bus rapid transit system in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. 

But the proposal is back to square one after final bill language posted Sunday squelched the project.

“All of the leaders signed the spreadsheet for the policy provision and then went back on their word,” Koegel said as her daughter sat beside her listening to headphones and drawing. “If people saw what happened behind closed doors, they’d actually be appalled.”

Nonetheless, Koegel voted for the overall spending bill. Asked to explain her vote, Koegel said, “I did it begrudgingly. We need to pass a state budget.”

A similar dynamic took place with a bill to fund Minnesota colleges and universities. 

Marion Rarick, R-Maple Lake and co-chair of the Higher Education Finance and Policy Committee, slammed her colleagues for abdicating their responsibility this legislative session to name new members to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents. (This means Walz will name four interim regents.)

“There really was no reason we couldn’t get to the election of regents,” Rarick said. “There has only been four times over the rest of state history where we didn’t elect the regents.”

But Rarick also reluctantly voiced yes on the bill. 

The grousing seeped into legislative leadership.

During a Senate recess, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, held a press conference to say that even though he signed a letter endorsing Walz’s call for a special session he didn’t actually support these spending bills. 

“We are here today not because we agree with this budget,” Johnson said. “I want to be very clear with the public, with folks out there, it’s not because Republicans agree with the budget.” 

Murphy, the Senate Majority Leader, responded with a statement that read in part, “We are making difficult but responsible decisions to reduce the budget without sacrificing core services, and yet Leader Johnson seems to want even deeper cuts.”

Besides health care for undocumented immigrants, what were the other defining policy disagreements of this special session?

None? To be sure, lawmakers had their own pet issues like Koegel, Rarick and Nolan West, R-Blaine, who slammed increasing the cannabis tax from 10% to 15%. And tax breaks for large data centers were controversial enough that repealing the electricity tax credit but keeping other breaks became a standalone bill, which both chambers ultimately passed after several floor speeches. 

But the biggest spending changes, capping the money paid to Medicaid providers and planning for $250 million in special education cuts starting in mid-2027, were subsumed in enormous bills that were just published. 

A 204-page budget bill that funds elementary through high school education was finalized Saturday. A 306-page bill that sets most of the rules and financing of Medical Assistance, Minnesota’s Medicaid program, came out Friday. 

Lawmakers and their staff are human and had to choose what to concentrate on before Monday, though legislative leaders told reporters after the House adjourned that everyone had enough time to read the bills. 

“These bills are the compilation of five months of work,” Hortman said. 

The DFL House leader was in tears when asked about the budget deal to cut undocumented immigrant adults off MinnesotaCare. But Hortman also noted that other accomplishments of the 2023 DFL trifecta remained intact. 

Murphy also emphasized preserving these legislative changes. 

“I knew that this was going to be a difficult negotiation, but of the things we worked hard to achieve in 2023 that are important for families across the state of Minnesota, almost all of them are preserved,” Murphy told reporters after the Senate adjourned. 

Indeed, policies like free school breakfast and lunch, unemployment insurance for hourly school workers, and raising per-pupil funding for students were maintained in this year’s budget. 

Meanwhile, Demuth said that her Republican caucus accomplished “a budget that actually reduced spending in a common sense way and not raising taxes on Minnesotans” (cannabis vendors and customers excepted). 

Besides kicking undocumented immigrant adults off of MinnesotaCare, the IRL impacts of this session will take time to discern, especially since anticipated federal Medicaid cuts by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Trump may lead to a second special session. 

Murphy noted this possibility.

“I’m worried that Congress will act in July and make deep cuts to Medicaid in particular,” Murphy said. “If the cuts are as deep as they’re talking about, we will have to come back to balance the budget.” 

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Editor’s note: This story was written by Matthew Blake, MinnPost’s state government reporter.

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

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