Local legislators sum up session, School and health funding a plus; property and cigarette taxes a minus, they say

“This year we had two goals: to fund education well and to keep and preserve the health care system. We achieved those two”
Sen. LeRoy Stumpf

The day after the belated passage of a $30.5 billion budget by the Minnesota Legislature, leaders of the rival parties went touring northwest Minnesota on Thursday, taking credit for popular provisions such as education and health and passing on the bitter pills, such as increases in property taxes, to their political rivals.

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty was in Moorhead highlighting major features of the budget. He also visited Duluth, Mankato and Worthington.

House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul, held a press conference in the Grand Forks airport. “We believe that our focus on schools and health care is being rewarded,” he said.

Job done

Sen. LeRoy Stumpf, DFL-Plummer, who reached his home after a long drive Thursday evening and an unusually long legislative budget session, too, said it all was worth it as the budget brought good news for the people of northwest Minnesota.

He said he felt better coming home this year than he did two years ago.

“This year we had two goals: to fund education well and to keep and preserve the health care system. We achieved those two,” he said.

Northwest Minnesota has a large number of people who use MinnesotaCare, which Democrats were able to preserve successfully, Stumpf said.

Several provisions in the budget, according to Stumpf, will help people of northwest Minnesota specifically. The education bill has several provisions for this region.

Prominent among them is the provision to maintain the current level of funding for the Red Lake School, even though it lost a number of students after the March shooting incident. It also provides additional money to the school to help restore normalcy there.

Rep. Bernie Lieder, DFL-Crookston, said: “We ended up better than accepting the Governor’s budget.”
Schools and health systems are going to benefit the most from this budget, he said. “We did prevail (in these two sectors).”

Public schools in northwest Minnesota would receive additional funding of $5 million, he said.

East Grand Forks received $1.33 million, followed by Crookston ($1.16 million), Warren-Alvarado ($484,195), Win-E-Mac ($491,364), Stephen-Argyle ($363,760), Red Lake Falls ($352,883), Fisher ($315,553), Climax ($166,036) and Plummer ($154,484).

The education bill also permits East Grand Forks to use state funding that had expired earlier for a handicapped-accessible elevator at Senior High School.

On the other hand, Lieder said increases in property tax and the new tobacco tax would have a major impact on property owners and shopkeepers of northwest Minnesota.

Rep. Maxine Penas, R-Badger, said a bill authored by her to create a system to replace Carpenter buses has been included into the K-12 Education Finance omnibus package. The buses, a large number of which are in northwest Minnesota including in East Grand Forks and Roseau, had manufacturing defects that normally would have been taken care of by the manufacturer.

The manufacturer, Carpenter, went out of business in 1995. The budget creates a $2.2 million loan program for schools with such buses, Penas said in a statement.