Mike Mullen//July 9, 2014
Mike Mullen//July 9, 2014
1) Despite a US Supreme Court ruling from last week saying that members aren’t required to pay dues, Minnesota home health care workers have provided the state with enough signatures to start a union election here, Minnesota Public Radio reports.
The measure — the 9,000 signature petition accompanying it was presented to the Bureau of Mediation Services on Tuesday — will be a historic, advocates say.
State lawmakers passed legislation in 2013 allowing the unionization efforts for the more than 26,000 home care workers in Minnesota. Advocates say the move is necessary to improve working conditions in the high-turnover industry, and to acknowledge that the field is an important career.
Republican resistance has been staunch. “Forcing personal care attendants – those who often care for ill, elderly or disabled family members and close friends – into a government union for the sole purpose of extracting more money out of them to fill the coffers of Gov. [Mark] Dayton’s political cronies has been part of a futile effort of his that I have fought for years,” retiring state Rep. Kurt Zellers, who is running for governor against Dayton, said in a statement.
2) The Minnesota Racing Commission’s poor regulation of Running Aces Harness Park contributed to nearly $440,000 in underpayments of winnings to horse owners between 2008 and 2012, according to a report from the state Legislative Auditor released on Tuesday.
Lawmakers have long been concerned about the racing commission’s oversight of horse tracks in Minnesota. “I want to say it’s in the neighborhood of a couple of years that we have been concerned about the Racing Commission and its oversight of the tracks,” said Rep. Joe Atkins, who has scheduled a hearing for later this month, “but not having a deep enough knowledge of knowing what the specifics were.”
There has been a change-up in leadership since 2012, and a Racing Commission response from the new set of officials in charge acknowledged the previously lackluster oversight. Essentially, Running Aces had been calculating purse payouts based on a percentage of a small piece of the total pot, and Auditor Jim Nobles found that’s contrary to state law.
3) The members of the newly created Legislative Commission on Data Practices on Tuesday laid out a broad set of topics that they hope to address with tangible policy changes over the next legislative session.
Among the topics that members brought up were license plate readers, drones and a year-long exemption for health plan contract data that was sandwiched into a clarification bill to the Data Practices Act. Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, a data-privacy guru who’s retiring from the Legislature, said she hopes the make up of the commission — it contains leaders of the applicable House committee — will help ensure that real changes are made.
“My primary purpose is to develop more expertise in the Legislature on these very complex issues,” Holberg said. “I’m kind of enjoying the awakening if you will — which is, of course, a direct result of the public’s interest as well.”
COMINGS & GOINGS