Legislators stuck on the outside

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It’s one thing for members of the public, busy with their everyday lives, to feel removed from the process of state budgeting. It’s something else when members of the press feel shut out of the activity, despite hounding leadership and staff, shuttling between negotiating sites and prying what scant details are available from day to day.

Stranger still, and perhaps more alarming, is when lawmakers themselves complain they’re on the outside looking in. A chorus along those lines has begun to build, mostly among Democrats, who say the three-sided negotiating table — two of its spots belonging to DFLers — should be placed nearer to a window than a closed door.

Gov. Mark Dayton, House Speaker Kurt Daudt and Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk negotiated almost continuously during the final week of the regular session, and have held intermittent talks throughout late May and early June to lay the groundwork for a special session. In both cases, meeting under Dayton’s imposed “cone of silence,” the leaders have put up a seemingly impenetrable front against leaks to the public.

Dayton addressed the Capitol press corps on numerous occasions during the first week of June, and House Republicans called three different press conferences, though the only fact to emerge during that time was that Dayton had agreed to Republicans’ offer of a $525 million education budget target.

On Wednesday, a letter from 34 legislators called for greater transparency in the deal-making process, and for bills to be posted at least 48 hours in advance of the special session.

“Many of us have heard from our constituents that they are dismayed by the lack of transparency in the final stages of legislative sessions,” reads the letter. “We need to do better.”

The letter grew out of a series of discussions among House members after the frantic May 18 adjournment, as many DFL members focused their displeasure on the last-minute introduction and passage of a jobs and economic development budget bill, according to Rep. Barb Yarusso, DFL-Shoreview, lead author of the letter.

Each of the 34 signees to the “rushed” first draft of the letter were Democrats, but Yarusso said “10 or 11” more legislators had since agreed to sign the request, including “a couple” Republican members. (Yarusso declined to volunteer the GOP legislators’ names on Thursday, but said a second version of the letter was planned.)

Yarusso cited numerous examples of significant legislation that materialized late in the session without public testimony, including the delay of a sales tax exemption for joint-powers agreements that was suddenly attached to the since-vetoed education bill. As passed, that provision would cost local governments $20 million during the 2016 fiscal year. The effective date measure was noticed just before the bill reached the House floor, Yarusso said, but others were missed.

“We discovered some things with barely enough time to know about it, and other things, only after the fact,” she said.

At least initially, the plea for at least a two-day review period seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. As of Thursday evening, private negotiations continued, and no bills had been finalized by legislative staff. But a joint House and Senate walk-through was still scheduled for Friday afternoon, and lawmakers were told to prepare for a special session that could convene the following day.

The secrecy around final deals is a frequent target of derision for Capitol press corps members, and coverage of how things came together has become increasingly difficult, according to Joe Spear, a director with the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists.

“They used to have these big debates in conference committees,” said Spear, editor of the Mankato Free Press. “It was often late at night — sometimes really late — but we always wanted to have a reporter up there to listen in.”

Now, Spear said, it’s difficult to generate stories that are explanatory, or even useful, during the negotiation stage. This problem is exacerbated for regional outlets like the Free Press, as the Mankato-area lawmakers that paper usually covers are often shoved to the margins of the discussion.

“They’re kind of out of the loop,” Spear said. “They’re sort of idle. We do talk to them every once in a while to see what they’ve heard through the grapevine, but you can tell they’re not really in on the deep conversations.”

Even legislators close to the most contentious issues can have trouble keeping tabs on progress. As chair of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, has a stake in two of the omnibus budget bills vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton. Marty, one of the signees to the letter, said he had “some idea” of how negotiations were playing out during the interim since the session ended, though not without a good deal of effort on his part.

“It’s a lot of phone-calling,” Marty said. “As the Senate policy chair [on energy and environment], I’m supposed to be negotiating the policy stuff. I don’t know all the details, but I know the general direction things are going.”

Marty said there are still “strong disputes internally, in the [Senate DFL] caucus,” on controversial proposals to relax environmental review and change the state practice on net metering. But, rather than hiding the deal-making, Marty said those disagreements make public review all the more important: When the late-breaking environment and agriculture bill arrived on the Senate floor on the final night of the session, 29 out of 39 Democrats voted against it.

One of those Democrats was Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, who also signed the letter seeking more public input. Latz said he found out only after the bill passed that it contained a provision mandating a study of agriculture nuisance lawsuits, which, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said should have come before that panel during the session.

“I had thought the whole thing was dead,” said Latz, who added he would have worked to strip the provision if it had appeared in his committee.

Latz said he generally agrees with the oft-cited belief that the Legislature, especially under divided majorities, can only pass bills with private meetings as hard deadlines approach, but thinks more openness could avert potential snags or crises.

A lot of it is a matter of communication back to the members of the caucuses. And then you need two-way communication, so that deals aren’t struck that are going to turn out to be really problematic for a lot of people,” Latz said.
Latz went on to say he felt open to communicate his feelings to Bakk during the negotiating period, and had done so on “a couple of things of particular concern.”

The information freeze-out is less troubling to Rep. Sarah Anderson, R-Apple Valley, despite the fact that a proposal she championed had apparently become one of the final sticking points before the convening of the session. Anderson’s state government reform bill gives counties the choice of hiring an outside accounting firm to audit their books instead of State Auditor Rebecca Otto. Dayton signed the state government omnibus, but has said he wants that language removed as part of a special session.

Anderson, for her part, trusts Daudt and House Majority Leader Joyce Peppin to represent the House position with minimal input from the bill’s author.
“I think when it comes to the State Auditor issue, my leadership understands the position I have on it, and the position of the committee members,” Anderson said. “[Daudt] is being very honest and forthright, as far as what our view is on this issue.”

Despite that faith, Anderson confessed at least some curiosity as to how things would come out in the end: She spent part of Thursday afternoon refreshing the House of Representatives website to see if final special session bills had been posted.

As of early Friday morning, none had.