Legislature passes $1 billion public works bill

Pioneer Press
May 21, 2006
Bill Salisbury

Minnesota will step up its commitment to bioscience research as part of a $1 billion public works program that the Legislature passed early Sunday morning.

In the House and Senate, the measure that many lawmakers said was the first priority this year — a bill to borrow $1 billion for state building projects — passed fairly quickly Sunday morning. After ten minutes of debate, the House approved it 111-21. The Senate had no debate on the massive building measure and passed it 60-6.

Getting the votes in the Legislature was far more complicated.

"It was a long process, and it's frustrating it took so long,'' said the chief House negotiator for the bill, Rep. Dan Dorman, R-Albert Lea.

He said the bill should go a long way towards repairing the Legislature's public image, tainted last year with a partial state government shut down and two years ago when it failed it pass its major spending, borrowing and taxing bills.

The measure includes $40 million to build the first of five bioscience research laboratories that the University of Minnesota wants to erect over the next 10 years.

"It's the most important project in the bonding bill," Senate Capital Investments Committee Chairman Keith Langseth, DFL-Glyndon, had said.

The public works measure is called the bonding bill because it would pay for most construction projects by selling $949 million in general obligation bonds to investors. Legislative leaders called it the most important bill of the session.

The money would build dozens of classroom buildings, laboratories and libraries at state colleges across the state.

It would pay $60 million to complete the Northstar commuter rail line from Minneapolis to Big Lake and transfer $7.8 million from the Metropolitan Council to continue planning a proposed light-rail or bus rapid transit line in the Central Corridor between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul.

The agreement also calls for expanding three prisons, building a new state hospital lockup for sex offenders and funding dozens of flood-control projects and park and trail expansions.

The House-Senate conference committee that negotiated the bill barely met Gov. Tim Pawlenty's demand to keep the price tag under $1 billion. The bill's total cost is $999,980,000 — a figure driven partly by Pawlenty's spending requests.

State colleges and universities would be the big winners under the bill. They would get $309 million — nearly one-third of the money in the bill — for renovations and construction projects.

The university had asked the Legislature to create a nine-member Biomedical Sciences Research Authority that could borrow $330 million to finance construction of the five labs over the next decade. But Dorman rejected that idea.

He objected to delegating the Legislature's authority to make construction decisions to an appointed body. Instead, he favors having the Legislature fund one new lab every two years.

To get the lab, the University had to give up a proposed $41 million science classroom building on its Minneapolis campus. But it got another $27 million to expand the Carlson School of Management.

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Posted by reas0011 at May 21, 2006 08:34 AM