Minnesota lawmakers miss self-imposed deadline, eye weekend special session

Minnesota lawmakers have blown past a midweek goal to return to St. Paul to finish work on the state budget and are now eyeing the weekend for a possible special session to head off sending out more layoff notices.

After hours of closed-door meetings Wednesday, legislative leaders and Gov. Tim Walz said they’ve started discussing the logistics of a likely one-day special session, but tension points remain in negotiations over the budget bills themselves.

In a Legislature with 101 Democrats and 100 Republicans, Walz said, single legislators can wind up effectively having veto power, making talks difficult.

“We have the closest split in any Legislature, maybe ever,” Walz said, “which means the details matter.”

Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth said a Saturday special session is possible and that budget negotiations have “not broken down in any way.”

The Legislature adjourned its regular session on May 19 without a completed two-year budget. Legislators had hoped to hold a special session that same week, but they blew past that deadline, as well as another goal to have a budget complete before Memorial Day weekend.

The situation gets “much more serious” as July 1 nears, Walz said. If the state doesn’t have a budget by then, it would enter a partial government shutdown, resulting in the layoff of thousands of public employees.

The state was obligated on Friday to warn hundreds of nurses of that possibility. The next major deadline is Monday, when the state would have to warn tens of thousands of public employees of possible layoffs.

Lawmakers hope to avoid that.

“I think that causes great uncertainty for folks,” Walz said. “I think it adds unnecessary chaos.”

He also said state agencies have started to work through what will happen if their budgets aren’t improved by July 1. Minnesota hasn’t had a government shutdown since 2011.

“We’re not there yet,“ Walz said, about a possible shutdown. ”We’re basically 28 days out.”

Lawmakers held an initial public hearing on a more than 300-page human services bill Thursday afternoon. An agreement between House and Senate lawmakers on the bill would cut more than $255 million from disability services, primarily by capping inflationary cost increases while adding funding for substance abuse treatment.

After days of closed-door negotiations over the bill, committee chairs in the House and Senate put forward a bill that they noted required some of the deepest cuts as lawmakers work to balance the state budget.

Rep. Joe Schomacker, R-Luverne, said the bill doesn’t include everything any one lawmaker wanted.

“This is what compromise is,” he said, “and this is what it looks like.”

Rep. Brion Curran, DFL-White Bear Lake, said that while the bill improved from earlier in the session, the cuts would make Minnesota worse off. She noted human services budget negotiators were given a target to cut spending significantly.

“What we were told to do is awful,” Curran said.

A transportation budget bill is still outstanding, as well as a slate of tax changes for the next two years. Debate over passing a bonding bill, which would fund construction projects across the state, is also ongoing.

A leadership agreement to strip health care from undocumented adults, a top priority for Republicans, is still being debated. But many Democrats are upset about the deal, and leaders worry that including it in health and human services budget legislation could jeopardize its passage.

Republicans have said they need a “guarantee” that bill will both be passed and signed into law if it travels in a separate bill outside of the broader budget.