Hopkins Legislators Critical of Shutdown Deal

The deal is “fiscally irresponsible,” said Hopkins Sen. Ron Latz (DFL-District 44). 

It could “set us up for bigger problems in future years,” worried Rep. Steve Simon (DFL-District 44A). 

The message is clear: Hopkins’ legislators aren’t enthusiastic about the agreement Gov. Mark Dayton struck with Republicans to end the shutdown.

“At this point, I don’t expect to support it,” Latz said.

Simon said he needs to read the actual legislation and "see the fine print."

Of course, neither Latz nor Simon think the deal is all bad. One of Dayton’s caveats for agreeing to the Republican plan is that they back off an across-the-board 15 percent cut that Latz criticizes for not setting priorities.

Dayton also insisted on a $500 million bonding bill and that Republicans abandon what Latz slammed as “nasty, right-wing social stuff”—non-budget policy items on issues ranging from embryonic stem cell research to a redistricting plan.

But both Latz and Simon dislike the way the plan closes the budget gap by borrowing $1.4 billion—$700 million by issuing state bonds against future tobacco revenue and $700 million through shifting K-12 education money.

Critics are already forecasting that the borrowing will force the Legislature to confront the same issue two years from now.

"I like that a deal was done, but not necessarily the approach,” Simon said.

“I don’t like it. I think it’s fiscally irresponsible,” Latz said. “It just kicks the can down the road.”

Still, Latz said he’s “relieved” the shutdown is over and thinks the borrowing will cause less harm than $1.4 billion in cuts.

Polls before the shutdown indicated that a sizable majority of voters favored what DFLers call a “balanced approach”—using both tax increases and spending cuts to close the budget gap. 

Yet Latz said a large proportion of the people who wrote him during the shutdown said they just wanted the stalemate to end and didn’t care how it ended. Latz doesn’t agree with that—no one goes into a negotiation simply wanting to end the dispute at all costs, he said—but said those sentiments put pressure on the governor and other legislators to focus on just ending the shutdown.

“I don’t know what more could have been done to convince the people of Minnesota to pressure the Republicans to increase revenues,” Latz said.

Although Dayton insisted that he didn’t give in because he got the level of spending he wanted, he told MPR on Friday morning that he probably wouldn’t vote on portions of the agreement if he were a legislator.

For Latz, the stand-off was an expected byproduct of state government divided between a DFL governor and Republican-controlled Legislature with widely divergent viewpoints.

“People get the government they voted for,” he said. “They shouldn’t be surprised that people with this wide of a gulf have trouble coming to an agreement.”

He said the types of long-term, structural changes that both sides want require either significant pressure from voters or a single party controlling both the Legislature and governor’s office—with the solutions looking starkly different depending on which party seized control.

But Latz said the shutdown should have shown residents that state government matters—as well as that people must be willing to pay for the services they receive.

“I bet if you ask the average voter on the street what government does for them, they’d be a little better informed than they were 30 days ago,” he said.