Hours of negotiations later, still no Minnesota budget agreement

(KSTP) — Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota legislative leaders have met for more than 13 hours over several sessions on Sunday and Monday, but still, no substantial progress on the state budget has been reported.

“There’s no doubt we’re at the 11th hour here,” Walz said Monday morning. “It’s time to get it done.”

A series of meetings starting at 11:30 a.m. Monday morning hadn’t resulted in substantial progress as of 6 p.m.

“Folks are gonna be frustrated if you compromise on things that they care about,” Walz said in describing the talks. “That’s the only way to get it done.”

Lawmakers shuttled in and out of the governor’s office all day, carrying binders full of spreadsheets and accompanied by lawmakers and staff with expertise in various areas of the budget. Some of the areas of disagreement continue to be state health care for undocumented immigrants, unemployment insurance for hourly school workers and the governor’s proposal to end all funding for non-public schools.

 “We’re continuing to make progress,” said DFL Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy on her way into one of the meetings on Monday. “It’s slow, but there’s progress being made.”

She did say one area of disagreement appears to have been worked out. The Senate and governor will likely prevail in seeking a balanced budget over four years instead of just the next two years, as the House proposed.

While all of this is going on, some real people are caught in the middle, uncertain about the future of funding they care about. Rob Wudlich of “Get up, Stand Up to Cure Paralysis” is at the Capitol keeping a close eye on the future of funding for spinal cord research. He says the House is considering slashing that funding from $6 million over two years to $1 million.

“Spinal cord stimulation has helped people regain function, movement in their legs below their injury,” Wudlick said of the successes achieved since that funding started in 2015 through the higher education finance bill. “We’ve become kind of a global leader in spinal cord injury research thanks to this program.”

Murphy says working out disagreements in the Health and Human Services Budget could be the most difficult gap to bridge between the House and Senate.

“That is a really significant bill,” she said.  “It’s coming to us very late and it’s a hard one to reconcile.”

The session deadline is Monday, May 19, at midnight. However, the most important deadline is Monday, June 30th, when state funding would run out for any areas of the budget not signed into law by then.