The Minnesota Legislature struggled to finish its work — the final coda came at 3 a.m. Friday — but managed to approve thousands of pages of legislation, brimming with hundreds of changes to the way Minnesota does business.
Some of those changes are unexpected and little noticed.
It took four days after the Legislature’s constitutional deadline to complete their plans for a $46 billion, two-year budget for Minnesota. While many of their measures await final action from Gov. Mark Dayton, here are some of the more obscure actions the Legislature approved:
CHARGES AT THE CAPITOL
The Legislature and Dayton’s administration agreed that the $310 million Capitol renovation might be worth a little bit more from the people who use it. Tucked into legislation is a provision that allows the state to “collect charges or fees from users holding events in the Capitol building.”
Department of Administration Commissioner Matt Massman say the state is planning to charge only people who would like to use the Capitol during hours it is generally closed for regular business, like evening hours once the Legislature leaves or many weekend hours.
Massman said the intent of the legislation is not to charge fees to those who come to the Capitol for group events in order to petition their government.
“There is not going to be a charge for you to access the democratic process,” he said. Instead it will be decided on a case-by-case basis for those who want to have events at times when the building is not staffed for events.
RELATED: Here’s your quick guide to (almost) everything Minnesota lawmakers did — and didn’t do — this year
COLLEGE ENTRANCE TEST COSTS
Lawmakers haven’t been consistent about whether they want all high school students to take the ACT and now they can’t decide whether they want to help them pay for it.
The education budget includes a $3 million cut to a fund used to reimburse school districts that cover the cost for low-income students to take the college entrance exam. The cut slashes those reimbursement funds in half.
In 2013, the DFL-controlled Legislature mandated the ACT for all high school students. Two years later, under divided government, the mandate was scrapped, but districts still had to offer an opportunity to take the tests and pick up the tab for students who couldn’t afford it.
Minnesota had nearly universal participation in the ACT by the class of 2016, something Brenda Cassellius, education commissioner, celebrated because it meant more poor and minority students were taking the test.
Now, the chance to take the ACT lives on, but the money to help districts pay for it is dwindling.
MUSSELS, MINNOWS GET SOME MUSCLE
The environments and natural resources budget has a new interest in some small freshwater creatures.
The bill includes a prohibition on harvesting live mussels from state waters. A licensed angler is allowed to take and possess, “for personal use only,” no more than 24 whole or 48 half shells of dead freshwater mussels from any waters where fish can be caught and kept.
Mussels must be hand-picked and cannot be purchased or sold.
The bill also calls for the natural resources commissioner to probe the potential risks related to importing “golden shiner minnows” to be used as bait.
The commissioner in partnership with the University of Minnesota and any third-party must produce a report that includes recommendations about how to protect state waters from invasive species and fish diseases.
SEE YOU LATER, SCOTT WALKER
Minnesotans who pay higher taxes because they work in Wisconsin will get a break under the tax bill passed by the Minnesota Legislature.
Border crossers would get a credit for income taxes paid to Wisconsin that exceed the amount they paid to Minnesota. They still would have to file two state tax returns, but they would get a refund for higher taxes paid in Wisconsin.
For 40 years, Minnesota and Wisconsin had a tax reciprocity agreement that allowed border crossers to pay taxes only in their home state, but that pact ended in 2009. About 24,000 Minnesotans work in Wisconsin, and many pay hundreds of dollars more in taxes than they did when reciprocity was in effect.
“I’m not blaming the Dayton administration one bit on this one,” said House Taxes Committee Chair Greg Davids, R-Preston, who says his southern Minnesota community has been most affected by the reciprocity mess. For years, Minnesota has tried to negotiate a new agreement with Wisconsin but came up short, he said.
“So I said: ‘You know what? We’re going to do it anyways,'” Davids said, “‘We don’t need Wisconsin; we’ll see you later.’”
‘I VOTED’ STICKERS FOR ALL
Hey, Minnesota absentee voters, you, too, can get a sticker.
With the rush of people using Minnesota’s liberalized absentee voting laws, those doing their civic duty by mail or in person before Election Day were missing a token of thanks for participating. Nearly 700,000 Minnesotans, or 23 percent of the electorate, used absentee or mail ballots in last year’s election.
But most did not get the red and white Minnesota “I voted” sticker.
The Legislature decided the early voters should be denied lapel art no more.
In an election-relation measure waiting to be sent to the governor, lawmakers updated the law to allow election official to provide the stickers to mail and absentee ballot voters.
BAG BANS BANNED
As have Republicans in other states, Republican legislators in Minnesota wanted to stop cities from banning stores from giving customers plastic or paper bags.
Minneapolis is on track to usher in such a ban next month.
But a budget bill being sent to Dayton would ban cities from banning bags “for packaging of any item or good purchased from a merchant, itinerant vendor, or peddler.” A previous iteration of the measure would have also banned cities from imposing fees on bag-use, but that was stricken in the final version.
The measure would negate Minneapolis’ plan — and forewarn other cities not to even try banning bags.
LEGISLATIVE INSURANCE MEMBERSHIP
The Legislature allocated $20,000 for two years of membership dues in the National Conference of Insurance Legislators.
The organization, which bills itself as working “to assert the prerogative of legislators in making state policy when it comes to insurance and educate state legislators on current and perennial insurance issues”, will have three conferences next year. The conferences will be held at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead in Georgia, the Little American Hotel in Utah and the Renaissance Oklahoma City Convention Center Hotel & Spa in Oklahoma.
It has bipartisan leadership. All states are automatically members but only contributing member states can join the leadership, said Paul Penna, executive director of the organization’s support service. Minnesota has not been a contributing member in recent years but Republican Rep. Joe Hoppe and Democratic Rep. Linda Slocum have attended past events.
Key issues have included big topics like tracking the impact of potential changes to the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) and the use of big data in all insurance sectors, as well as specific topics like coverage of air ambulance usage and insurance for self-driving vehicles.
THE LEGISLATURE ALSO MOVED TO…
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Fund digital preservation of the hearings’ audio files and digitization of some of the Minnesota Historical Society’s collections.
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Require Metro Transit audits every quarter, a win for skeptics of the regional bus and train system.
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Make sure children 10 and older who end up in the child-protection system know that they have a right to attorneys at no charge and that discussions with their attorneys are private. Dayton signed this into law earlier this month and it takes effect in August.
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Changes open enrollment policies to give kids from an Edina neighborhood a preference to enroll in the Edina school district, even though the neighborhood is part of the Hopkins school district. Even some Democrats disagreed on whether this provision is fair. “This would create a terrible precedent statewide,” said Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park.
Christopher Magan, Bill Salisbury and David Montgomery contributed to this report.