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Lawmaker seeks to undo the ban on banning bags
The Minnesota Legislature in 2017 barred cities and counties from enacting plastic bag bans.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota lawmakers are debating a piece of legislation that would return control of retail plastic bags to cities and counties.
Rep. Sydney Jordan, a Minneapolis Democrat, wants to repeal a 2017 state law that bars local units of government from banning single-use bags, including plastic grocery bags. For Rep. Jordan, it’s a matter of reducing the amount of plastic waste in the environment.
“The average American uses on average about 365 plastic bags per year. The average Dane in Denmark uses four,” Jordan told KARE.
The Minneapolis City Council in 2016 voted to ban single-use bags in most retail establishments and set the effective date as June 1, 2017. But the ban never went into effect, because it was blocked by state lawmakers.
During the 2017 Session, the Legislature passed a bill preempting localities from enacting bans on retail bags. The Minneapolis Council eventually passed an ordinance requiring retailers to collect a recycling fee of 5 cents per bag.
“This bill doesn’t enact any sort of ban,” Jordan explained. “It would be up to local cities and counties to create their own ordinances.”
When Jordan presented her bill in the House State and Local Government Committee Tuesday, Republicans pushed back against the idea.
“When I passed my bill, it was the ban-ban, and now we are on the ban-ban-ban. I feel like we’re in a Flintstones cartoon with Bamm-Bamm,” Rep. Jim Nash, the Waconia Republican who led the preemption effort in 2017, told colleagues.
“This is not going to fix the problem. The problem is in people who are lazy and throw things out the window or don’t do their job properly.”
Rep. Bobbie Harder, a Henderson Republican, said she normally would support the idea of more local control. But she’s opposed to giving cities the power to ban bags.
“If cities and counties enact different ordinances, I see confusion for the consumer. And if they’re upset, they’re not gonna come to city or the county they’re going to go to business owner.”
The committee chairperson, DFL Rep. Ginny Klevorn of Plymouth, said she spent years living in Sao Paulo where a strict plastic bag ban was in use. She said people became accustomed to bringing their own containers with them.
“The grocery stores still functioned. We were able to bring our groceries home. And people knew they’d need to bring a cardboard box, a market basket or something to bring their groceries home.”
Rep. Jordan told KARE she believes Minnesotans likewise would adapt to dealing with different rules in different parts of the state.
“I think Minnesotans are smart and they already navigate patchworks of laws as they move from city to city, or county to county,” Jordan explained. “For example, speed limits change when you cross a county line or city line.”
Jamie Pfuhl, the president of the Minnesota Grocers Association, said having a patchwork of ordinances would create competitive disadvantages for some grocers because they’ve no longer be on an even playing field.
“Operating in an environment of varying local laws will cause customers confusion and has the potential to have inequitable effect on those that do not have the same ability or access as others within our communities.”
Pfuhl pointed to the plastic bag recycling bins available in most stores, which keeps tons of bags out of landfills. She noted that those bags aren’t accepted in curbside recycling programs.
“It’s a convenient drop spot,” she said. “Millions of pounds of plastic are recycled annually by your local grocers.”
Jordan said those voluntary recycling programs are only catching a fraction of the plastic bags, so they end up on the streets, in landfills, or placed by mistake in curbside recycling bins.
“The best estimate for that is it’s far less than 10 percent of all plastic bags are recycled in Minnesota. And plastic bags are not infinitely recyclable – the plastic degrades over time and becomes micro plastics, and that gets in the water and eventually our bodies.”
The committee decided to lay the bill over, which would allow it to be folded into a larger, catch-all bill later in the session. Retailers say they’ll keep pressing for a uniform rule on bags that covers the whole state.
A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals took up a challenge to the Biden administration’s SAVE student loan repayment program.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Supporters of President Biden’s latest student loan repayment plan gathered outside the federal courthouse as a three-judge panel from the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the most recent challenge to it.
The SAVE — or Saving on Valuable Education — program aims to reduce student debt by $170 billion, a scaled-back plan the U.S. Dept. of Education created after the courts struck down Biden’s plan to cut college loan debt by $430 billion. The program expands the scope of an existing income-based repayment program by shortening the repayment terms and erasing some of the interest.
“This isn’t just about repayment. This is an attack on everyone who had a dream and worked hard to go to college, but didn’t have rich parents who could write a check,” Melissa Byrne of the We the 45 Million organization told reporters outside.
“This debt takes away the American dream and turns it into a debt sentence that last and lasts and lasts.”
One of those who spoke at the press conference was Alyssa Barnes, a U.S. Navy Gulf War veteran from Maine, who says she won’t be able to repay the $130,000 in debt she incurred in undergraduate and graduate school, while trying to support herself and two sons as a single mom.
“I feel a lot of regret that I didn’t know what I didn’t know when I took out those loans,” Barnes told KARE. “Over a third of by debt is just from interest accruing over the years — $37,000 is just interest. During COVID I called them to try to refinance and they just hung up on me.”
Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey led the legal attack against the plan and was joined in the effort by several other Republicans attorney generals. He has challenged the legality of using the current repayment plan to cancel interest debt, and more generally asserts only Congress can craft such a program.
Bailey, speaking on the Christian Washington Watch podcast, said Missouri has legal standing to challenge the repayment program because the state’s higher education system will lose funding if the state’s student loan program known as MOHELA can’t collect fully on student loans.
“They owe money to the State in the Lewis and Clark Discovery Fund used to pay for capital improvements in higher education facilities, and they also fund scholarships. So, there’s direct, concrete harm to the State of Missouri if those student loan payments to MOHELA are canceled by President Biden’s plan.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, took his GOP counterparts to task during Thursday’s news conference outside the courthouse.
“Here come these AGs who are supposed to be the people’s lawyer of their states, and they fight tooth and nail to block opportunity,” Ellison said.
He said the SAVE program was modest, not earthshattering.
“Look, we ask people to better themselves, to pursue education, to get more education so they can make a greater contribution to themselves or their family and community, and then what we do is say? ‘Here’s a bunch of debt!’ Unless you’re rich!”
During Thursday’s oral arguments the three judges, all appointed by Republican presidents, appeared to be skeptical of the government’s argument that SAVE program can be expanded the way the Biden Administration has done.
The U.S. Supreme Court already decided the Republican AG’s lawsuit can proceed, and asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on the merits of the challenge.
The newly elected board unanimously accepted it during a special board meeting Thursday night.
BURNSVILLE, Minn — STEP Academy officials said the school is taking steps to pay off its debt after letting go teachers, administrators, and people who worked in operations to balance their budget.
“We’re very sad we had to reduce our budget based on our enrollment but that was a necessary step so that we could stay financially secure,” said Paul Scanlon, STEP Academy’s chief operations officer.
Scanlon corrected a statement made by the St. Paul charter school’s finance director on Monday who said the school has an operating budget deficit of $2.1 million.
“It’s projected by the end of the year that it will roughly – 2.1% of our overall budget. It’s not 2.1 thousand or 2.1 million,” Scanlon said.
He said that’s roughly $275,000, which is how much debt the charter school will have by the end of the academic year.
“Through careful financing, we’ve been able to pay off some of our debt and get that number lower and lower,” he said.
Scanlon said under the Minnesota Department of Education, a school must be at least -2.5% to be considered in statutory operational debt.
The newly elected board started on Monday. Scanlon said there was some confusion about their appointment, but he said the plan was to seat them at their annual meeting on Oct. 21. He said all of the new board members were elected to their positions.
“Candidates nominated or being nominated for the positions to expand the expertise and size our of board took several weeks of getting the nominations and having ballots prepared,” he said.
The board unanimously voted to accept Superintendent Mustafa Ibrahim’s resignation. He said his last day will be Nov. 4. In his letter, he said “my time leading STEP Academy has been the most rewarding period of my career.”
Scanlon said they will not be looking for an immediate replacement.
“At this time based on our finances, based on the strength that we’re seeing from our two principals on both sites, we feel like we can cover many of those components and then we would look to post for the 25-26 school year,” he said.
The board also approved an Ad Hoc committee’s report on the job description of the superintendent of educational services for when they do hire someone for that role.
The board unanimously voted to postpone filling two school board vacancies until they have appointed a chair, vice chair, secretary, and treasurer. They’ll discuss it again at their next meeting, and possibly decide how they want to fill those seats.
“We’re 50 ahead of where we were, 50 deaths,” Mike Hanson said. “50 families who have lost a loved one more than we were at this time last year.”
MINNEAPOLIS — It’s a frustrating trend for Mike Hanson, director of the Office of Traffic Safety within the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
“Anytime I see an incident like the one that took place last night, I’m angry,” Hanson said. “It’s really hard to put into words, because this is exactly the type of thing that we work to prevent.”
Wednesday night, a 29-year-old man from St. Paul exited eastbound I-94 onto Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis. The crash report says that man was traveling at a “high rate of speed.” That man hit several cars, killing a 26-year-old Minneapolis woman and injuring several others.
“That is the one thing that makes every bad decision worse, because speed brings energy, and energy is what results in injury and death,” Hanson said.
Data provided by DPS shows that there have been nearly 150 accidents in and near the area where this happened since January 2021. Some don’t involve alcohol, some do. Hanson said it’s their goal to make sure alcohol is never a factor.
“There is literally no excuse today for somebody to wind up in the back seat of a squad car, an ambulance or heaven forbid a hearse, because of an impaired driving decision,” he said.
Unfortunately, data shows that fatal accidents are up in Minnesota so far this year.
“We’re 50 ahead of where we were, 50 deaths,” Hanson said. “50 families who have lost a loved one more than we were at this time last year.”
Hanson said they work with different agencies across the state to help assist with education and prevention before anyone gets behind the wheel impaired.
“Our basic message is impaired is impaired. It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re impaired by, if you feel different, you will drive different,” he said. “And if you’re sitting behind the wheel and you have to ask yourself should I drive? It’s already too late.”
