Star Tribune
Walz says he’s willing to say ‘no’ to legislative allies
I asked Gov. Tim Walz the tough question first: Knowing now that the state’s budget office sees a potential deficit two years out, does he regret spending so much in the budget he and legislators crafted last spring?
“No, no,” he said. “Those were investments in the future.”
Some of those investments may take awhile to pay off, he added. And some people, he said, may not recognize the savings and new spending ability they have from measures like the child tax credit, elimination of Social Security taxes for most and provision of free school lunches for all.
We met in his office with Matt Varilek, commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development, in late January as the warm spell arrived. I’d been more critical than any other voice in the Star Tribune of the governor and his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature for deciding to spend or refund the entire $17 billion revenue surplus the state government had going into the 2024-25 biennium, which began last July.
By November, my caution appeared to be warranted. That’s when the state budget office warned a deficit may appear in the 2026-27 biennium, one big enough to consume the excess revenue that’s again accumulating.
That office will provide another forecast later this month. Because the U.S. and state economies are strong, there’s a chance the state’s revenue will keep growing to a level that, when legislators craft the 2026-27 budget early next year, they will be able to cover a structural shortfall, Walz said. However, he’ll have to put the kibosh on lawmakers who want to raise spending in the legislative session that begins Monday. It will be Walz’s sixth session since being elected governor in 2018.
“I’m under no illusion. I think this is going to be one of the more challenging sessions that I’ve had as governor because you’ve got to say no to your friends,” Walz said.
He’s fine with that.
“We did a lot last year,” he said. “I was saying right afterwards, ‘Look, we’ve got enough on our plate. We don’t need to expand anymore.'”
The expansion of state government in 2023 was the largest in the lifetime of most Minnesotans. It happened for three reasons.
First, the pandemic shocked the economy into greater efficiency, weeding out marginal businesses, sending more people into retirement and giving more opportunity for lower-income workers to rise.
Second, Minnesota’s progressive tax system was structured to capture the jump in Minnesotans’ income and U.S. corporate income that resulted from the efficiency shock. The state’s tax collection, which typically rose in single-digit percentages over biennial terms, was 29% higher in 2022 than in 2020.
Third, legislators in spring 2021, still wary about the pandemic, took a cautious approach to the 2022-23 budget and left some of that new money unspent. In spring 2022, Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on how to spend or return the new revenue. After Democrats won control of the Legislature in fall 2022, the surplus was so large that — even with some one-time rebates, the child-tax credit and Social Security-related cut — they were able to lift the 2024-25 budget by 36% compared to 2022-23.
As state government hires more workers this year, it is intensifying competition for Minnesota’s private employers when the workforce is constrained by the exit of baby boomers and by ultra-low population growth. On top of that, lawmakers created new worker benefits that will also push up labor costs for businesses.
The most controversial is paid family and medical leave for all workers in Minnesota, set to begin two years from now. For businesses that already offer generous leave options to workers, a decision looms about whether to join the state-administered program that most of the state’s private employers will rely on. Walz said he’s been talking a lot with business owners and executives about the leave program to assure them on its implementation.
“At this point, I’m feeling pretty comfortable,” he said. “But we are going to be judged not on all this background work, but on the first day paid leave comes online. Is somebody able to make a claim? Is it fraud proof? Do they get their money in their bank account?”
Varilek, who leads the agency that will run the paid leave program, each week provides Walz a rundown on systems and hiring for it. DEED also runs the state’s unemployment insurance and will link that system technologically with paid leave. “We’ll be able to use essentially the same wage reporting for a leave system that folks are already familiar with,” Varilek said.
The best thing Walz did in 2023, in my view, was issue an executive order last fall to eliminate college education as a requirement for most of the jobs the state has on offer. Too many employers, I believe, overlook talented people by requiring credentials or experience that may not necessarily reveal what they can bring to a job.
As a former high school teacher and veteran of the Army National Guard, Walz said he’s seen plenty of people start a job, prove their competency and rise up. “The idea is to get in and be able to do the job,” the governor said.
The worst thing I think he did, though, was to sign a bill that made it tougher for people to become a Minnesota public school teacher without an education degree. “Seem contradictory to you?” he asked. He then spoke about realizing that, since his teaching license had lapsed, it would be harder for him when he leaves office to return to the high school in Mankato where he taught than to join a college faculty.
“Teaching fourth-grade science is hard. You’ve got to have skills,” he said. “But if there are people who are saying ‘I want to give it a try,’ then we need to think about how we streamline that without weakening our standards. I think it’s a fair point. It’s one that I do struggle with.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
