Legislative Update
Lots of Fixes in the First Half of the Legislative Session
We?re nearly halfway through the legislative session as both 1st and 2nd committee deadlines approach this week. These deadlines are when policy bills need to have had at least one hearing in both the House and the Senate. This will be a rush of bills all trying to meet the deadline that allows them to continue on the path to potentially become law.
We?ve accomplished some good work so far this year, most importantly in the School Resource Officer bill that the governor signed last week. This fix has been a top priority for Republicans in the state legislature after months of calling on Governor Walz to call a special session to address this important issue. In the end, this bill required a good amount of bipartisan work to get across the finish line with only 9 votes against the final bill in the House and 3 in the Senate. Small numbers but enough that could have killed the bill in either body had Republicans not been brought in on good faith to craft language that is amiable to the entire state.
Another important accomplishment this session has been addressing two errors in last year?s tax bill. The first was addressing an error in the standard deduction calculation that missed the record high inflation of the past four years. This miscalculation would have cost Minnesotans over 350 million dollars in the next biennial budget. For individuals and families, the error could have meant hundreds of dollars in additional taxes owed each year.
The other error in the tax omnibus was finally fixed just this week and affects businesses across the state. Net Operating Loss or NOL allows businesses to carry forward a portion of operating losses from one year to the next to help make their tax bill more predictable year to year and reduce tax burden. This change in the NOL was mistakenly set to start last tax year instead of this upcoming tax year and would have cost small businesses an average of $3,050 this year. While the change will still go into effect next year, correcting the start date will allow businesses to plan ahead for this rather than have the added expense dropped on them this year already.
Looking ahead to the rest of the legislative session when we return from the easter holiday we will have less than 25 days left that we can meet on the House floor per the constitutional limit of 120 legislative days. The speaker will need to be strategic in prioritizing these days for legislation that actually has the potential to pass the Senate and get signed by the Governor. Hopefully, this will limit the scope of our work for the rest of session to bills that provide good governance to the people of Minnesota.
As always please feel free to reach out to my office with any legislative concerns you have and share what issues you?d like to see prioritized in the last few weeks of the 93rd legislature.
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