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Dear Neighbor,

It’s been another busy week in St. Paul, with a lot of important bills moving through the committee process, some others coming to the House floor and another big one on the horizon.

Here is the latest:

HF12Rally

*Preserving girls sports*

Legislation to promote safety and fairness in girls sports by prohibiting boys from playing in girls sports in Minnesota is expected to come to the House floor on Monday. The bill (H.F. 12 [ [link removed] ]), known as the Preserve Girls Sports Act, says: “Only students of the female sex may participate in an elementary or secondary school athletic team or sport that an educational institution has restricted on the basis of sex to women or girls.”

I look forward to having this discussion as a full House. Republican will support safe and fair girls sports. The question is whether Democrats will do what the overwhelming majority wants, or if they will again cater to the radical activist fringe at the expense of girls.

*Light Rail Update:*

This week, the full House took up a Republican-led bill (H.F. 14 [ [link removed] ]) that would put a temporary hold on funding for light rail projects. The bill comes after repeated cost overruns and delays have cost taxpayers dearly. For example, the Southwest Light Rail has more than doubled in cost – from $1.25 billion to $2.9 billion – and is nearly 10 years behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Blue Line Extension’s price tag has tripled, jumping from an estimated $999 million to $3.2 billion, with service now pushed back to at least 2030.

With taxpayers on the hook for these skyrocketing costs, pressing pause on new spending makes sense. However, House Democrats blocked the bill from passing – for now. It remains on the table for possible reconsideration later.

There’s an interesting layer to this story. On the very same day House Democrats blocked this bill to restore sanity with light rail spending, MNDOT and the Met Council announced the Northstar rail may be discontinued and replaced with bus service. The Star Tribune reported [ [link removed] ] the main reason is ridership on the line “declined by nearly 98% during the pandemic as workers transitioned to remote work, with an average of 60 weekday rides reported in April 2020 with a $116 subsidy per passenger.”

Side note: It would be a far better deal for taxpayers to lease every passenger a luxury car instead of spending, in some cases, $5,000 per month to continue shuttling them along on the train.

The decline in ridership mentioned by the Star Tribune certainly is a factor in the Northstar’s demise. So is the fact the .5% transit tax increase Democrats enacted across the seven-county metro area in 2023 did not take into account a good stretch of the Northstar line runs roughly one-third across the southwest side of Sherburne County – which is not part of the seven-county metro. It’s a whole lot easier for the governor’s administration and Met Council to pull the plug and blame low ridership than deal with all the negative publicity that may have come from an ugly lawsuit over tax liability for a train nobody rides. Just sayin’.

*Emergency powers*

Remember when the governor maintained his emergency powers for a year and a half and kept making unilateral decisions impacting all Minnesotans even though we were not in an emergency? House Republicans brought a bill to the floor this week that would prevent that bad part of Minnesota history from repeating itself, while also continuing to provide recourse in the event of a true emergency.

The bill (H.F. 21 [ [link removed] ]) provides more checks and balances on the governor by requiring supermajority approval by each legislative body for peacetime emergency powers to extend beyond 14 days. This is a 180-degree turn from current law which says the governor can continue extending emergency powers so long as the legislature does not stop them. And, instead of allowing the governor to extend emergency powers by 30 days a crack, the bill drops it down to 14 days.

It’s a reasonable solution but, unfortunately, House Democrats blocked its passage. House Republicans were able to table the bill so it remains a the front desk and available to be taken up again later.

Until next time, have a good weekend and please stay in touch.

Shane







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State Rep. Shane Mekeland
2nd Floor, Centennial Office Building
658 Cedar St., St. Paul, MN 55155
[email protected] <[email protected]>
(651) 296-2451







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