Last chance tonight and tomorrow night:  Buffalo Community Theater’s Music Man.  Rotarians and their families who purchase online will receive a $2 discount per ticket..  Go to www.bctmn.org and enter the code mmrotary.

 

The first host family has been secured for our inbound student.  We still need a couple more.  Contact Rita Varner Otness at 763-226-0326 with names.

 

Our speaker this week was our local House of Representatives legislator Marion O'Neill.  Marion offered a recap of the latest legislative session.

 

The Minnesota state budget is done biennially and this was the budget year (longer session) so her recap was full of numbers......here's just a few!!

 

The Minnesota state budget is $48 Billion and of that the greatest expenditures are education at $20 billion and health & human services at $17.25 billion.  All other departments combined are just over $10 billion.  This year's biennial budget includes a $1.25 billion increase over the previous budget.  Of that increase, education will receive a 2% increase each of the two years.  Other notable budgets included $2.1 Billion for all of law enforcement and judiciary and $1.7 Billion for the environment including the DNR.

 

Bills that passed include income tax relief for those in the second tier ($37,800 to $75,000), an increase in the working farm credit,  and a $50 million decrease in the collected effective rate for commercial / industrial property tax.  These were passed during the special session.

 

Bills that failed  included the 1/2% sales tax for roads and a 20 cent gas tax for transportation.

 

Marion expressed a concern that all of the bills that passed out of the housePaul Gazelka and House Speaker Melissa Hortman although legislators did vote on the final bills.  Fourteen bills were passed in this manner.

 

Marion introduced several bills that would have benefitted our district, however they failed in the process to get included in the final versions of the bills.

 

Thank you Doug for inviting Representative O'Neill.