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Capitol View®
Tim Pugmire

Lawmakers prepare for long weekend

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State lawmakers are raising logistical concerns about the closing days of the 2015 session and whether they can process all the budget bills before their Monday night deadline for adjournment.

There’s still no overall budget agreement, and negotiations continued Friday behind closed doors at the governor's residence in St. Paul.

During a morning meeting of the Senate Rules Committee, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said the revisor of statutes told him it will take two to three days just to prepare the massive health and human services bill, assuming the DFL-controlled Senate can reach an agreement with House Republicans and Gov. Mark Dayton.

“She said that that timeline could be compressed some, if that conference committee would send her articles so that they could start working on pieces of the bill," Bakk said. "So, that is the request the speaker and I will make of the conferees.”

Lawmakers also voted to allow conference committees to meet past 1 a.m. for the remainder of the session.

Sen. Michelle Fischbach, R-Paynesville, spoke against the measure. She said legislators shouldn’t be meeting in the middle of the night.

“When is the public going to have the opportunity to look at these bills, these big conference committees?" she said. "If we’re just ramming all of this through so that we can make our deadline, it’s unfair to the public, and to me 2 and 3 in the morning is unfair to them too.”

Bakk said he thinks House leaders miscalculated the time needed at the end of session to process the budget bills.

If they can avoid a special session, lawmakers will have some time to recover before they meet again next year.

They set March 8 as the starting date for the 2016 session.