From State Rep. Al Juhnke
District 13B, DFL-Willmar

Last January, I said the key priority for Democrats in both the Minnesota House and Senate would be getting Minnesota back on track economically. For the past three years, Minnesota’s economy has been underperforming the rest of the nation — something that hasn’t happened since the 1960s — and the state had lost close to 25,000 jobs in the last six months of 2007 alone.

Two or three years from now, we’re going to look back at the 2008 session and see the first signs of our state getting back on track.

In addition to balancing a $935 million budget deficit, we were able to reprioritize the spending in the state budget to increase funding for our schools, strengthen our workforce and increase funding to nursing homes.

Transportation will improve
We also made significant investments in our economy — investments I believe will pay off in tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs during the next few years. Those investments include $6.6 billion in our transportation system, more than $800 million in infrastructure projects around the state, strategic investments in the emerging bioscience industry, a nation-leading 20 percent biodiesel mandate and the creation of Livestock Investment Grant Program.

Individually, all of those initiatives are going to provide a jolt to state’s struggling economy, particularly in rural parts of the state. Taken together, however, I believe they will help turn the state’s economy around and begin to put Minnesota back in a position of leadership.

I’m not alone in that opinion. There’s broad bipartisan agreement that the 2008 session was one of the most productive in recent history.

This session also built on the successes from last year’s session. Last year, we provided $800 million in new funding to Minnesota schools (an 8 percent increase), passed nation-leading legislation on renewable energy and fuels, provided health-care coverage for 30,000 kids in Minnesota who lacked coverage, expanded all-day-kindergarten and passed tuition relief for college students.

This year we sent an additional $51 per pupil to our schools and took significant steps toward reforming our health-care system to only help slow the rise in health care costs and improve care.

We also sent $25 million in direct property relief to homeowners, another $60 million in property tax relief to cities and counties and expanded the program so that 10,000 more homeowners will qualify for refunds. Combined with the increased funding for transportation and bonding, the pressure on local property taxes is going to be reduced significantly.

Constitutional amendment
After years of trying, we finally were able to put a constitutional amendment to dedicate funding for the outdoors on the ballot this fall. When you combine that with the more than $45 million we passed last year to clean up our lakes, rivers and streams, we’ve made huge strides in preserving wildlife habitat and cleaning up the state’s waters over the past two years.

We’ve still got some work to do. At the governor’s insistence, rural hospitals took a hit in funding and more still needs to be done get all of the school districts in the state back on solid financial footing and ensure that school funding is distributed fairly.

However, we are making progress and we’re in a better position than we were two years ago.