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Bethany Wesley, Bemidji Pioneer, February 14, 2012
The Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities is fighting a proposed constitutional amendment that would require a supermajority vote from legislators to adopt any tax increase.
Such a requirement would hurt rural cities, argued Tim Flaherty, an attorney and lobbyist for CGMC, during a recent visit to Bemidji.
The proposal would require a supermajority vote, or three-fifths support, from both the House and Senate, to enact any tax increase. Because it would be more difficult to raise taxes, legislators would more often turn to cutting local government aid and other programs to balance the budget, Flaherty said.
If the state were to cut K-12 education funding, school districts would be forced to rely more on referendums, he said, which usually hurts rural communities because districts in smaller, property-poor districts can’t raise taxes easily. That would create school inequality, Flaherty said. Additionally, funding cuts to the state education systems would result in higher tuitions and cuts to funding for nursing home could lead to closures and higher unemployment. “It’s going to hurt greater Minnesota more than the rest of the state,” Flaherty said.
Local legislators do not appear eager to adopt the proposal.
“I don’t have much support for that,” said Rep. John Persell, DFL-Bemidji.
Sen. John Carlson, R- Bemidji, said legislators need to be “very careful” in approaching the proposal and how it would affect the public in the long-term. “We need to think about what’s right for Minnesota,” Carlson said.
Rep. Dave Hancock, R-Bemidji, and Carlson both alluded to the budget deal passed in July to end the 20-day state shutdown. No one was happy with the settlement, Hancock said. Reform initiatives, referred to as Reform 2.0, are aimed to control that in the future, Hancock said.
The supermajority proposal is just one part of that. “I don’t see it as high on the priority list,” he said.“What is high on the priority list,” Carlson said, “is to make sure we don’t have a shutdown again.”
The proposal is among dozens of constitutional amendment proposals in the House and the Senate. With Republicans in control of both houses, amendments are one way they could past a potential veto by Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat who, for instance, vetoed four lawsuit reform initiatives. While reform ideas may have merit, Carlson said, he was not convinced that constitutional mandates are always in the best interest of Minnesotans. “Just because the governor says no doesn’t mean we have to go past him and go the Constitution,” Carlson said.
Megan Boldt, Pioneer Press, February 9, 2012
If Minnesota adopts a ballot measure that would require a supermajority of lawmakers to raise taxes, property taxes in turn likely would increase as local governments could be forced to take on a bigger burden of providing public services.
That's according to an analysis by the Minnesota Budget Project, an initiative of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.
The group said it opposes constitutional amendments that would take away the power of a simple majority of lawmakers to craft state budgets and pass tax proposals.
Between 2000 and 2009, states with strict supermajority requirements saw local property taxes rise an average of 22 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to the analysis. Property taxes in states without supermajority requirements for tax increases rose an average of 13 percent during that time.
California, a strict supermajority state, saw property taxes increase by 41 percent in real dollars, even though that state also has a constitutional limitation on property tax growth.
"The impact of this cost-shifting could further increase disparities in economic opportunities and availability of quality services across the state. Communities with fewer resources are least likely to be able to make up the difference from state budget cuts," according to the report.
The Minnesota Budget Project used data from nine states - Arizona, California, Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Dakota. These states
have supermajority requirements that apply to all major sources of revenue, similar to the proposal being considered in Minnesota.
The Mankato Free Press, February 4th, 2012
Minnesota’s divided and contentious politics have led some clever lawmakers to suggest the seductive idea of empowering the people to make decisions where their representatives cannot by offering a buffet-style smorgasbord of constitutional amendments.
Most have some kind of populist appeal and a suggestion that they are an easy solution to an even more clear and simple problem. Unfortunately, these instruments of pseudo empowerment threaten real representative democracy and let political leaders off the hook.
Minnesota’s Constitution, like the U.S. Constitution, represents statements of principles and carefully thought out structures of how government should work based on the basic idea that constitutions should set up a level playing field and create rules that apply to all.
Minnesota lawmakers have so far this year given birth to about two dozen constitutional amendments, from requiring photo IDs in voting to restricting the Legislature’s budgeting authority. Republican Sen. Majority Leader Dave Senjem has wisely expressed a need to limit the amendments to two or three. But even that may be too many.
While one can appreciate the zeal to let the people decide, all too often the people look for an enemy and find it is them. Take the Legacy Amendment for example. That amendment required a certain percentage of the sales tax to go toward the arts, culture and natural environment. Already some have questioned the inevitable judgment calls on where some of this money should go.
Most citizens do not have the time, or the inclination, to study issues in-depth, deliberate at length, and come up with alternative scenarios. That’s what we expect of our duly elected representatives. Many constitutional amendments simply let them off the hook. Good lawmaking is hard work, and we expect our legislators to get it done.
Constitutional amendments tend to be a cop out for lawmakers when they find they can’t compromise or worse, don’t want to compromise. They somehow feel people with surface knowledge of an issue can make a better decision than those who study reports, consider dozens of points of view and thereby come up with the best solutions to public problems.
People have plenty of power to express their displeasure with their lawmakers’ inability to solve problems by voting them out of office. They can do this in most cases quite frequently, and it’s been proven to work.
Constitutional amendments should not be a substitute for solving problems that can be resolved with regular legislation that has been studied and vetted. Many of the amendments being proposed by Minnesota lawmakers this year appear to be end runs around the legislative process, the veto of a governor being a part of that process.
The populist notion of a constitutional amendment sounds good as long as one is in the majority, because majority rules no matter what. But we all know that the majority changes frequently, so the majority may find itself regretting what it wished for when it’s in the minority.
The legislative process allows for minority interests to become part of a more thought-out and broader approach to solving complex public problems.
Constitutional amendments that cause representatives to abdicate their responsibility actually weaken representative democracy rather than strengthen it.
Austin Daily Herald, January 31, 2012
Minnesotans will vote on at least one constitutional amendment this fall and reports from St. Paul indicate that lawmakers are considering adding several more to the ballot. It’s a trend that Minnesotans need to keep an eye on, because legislating via amendment is a trend that could prove destructive in the long term.
There are several reasons for lawmakers to put what ought to be simple legislative questions out for voter approval in the form of constitutional amendments. For one thing, it lets lawmakers wash their hands of the result by “leaving it to the people.” While that makes lawmakers’ lives easier, it also raises the question of what good legislators are doing if they won’t do their jobs. Amendments are also a means of getting passed into law changes that can not make it through the usual legislative process — for example, bills which the governor would veto. And, of course, amendments are harder to overturn than simple laws.
While there may be some good in the last point, subverting the basic legislative process is a mistake. Minnesota has, by and large, done well over the years when its legislature and governor have worked together to hammer out laws that serve the state. Bypassing that process serves only to deepen a political divide that makes it difficult to get the people’s business done in the ordinary way.
Nor does leaving it to the people, cutting out the deliberative and less-emotional circuit-breaker of the usual legislative process, serve the state well — near-disastrous experiments such as California’s proposition system have amply shown.
Legislative amendments might sound good. But the reality is that they are an end-run around a long-standing process that exists for good reasons. Like most short-cuts, they will ultimately go wrong.
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