Minnesota, once known as a leader in open government, has now reached a new low for putting together an entire state budget without any public hearings. Only Republican legislators and representatives from the Governor’s Office were present. Final approval of bill content was given by only three people, the governor, speaker of the House and Senate majority leader. No public votes or public testimony in committee, no ability to amend these bills at the request of the public or to correct errors. Everything was done behind closed and locked shutdown doors. It will be finished on the House and Senate floors with legislators voting on bills they will be seeing for the first time.

Special sessions in the past have been limited to a few issues or single subjects. The 2007 special session on the southeastern Minnesota floods dealt with $150 million but in contrast there were public hearings, the bill was amended in numerous committees and took an entire day to resolve. This $35.4 billion budget had no public hearings. Cobbled together by only partisan legislators and those invited behind the locked doors it is the nadir of public policy making in Minnesota. This has been a bipartisan debacle with a past Republican governor and Democratic-controlled legislature and now a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled Legislature.

Rather than balance this historic $5.2 billion deficit fairly and directly, this budget is settled on significant cuts, which will result in lost public-sector jobs and deep cuts in programs, but the rest is resolved with more shifts and borrowing that will have to be addressed in what is now a Minnesota future of permanent deficits. The result is not what the public expected, and it is because the public was not involved.

Democracy is not easy — it requires public participation to be successful and its government to be open to let that participation always be present.

Gene Pelowski

state representative

District 31A

Winona