Eva wrote: Speaker Sviggum and Majority Leader Johnson were on Tom Hauser's show this weekend. It sounds like Senator Higgins is chairing the committee looking at stadium tax issues. So people should write Linda Higgins to let her know how you feel about the legislature prioritizing stadium deals over the Planetarium, Biotech development - or other bonding bill items or possibilities.
Linda here: The ballpark proposals have many committees to travel through. My new committee, State and Local Government Operations, is just the first committee, not the only committee. Some newspaper accounts made it sound like we set up a new committee just for ballparks. Not so. It will likely end up in Taxes, which is where the funding issues will be taken up. There a couple of thousand bills introduced every year in the Minnesota legislature. The city and county alone will have a dozen or more. The city's priority bill is the planetarium. Ask them. They'll tell you so. But they also must be at the table for the host of other bills affecting the city. Otherwise, our city gets stiffed. Badly. I haven't heard anyone saying that the ballparks are a priority over anything else. Except maybe the teams. Everyone I've heard has said that bonding is the priority, and then each legislator has a host of bills he/she is authoring that are priorities. The media will be hyping the ballparks. But the multitudes of committees will be working on the bills in their jurisdictions. Most of those bills will never reach the media--unless they're glamorous, sexy or weird--and will then never reach you. An example: I was carrying 67 bills one year and working very hard to get them passed. One of my bills was a modest medical marijuana proposal. It was the only bill that the reporters wanted to talk about. Not my healthcare proposals, not my environmental proposals, nothing. Just medical marijuana -- a bill that was dead on arrival in the committee. So you really don't need to write me, as Eva suggested. Write your own legislators (Eva is my constituent and writes regularly.) with your opinions. I'm just the chair of the first committee in one of the two bodies of the legislature. By the way, I am chief senate author of the Planetarium bonding bill, as well as the Schubert Theater and the Heritage Park proposals. I've got the Lowry Bridge proposal for the county too. Linda Higgins senator, district 58 north mpls and downtown mpls REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
