Sen. Stumpf

Saturday morning the Senate Capital Investment Committee unveiled its scaled down $1.4 billion Bonding Bill as a counter proposal to the House’s $800 million Bonding Bill. In the 19 days since the Senate originally introduced its bill, chair of the committee Sen. LeRoy Stumpf (DFL-Plummer) says his office has received hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls in support of all the projects that were included. He says his new, smaller bill is a compromise, and he says he worked with dozens of project stakeholders to reduce the size of their request to accommodate the House and Senate Republicans request for a smaller bill.

The Senate Capital Investment Committee is calling a Conference Committee with the House of Representatives to work out details of a Bonding Bill.

As cities and counties consider moving forward without the funding in the Senate Bonding Bill, Sen. LeRoy Stumpf (DFL-Plummer) is reminding Republicans and the public of a little known, but hugely important fact. For a large number of the bonding projects that received funding in the Senate proposal, the legislature required a 50 percent match before the project could receive state funding. Those matching dollars come from a variety of sources including federal, local and private money. The Senate’s $1.5 billion Bonding Bill leveraged a total of $916.8 million in matching dollars – making the total investment in Minnesota projects close to $2.5 billion. Sen. Stumpf says leaving that money on the table is something no legislator should be willing to do.

This afternoon’s failure to pass our Bonding Bill by one vote is a huge disappointment. By all but one Republican refusing to vote for this bill, we are hurting the state of Minnesota. This bill gave us a tremendous opportunity to do good — to solve traffic problems in high fatality areas, to fix millions of dollars’ worth of asset preservation projects on our college and university campuses and to bring equity to communities across the state.