Minn. Leaders Reach Deal To End Shutdown

The New York Times reports:

The governor of Minnesota and the state’s Republican lawmakers announced on Thursday that they had, at last, reached a deal on the state’s budget, bringing what is expected to be a swift reopening of government services.

In the end, Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor, gave up his wish to raise taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans and agreed to a set of provisions that Republican leaders had offered him two weeks ago, just before the state closed its parks and sent 22,000 workers home. Still, Republican leaders said they, too, had not gotten all they had wished for: deeper cuts in state spending.

Instead, both sides agreed to balance the state’s approximately $35 billion budget by finding an additional $1.4 billion in revenue through some fancy accounting maneuvers — by delaying payments to local school districts (which were unhappy to learn of this) and by borrowing money against expected future payments from the tobacco industry.

Critics complained that the state’s political leaders merely delayed Minnesota’s financial troubles rather than making hard, lasting decisions about whether to raise taxes or to cut services.

Other Minnesotans wondered aloud what two weeks of a shuttered Capitol, closed highway rest stops and suspended lottery services had been about in the first place, if both sides were now agreeing to an offer that had already been on the table. But others simply expressed relief that the longest and broadest shutdown in state history, and the only one in the nation so far this year, would soon be over.