Minnesota House approves $1.9B public works package

By Steve Karnowski Associated Press

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — The Minnesota House approved a $1.9 billion public infrastructure package with bipartisan support Monday evening for fixing up roads, bridges, water systems, college facilities and parks and trails across the state, sending it to the Senate where its fate is less certain. Most individual projects in the package were unglamorous and noncontroversial, with a focus on maintaining or replacing existing but aging assets in legislative districts statewide.

They were split between one piece of legislation that called for $1.5 billion in borrowing, known as a bonding bill, and another that totaled about $400 million in cash.

Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman, of Brooklyn Park, told reporters that the two bills are “chock full of critically important infrastructure projects that will strengthen communities ... all across the state, and importantly will create jobs.”

But the politics of assembling bonding bills get complicated because it usually takes a 60% supermajority in each chamber for the state to take on more long-term debt.

The House cleared that bar when it passed the bonding bill 91-43, with 21 Republicans joining majority Democrats in voting yes, more than the needed 11. The separate cash projects bill, which required only a simple majority, then passed 98-36. But leaders of the Senate GOP minority reiterated at a news conference Monday that some kind of tax relief from the state’s huge $17.5 billion budget surplus would be their price for the necessary GOP votes when the bill comes up in the Senate. Democrats hold a one-vote, 34-33 majority in the Senate. It would take at least seven Republican votes to pass a bonding bill there.

The brief but shining life of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet who gave dignity to the Black experience

By Minnita Daniel-Cox Associate Professor of Music, University of Dayton

Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died in 1906.

In his short yet prolific life, Dunbar used folk dialect to give voice and dignity to the experience of Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He was the first Black American to make a living as a writer and was seminal in the start of the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance.

Dunbar also penned one of the most iconic phrases in Black literature – “I know why the caged bird sings” – his poem “Sympathy.”

“… When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – I know why the caged bird sings!”

Published in 1899, “Sympathy” inspired acclaimed Black writer and activist Maya Angelou to use Dunbar’s line as the title of her seminal autobiography.

But Dunbar’s artistic legacy is often overlooked. This,

Hortman and Rep. Fue Lee, of Minneapolis, chair of the House Capital Investment Committee, framed the package as unfinished business from the 2022 session, when a bonding deal fell apart amid other partisan election-year disputes. They said they hope to follow it up with another public works package in the coming weeks.

If Senate Rep. Kozni and Republicans don’t go along, leaders of the House and Senate Democratic majorities have threatened to pay for a potentially much bigger list of projects just out of the surplus. What Hortman called a “with-orwithout-you” all-cash approach