Minnesota House lawmakers are on the second day of their three-day tour of northwest Minnesota, hearing pitches from projects vying for state bonding dollars. Capital Investment Committee Chairman Dean Urdahl from Grove City says, “We have two billion dollars more in requests than we spent last time, so we’ve got about three billion dollars in requests, and we’re going to have to prioritize.”
The panel is in Halstad, East Grand Forks, Crookston, Thief River Falls and Bemidji today (Wed), following stops yesterday in Waite Park, Saint Cloud, Glenwood, Fergus Falls and Moorhead. Tomorrow they’ll visit Park Rapids, Brainerd and Little Falls, plus two stops in the Twin Cities. They’ll continue visiting other regions of the state and wrap up this fall.
Urdahl says his personal priorities for state bonding money are new infrastructure, including water and wastewater projects, plus funds to maintain buildings at state-run colleges and universities. But he says, “We’ll just have to see how much money we decide to spend and how it all works out.” Urdahl predicts the 2018 bonding bill will be between 500 million and a billion dollars. The 2017 legislature passed a bonding bill just under one billion dollars, but some argue the next one should not be as large.
More in this interview with Urdahl: