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Like school students who have procrastinated and put off completing their homework, state lawmakers were in a mad dash last week - and well into this week - to complete their work as the 2025 state legislative session came to an inconclusive end.
And after failing to complete much of their work on time, the legislature has moved into a special session to determine key budget and spending bills, among other things.
What happened this year is by no means new and sadly seems to have become the norm.
What will emerge when the dust settles and the doors open from the proverbial smoke-filled rooms?
That’s anyone’s guess and really no way to run a government.
Rightly so, the state legislature has set up rules for how local governments must operate.
City councils, county boards, town boards and school boards all operate under auspices of the Minnesota Open Meeting Law.
The premise is simple - that all meetings of governing bodies are presumed open unless there are rare and specific reasons to close the doors.
The exceptions to the Open Meeting Law include performance evaluations and only if the subject of that evaluation requests it, as well as meetings that might disclose proprietary or sensitive information such as victims of abuse or assault. Strategy sessions for contract negotiations must also be recorded, and the opposing side has the right to request the audio recording and listen in once the contracts have been settled.
For just about everything else, the doors must be open and the public is free to be there and watch how their elected officials arrive at their decisions.
That’s not how it works in the legislature, however, and the most important decisions every session come under a veil of secrecy.
Even many of the legislators are not privy to the back room deals, given the formation of conference committees that whittle the number of decision makers to a chosen few.
Just because that’s “how it always has worked” in St. Paul doesn’t make it right, and the way it works now offers no transparency.
It also makes it easier to cut deals, to peddle influence and to tie decisions on one issue to matters far unrelated - all behind closed doors.
We hope that lawmakers come to decisions in the coming days that benefit our area, but no matter what happens we’ll have no idea how they came to the conclusions they did.
That’s a flaw in the system and one that needs correcting.
Just as they hold local governments to a standard, state legislators need to move toward applying the same standard to their own work.
The presumption of openness in government is a good one, but it sure rings hollow if it doesn’t apply at the highest levels of state government.
