ST. PAUL -- Keeping sex offenders and other dangerous criminals off the streets would get more than a third of Minnesota's new spending, the Senate Finance Committee voted Tuesday.
About $70 million of $204 million in new spending would go to state hospitals to house an increasing number of sex offenders as well as mentally ill and dangerous people being committed.
The Senate's budget proposal also would send $32 million to schools and spend $20 million to begin cleaning up the state's streams and lakes.
Also, child-care providers would get $14 million more.
Senate Finance Chairman Dick Cohen, DFL-St. Paul, lumped all the budget changes proposed by eight budget subcommittees into one bill. The House plans to vote on seven budget bills by week's end.
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Lawmakers and Gov. Tim Pawlenty approved a two-year, $30.1 billion budget last year. This year's Legislature only makes changes in the existing budget.
Sen. Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, said the budget bill is designed in part to fill in for budget cuts made in recent years.
Senators divided $405 million available to be spent between spending in his budget bill and tax relief in a tax bill due on the Senate floor today.
The committee rejected several Pawlenty proposals, including his desire to establish an illegal immigrant task force and an Internet child pornography law enforcement team.
The Senate budget bill, which includes policy as well as money provisions, also would:
- Appropriate $250,000 to Northern Connections, a Fergus Falls-based pilot program that would assist job-hunters.
- Establish a center that would help local school districts improve safety. It also would require schools to hold lock-down drills as well as drills for fires and storms.
- Require schools to teach sex education that includes abstinence as the first approach and teaching the use of contraception methods. Parents could opt their children out of the classes.
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- Allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities if they agree to apply for citizenship.
- Require at least one Minnesota State Colleges and Universities board member to represent labor and another to represent business.
- Provide about $900,000 to help reduce bovine tuberculosis among cows and deer. It also forbids feeding wildlife within 15 miles of a cattle herd that is infected with bovine TB.
- Spend $429,000 to outfit State Patrol cars with heart defibrillators.
- Establish a prescription drug rebate program for senior citizens.
- Provide $4 million to employees who were off work due to a partial state government shutdown last summer.
- Appropriate $500,000 to help fund installation of E85 ethanol pumps around the state.
- Allow New London-Spicer schools to transfer up to $150,000 a year for up to five years from its debt redemption fund to general fund.
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- Authorize Willmar schools to transfer up to $335,000 from its debt redemption fund to general fund.
