By Amanda Bilek

Senior Public Policy Director, Minnesota Corn Growers Association

There is a little less than one month left in the 2024 Minnesota legislative session, and the work has transitioned from individual committee hearings on separate bills into “omnibus bill” season. Warning” this post will be a little heavy on legislative process. If you are interested in reading more about the various provisions, the MCGA policy team is tracking and working on the final weeks of session, please refer to last week’s policy update.

An omnibus bill combines several different provisions into one bill to move together throughout the remaining part of session. Some committees and divisions at the Legislature have already moved out an omnibus policy bill, which includes various policy measures—all within a committee’s jurisdiction—but have been combined into one bill. Since this is a non-budget year, the omnibus bills that are moving now are supplemental finance bills. It is important to note that several supplemental finance bills do contain policy provisions usually because the policy provision is related to a finance appropriation. However, this is not universal and there are numerous examples of policy provisions not related to an appropriation included in a supplemental finance bill.

To make things a little more complicated, supplemental finance bills are being combined with other committee finance bills in advance of floor votes. After floor votes in each chamber, a conference committee will be appointed to iron out differences between House and Senate bills and will be populated with conferees from the various committees of jurisdiction.

Let’s use the omnibus supplemental finance bill for agriculture as an example. The House and Senate agriculture committees finished their work last week and passed out of their committee omnibus supplemental agricultural appropriations bills. In the House, the next stop will be the Ways & Means Committee before moving to the floor. In the Senate, the bill was referred to the Senate Finance Committee before floor action. Last Friday, the Senate Finance Committee heard the bill, laid it over, and later in the committee meeting combined it with the omnibus supplemental finance bills for commerce and climate and energy. The agriculture provisions will travel for the remaining part of session in SF 4942, which also includes all the finance appropriations and related policy provisions for commerce and energy and climate in addition to agriculture. The House will do a similar process when the House Ways & Means Committee meets on Thursday, April 25.

Agriculture is not the only finance division to be combined with other areas. Housing, labor, and transportation will be combined as well as state and local government and veterans. Of the bills and budget areas we are working on most closely, environment and natural resources will remain on its own and not be combined with other areas. The House omnibus environment bill (HF 3911) contains an entire article on agriculture policy provisions that has MCGA along with other agriculture groups very concerned about process and substance as we get into conference committee negotiations. In addition to the proposed changes affecting agriculture statutes in the House environment bill, MCGA has previous raised concerns with the following provisions:

• Changes to the public waters statute that would use the statutory definition to determine what is or what is not a public water and reduce reliance on the Public Waters Inventory as the definitive source of a public water determination.
• Require drain tile real estate disclosure at the same time of sale of agricultural property that would include size and location of private tile lines as well as outlets for the history of the agricultural property, not just the current landowner.
• Ban the planting of corn on state-owned land and transition the current approximately 4,000 acres of corn (mostly used as wildlife food plots) to native vegetation.

I want to conclude this week’s policy update by thanking you for your Minnesota Corn Growers Association membership. Your membership helps to support the policy activities of MCGA and enables you to rely on staff, who are experts in legislative process and various policy areas, to represent your interests to policymakers. Your membership gives corn farmers across the state a seat at the table, so you can focus on farming. If you are not an MCGA member, please consider joining here.