CHICAGO — The broadest shutdown of state services in Minnesota’s history appeared all but certain to begin in the wee hours Friday, Gov. Mark Dayton indicated late Thursday after intense negotiations over a new budget broke down among the state’s leaders.
Since early this year, the politicians in St. Paul have been locked in a battle over how to solve a $5 billion budget deficit under a divided government. Republicans, who took control of both chambers of the Legislature last fall, urged making sharp cuts and holding spending to the $34 billion that the state expected to take in over the next two years. Mr. Dayton, a Democrat who was also elected in 2010, called for collecting more in income taxes from the very highest earners to spare cuts in services to the most vulnerable residents.
For days, leaders on both sides have met under what Mr. Dayton’s spokeswoman described as a “cone of silence” about details of their progress. By Thursday — a day before the new budget year was to begin — state workers were preparing for a shutdown.
They closed the state’s 84 major rest areas along highways. They braced for the possibility that state parks and the Minnesota Zoo would also close, that hunting and fishing licenses would not be issued and that operations at the state’s lottery system and racetracks would stop. Thousands of state workers were also preparing to be sent home without pay, and contractors were getting ready to walk away from a hundred road construction projects that are in progress.
“It’s a very sad day for Minnesota,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, which is not expected to close. “It’s a state that had a well-earned reputation for being well governed, where, at the end of the day, politics were done in a fair and efficient manner. And it’s now on the cusp of ungovernability. There’s a new ethic here that compromise is weakness.”
Over the weeks of impasse, all sorts of compromises have been contemplated by observers. Some have suggested that Republican leaders might ultimately agree to some sort of increased revenue — though not from a permanent income tax increase — but that such an agreement might have trouble clearing the full Legislature. Some among the new crop of Republican lawmakers had promised while campaigning last year to cut spending and to hold the line on any new revenues.
0 comments:
Post a Comment