Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature have offered four identical bills so far this session to ban state funds from going to abortion services. The DFL answered back with a bill of its own on Monday. The Reproductive Privacy Act would ensure that rights to birth control, legal abortion and the choice of carrying a pregnancy to term are protected.

The bill, HF646, reads:

(1) every individual has the fundamental right to choose or refuse birth control; (2) every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose and obtain an abortion before fetal viability or to terminate the pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; and (3) the state shall not deny or interfere with a woman’s fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose to obtain an abortion.

It also says that state, county and local governments cannot discriminate against the right to reproductive health care. Government entities can’t:

(1) deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose:
(i) to bear a child;
(ii) to terminate a pregnancy before viability; or
(iii) to terminate a pregnancy after viability when termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or
(2) discriminate against the exercise of rights set forth in clause (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.

The Republican bills would allow the state to discriminate, specifically to ban certain medical procedures from being paid for with state subsidized benefits — in this case abortion.

The DFL bill also contains a severability clause similar to the four bills that have been introduced to ban state funding for abortion; the clause states that if part of the bill is ruled unconstitutional, the rest should still stand. Experts have noted that the language in these bills is intended to trigger a lawsuit at the Minnesota Supreme Court level.

The legislators introducing the Reproductive Privacy Act are Reps. Jim Davnie of Minneapolis, Rena Moran of St. Paul, Jean Wagenius of Minneapolis, Dianne Loeffler of Minneapolis, Mindy Greiling of Roseville, and Frank Hornstein of Minneapolis.

The bill is identical to one that has been introduced in past sessions.

Linnea House of NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota told the Minnesota Independent back in 2009 that the bill is important to preserving the safety of abortion services.

“In countries without access to safe and legal reproductive health care, women suffer from infertility or die as a direct result of illegal, unsafe and unsanitary abortions,” she said. “We also know that in countries where abortion is illegal, there is not always a decrease in abortion rates; there is, however, an increase in the number of women dying from unsafe medical procedures.”

Ominous news about job losses and financial woes at Minnesota hospitals over the last week coincide with Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s line-item veto of $381 million in General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) grants and his vow to make even more cuts by unallotment. But as bad as the doomsday scenarios are, they shouldn’t include St. Paul’s Regions Hospital closing — a prospect that the DFL warned of over the weekend.

Here are some headlines from the last week that, to some at least, read like plot lines for a series-ending episode of TV’s “House” doctor drama, if not a medical prequel to the post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” movies.

» Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis will lay off 100 staffers.

» Park Nicollet Health Services lays off 240 and closes a clinic in Hopkins. The owner of Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park has already laid off more than twice that number over the last six months.

» Willmar’s Rice Memorial Hospital continues to shed staff. Layoffs have left the city-owned hospital with its smallest workforce in a decade.

» In rural areas of the state, doctors are scarce. Health care organizations must dangle bonuses to attract debt-laden med school grads to the hinterlands.

» St. Peter bucked the trend by expanding a local clinic of Mayo Health System, but Mayo’s flagship facility in Rochester will lose $30 million from Pawlenty’s GAMC veto alone.

» Losing patients, North Memorial Health Care is cutting 100 jobs. A 6-percent decline in stays at the Robbinsdale hospital hides one area in which business is up by 22 percent: charity care.

» Two metro hospitals that care for the poor — Regions in St. Paul and HCMC in Minneapolis — will make deep cuts. HCMC Medical Director Michael Belzer says revisiting state cuts during the 2010 Legislative session will be too late, as hospitals will have set budgets and take actions necessary to meet them by then.

But Regions is not in danger of closing its doors, contrary to a DFL Party announcement (see below) from the closing days of the legislative session.

“That’s not going to happen,” Regions spokesman Vince Rivard told the Minnesota Independent on Monday, adding that a hospital expansion financed with St. Paul municipal bonds is still set to open this summer.

Still a variety of program cuts at Regions and even imposition of new, restrictive geographical boundaries are possible, Rivard said. The hospital sees patients from as far away as Montana but is only obligated to provide Ramsey County residents with non-emergency services.

And Rivard agreed with HCMC’s Belzer that fixes the Legislature next year makes to the governor’s vetos would come too late to forestall drastic cutbacks.

Here’s the press release from the DFL House DFL Caucus that asserted that Regions Hospital could close. It was sent out Saturday, midway between Pawlenty’s Thursday night line-item veto of GAMC and the end of the Legislative session Monday night.

NEWS STATEMENT
Minnesota House of Representatives

May 16, 2009

PAWLENTY VETO MAY RESULT IN FULL OR PARTIAL CLOSURE OF REGIONS HOSPITAL

Local lawmakers speak out against Governor Pawlenty’s deep cuts to
Regions Hospital

After announcing Thursday he plans to make billions of dollars in
budget cuts alone without public or legislative input, Governor Tim
Pawlenty eliminated General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) in Minnesota.
With one line item veto late Thursday night, the governor cut $381
million that was dedicated exclusively to treat the poorest people in
the state – including veterans, senior citizens, and the mentally ill.

Those cuts may result in the full or partial closure of Regions
Hospital in St. Paul. By eliminating GAMC, the hospital will face a $46
million budget cut – 10% of its gross revenue. Regions Hospital employs
roughly 5,000 people and serves nearly 23,000 patients every year.

The following is a statement from local state lawmakers deeply
concerned about these devastating cuts to Regions Hospital and the
potential impact on residents of St. Paul and the surrounding suburbs:

“Governor Pawlenty’s veto pen single-handedly put Regions Hospital in
St. Paul at serious risk of significantly cutting back critical services
or potentially closing its doors. This is a devastating blow to tens of
thousands of citizens in St. Paul and the surrounding communities who
rely on Regions Hospital for quality, expert medical care. It has
threatened thousands of jobs, and the health and safety of our
communities.

This deep and devastating cut could have been avoided. Lawmakers
offered a responsible alternative that would have cut Regions Hospital
only $5.7 million – a budget reduction the hospital could have sustained
without significantly drawing back critical medical services to our
community.

By eliminating GAMC, Governor Pawlenty has cut 30,000 of Minnesota’s
poorest, sickest citizens off health care. Many are veterans, senior
citizens, people with mentally illness, or those who are homeless. 70%
have expensive mental health or chemical dependency challenges, and 40%
have chronic disease that leads to frequent hospitalization. Without
care, these Minnesotans will be at risk of devastating health
implications.

Finally, these cuts have made the state’s budget shortfall even
worse. Eliminating GAMC in Minnesota costs the state $100 million in
federal matching funds. It also requires that inmates in county jails
and sex offenders who are constitutionally required access to medical
care must now be paid for in general fund dollars.

We are deeply disappointed in Governor Pawlenty’s decision to balance
the budget with jobs and deep cuts to hospitals. In the final days of
session, we’ll keep fighting to protect jobs and keep Minnesota’s
hospitals whole.”

Officials whose names appeared at the top of the release are State Reps. Joe Atkins, John Lesch, Karla Bigham, Leon Lillie, Paul Gardner, Tim Mahoney, Mindy Greiling, Carlos Mariani, Rick Hansen, Erin Murphy, Alice Hausman, Michael Paymar, Sheldon Johnson, Bev Scalze, Kate Knuth and Cy Thao.

Photo: Lisa Yarost, Flickr

Will state funding for education take a hit in efforts to close Minnesota’s gaping $5.3 billion state budget deficit?

State Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis, thinks so. “Do the math” was his pessimistic analysis at a panel in Bloomington last Tuesday, pointing to education’s 40 percent share of the state budget. Without new taxes, significant cuts throughout Minnesota’s budget will have to be made, and education’s huge share of the budget makes it a tempting target, said State Rep. Mindy Greiling (DFL-Roseville) in an interview on Friday.

Ask public school officials, though, and they’ll probably tell you what Lois Rockney, the chief financial officer of St. Paul Public Schools, says: After years of underfunding, “[t]here’s no fat left to cut” in school districts’ budgets.

In St. Paul, the Capitol may be dividing against itself over the issue of funding. Pogemiller has floated the idea of a 1.6 percent cut in every major budget area, and while the idea is not even a firm proposal yet, it’s already eliciting strong reactions from other members of the Legislature.

“I don’t think that’s a sensible approach,” said Greiling, who chairs the House K-12 Education Finance Committee. “The House does not agree with [Pogemiller’s suggestion],” she said flatly.

And Greiling feels she has Gov. Tim Pawlenty in her corner. According to Minnesota’s Constitution, Pawlenty has the authority to unilaterally cut unspent funds in the current fiscal biennium (ending in June), and he will propose the budget for the 2010-11 biennium. In an interview last week, Greiling said, “The governor has named education funding as one of his priorities to protect, and I look forward to holding him to his promise.”

If the governor decides to protect education funding, this would mean other huge budgets, like health care and welfare dollars, would see deep cuts — hardly a popular decision and one that could severely impact those sectors of government.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do for the long term” if education funding is cut, said Peggy Ingison, the chief financial officer of Minneapolis Public Schools. Most districts rely heavily on aid from St. Paul to fund all aspects of their operations. On average, 20 percent or less of a district’s funding comes from local property taxes.

Minnesota’s school districts vary widely –- some urban, some rural; some small, some large; some financially healthy, some barely holding their heads above water –- so any cuts in state education aid would impact them all differently. Some school districts may weather this crisis relatively well, because their voters have recently approved multiyear property tax levies that will give some cushion to their budgets through the most tumultuous times of this recession. Dennis Peterson, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools, said he was confident his district won’t even start feeling pressure until 2010-11 because a property tax levy passed in 2007 makes up 27 percent of the budget. In 2005 the district restructured itself, anticipating declining amounts of state aid, and now draws students from area private and charter schools.

But to most of the school officials this reporter spoke to, the future is unclear, verging on gloomy, and many were anxious about their districts’ future health.

In Minneapolis, Ingison says district leaders are afraid parents will pull their children from the district if too many specialized programs — such as culturally focused schools or language immersion programs — are cut. After struggling with declining enrollment for many years, MPS established many of these programs in recent years in an effort to woo parents back to the district and away from the charter schools that have attracted parents with these kinds of alternative education options.

“The 2010-11 school year doesn’t look good,” Burnsville-Eagan-Savage schools Superintendent Randy Clegg said in an interview Friday. While that’s 16 months away, if state aid gets slashed, the most serious cuts will hit then. Clegg said his district “needs to know what we can live without.”

In New Ulm, in southern Minnesota, Superintendent Harold Remme said his schools would be freezing all non-essential new hiring, and were also experimenting with ways to share some administrative personnel with neighboring districts. For Remme, this is a bitter decision. “We just came off of six years of declining enrollment… [where] we cut $700 million from the budget each year.”

“We’ve made as many reductions as we possibly can,” said Superintendent Chuck Futterer of the Cook County Schools, on Minnesota’s North Shore. “We’ve been looking at reductions for many years” as enrollment has declined and state aid has not kept up with inflation. “We’ve cut bus drivers, custodians, support staff, maintenance workers, and we’re looking at cutting one principal [out of two],” whose duties Futterer will take on. “The only thing left to cut is teachers.”

Superintendents are waiting on tenterhooks for January, when the governor is to issue his proposed budget for the next two-year fiscal cycle, so they can start planning ways to accommodate any state budget cuts. Most schools, they said, will manage to scrape by through cutting what are usually considered essential staff and programming. However, it’s an open question how healthy and effective public school systems will be after serious cuts like these.

Photo: Lisa Yarost

As of late Wednesday afternoon, Pawlenty hadn’t yet vetoed the education finance bill passed Tuesday evening. But House Minority Leader Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, flatly stated yesterday that a veto would be forthcoming. According to Seifert, passing the bill flouted Pawlenty’s wish to put education funding on the table as part of his office’s global budget negotiations with the Legislature over how to resolve the current $935 million deficit.

But earlier on Tuesday, the House had honored that spirit of negotiation by suspending its deliberations on the education finance bill while its leadership met with the governor. When those negotiations reached another impasse, however, legislators became wary. Continuing to leave everything up for grabs in the global budget deal would only strengthen Pawlenty’s negotiating position as the deadline for ending the session drew closer.

Another couple of days without passage of the education finance bill, for example, would have enabled the governor to veto the bill without enough time for legislators to override before adjournment. Consequently, when talks were snagged later Tuesday afternoon, the House, quickly followed by the Senate, reconvened and passed the bill with veto-proof majorities.

If, as expected, Pawlenty does veto the bill, he will be …

Continued: Click “Read More”denying a one-time increase of $51 per pupil to the education funding formula, derived without raising any taxes. Instead, the legislation would raise the extra $44 million by raiding the Q Comp fund used for teacher merit raises, cutting some of the budget for testing and doing some accounting shifts. The Q Comp fund is a pet Pawlenty program heartily defended by Republicans (and some Democrats) during debate on the bill. Yet a dramatic lack of participation — only 39 of 340 school districts, plus 21 charter schools, currently use Q Comp — has left the fund with a surplus of more than $20 million at a time when schools across the state are desperate for operating revenue. While it is true that the teachers union has stymied the participation in many districts, many rural school systems simply lack the personnel and resources to go through the Q Comp application process, resulting in a significant urban bias in Q Comp participation.

Meanwhile, $44 million in even one-time monies looks good for schools facing a miserly 1 percent increase in the state’s education funding formula in fiscal year 2009. The most optimistic economic forecasts peg the 2009 inflation rate higher than that, which means that schools will have less real purchasing power in 2009 than they had in fiscal year 2008, at a time when rising costs for transportation, heating and health insurance are already threatening to bust budgets. Add in Pawlenty’s current desire to cap property taxes (the one place school districts could go to offset penurious state funding), and the budgetary picture turns even grimmer.

And that’s precisely why 13 House Republicans crossed party lines to pass the ed bill — eight more than it would take to override a veto, if it comes to that. Some of these aye votes were from conservative stalwarts such as Torrey Westrom, R-Elbow Lake; Kurt Zellars, R-Maple Grove; Denny McNamara, R-Hastings; and Bud Nornes, R-Fergus Falls. It is doubtful that all, or even most, of these legislators will ultimately go against the governor over the comparative pittance of $44 million in one-time monies. Yet the strength of this bipartisan support dramatizes the dire financial plight of the schools under Pawlenty’s watch. Yesterday it reduced the governor to dispatching Republican legislators to tell their DFL brethren that the Central Corridor light-rail line wouldn’t get green-lighted by the governor if this education finance bill was passed.

“The Republicans in the House were pummeled by the governor’s people about this bill and 13 of them still voted for it,” said Mindy Greiling, DFL Roseville, chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Division. “The governor can wheedle along and object to what we are doing, but we have a good negotiating tool and it is called the specter of the override. Now it is true that we might not get an override, but the consolation there is that the [Republican] flip-floppers who don’t vote for an override will be in political trouble. Because we have been so stingy with education for so long that people are mad, especially the property-tax payers, at how we have not funded schools at the state level.”

She wrote a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune on Wednesday, calling for Kersten’s resignation, citing “reckless journalistic standards” and “gross misrepresentation of the facts.” Her letter was picked up on Thursday by Power Line’s Scott Johnson, a friend of Kersten’s, who says publication of the letter is an “act of thuggery” by Greiling and the paper. I caught up with Greiling on Thursday to ask her about the letter, get her response to Johnson’s remarks and hear about her experiences as TIZA. She said she spoke up not only because she feels Kersten’s article was incorrect, but because she was amazed by the quality of the school. “I saw such well-scrubbed, beaming students,” she said. “It was just such an impressive school…. a school to be emulated, not hated. She’s been a thug herself, as far as I’m concerned.”

Listen: Rep. Mindy Greiling on Katherine Kersten’s TIZA column (8:23)


Read Greiling’s letter after the jump. 

Earlier: Kersten column on Muslim school followed by threats, police patrols

In response to questions prompted by Katherine Kersen’s recent columns on Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), I decided to visit the school myself.

What I learned during a tour late last month is that none of Kersten’s concerns that the charter school is promoting religion in violation of a state law that prohibits public schools from doing so is valid.

What I did see was excellent teachers hard at work in the classroom focused on improving student achievement. I saw engaged students of different religious and cultural backgrounds learning reading, math, government and science. I spoke with parents, teachers and administrators who all stressed their high standards for TIZA students.

While an outsider, or someone like Kersten who is trying to validate a predetermined conclusion, might be tempted to brand Tarek ibn Ziyad as an “Islamic School” because it leases space from the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, the school, like other charter schools in Minnesota that lease space from churches, is a separate entity. It does comply with federal law that requires all schools to accommodate a student’s right to practice his or her religion. And unlike other charter schools that have faced financial and other administrative challenges, the school was recognized with a 2008 School Finance Award from the Minnesota Department of Education for its “sound fiscal health and financial management policies.”

Kersten’s reckless journalistic standards have diminished this paper’s credibility. Worse, they have threatened the safety of the children and staff at the school, which has been forced to take extra security measures in the wake of recent death threats. While I value a broad range of opinions from a variety of perspectives, I value the facts even more. Kersten’s gross distortion of the facts in this case should compel Star Tribune management to ask for her resignation.