EXCERPT: “Plans to make historic investments in Greater Minnesota could sail through fights at the Capitol over contentious pieces of Gov. Tim Walz’s spending blueprint. Some of the central tenets like a 20 cents per gallon gas tax hike and decision to keep in place a 2 percent tax on medical providers faced instant opposition from Minnesota Republicans when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor governor presented the proposal on Tuesday, Feb. 19. But as Walz, the first Greater Minnesotan to take the governor’s office in decades, laid out his plans for spending in rural parts of the state, leaders on both sides of the divided Legislature said they’d likely be on board with those ideas. So while lawmakers spend the next three months entrenched in debates over hiking taxes and where taxpayer dollars would best be spent, proposals for expanding broadband to rural Minnesota, growing access to child care and boosting state funds aimed at making schools safer could be folded into a final budget later this year with little fuss.” FULLSTORY: http://bit.ly/2SfoVP7
