By Jerry Burnes/Iron Range Today

CHISHOLM — Recent history has shown bonding bills do little to actually bond Minnesota lawmakers, highlighted by the nearly three-year gap between their last victory lap around such projects on the Iron Range. 

Bad puns aside, it took a buzzer-beating effort to pass a historic $2.6 billion infrastructure bill this past Legislature, which finally bridged the years-long gap between a $1.87 billion bill passed during an October 2020 special session.

As Gov. Tim Walz, donning a hard hat and neon yellow safety vest, walked around the new public safety building under construction in Chisholm, he heard of the project’s ideal community impact and spoke of the importance in funding local projects, especially to upgrade facilities in Greater Minnesota.

“Some of this is philosophical,” Walz said. “The state of Minnesota, our bond rating depends on — just like your house, if you don’t put new windows in it or a new roof on it, the value goes down. The state of Minnesota is the same way. We have universities, we have roads and bridges … but it costs a lot to maintain them.”

Walz was joined Wednesday by State Rep. Dave Lislegard (DFL-Aurora) and State Sen. Rob Farnsworth (R-Hibbing), along with IRRR Commissioner Ida Rukavina, Chisholm Mayor Adam Lantz and others. The governor and commissioner also visited Detroit Diesel in Hibbing to highlight the state’s workforce development funding efforts.

Rukavina said the IRRR invested about $1 million, in addition to the bonding bill, to help the project along, and helped support efforts at Detroit Diesel.

The $11.9 million public safety project in Chisholm will house the city’s police, fire and emergency response teams, located just off Highway 169, providing responders with more space and easier access to corridors around the city.

Like many aging facilities on the Range and around Greater Minnesota cities, Lantz said equipment was outgrowing the 100-plus-year-old buildings currently in use, making it difficult for fire trucks to maneuver back into the building, among other concerns that made the location untenable for the future. 

“It opens up different units,” Lantz said. “Sometimes we have firefighters in EMT. We have an EMT that are firefighters, not all are crossed right here, but it gives a nice locally centralized place for everyone to respond out of. It gives everybody an up-to-date facility with proper ventilation and proper needs for our community.”

Getting here for Chisholm’s public safety building was an exercise in finesse politicking, and may as well represent the state’s at-times grueling path on bonding bills, something Lantz alluded to when speaking of the fight for the last-minute funding in St. Paul.

This year’s infrastructure bill was funded through $1.1 billion in general obligation funds and $1.5 billion in cash bonding, the latter a byproduct of an unprecedented $17.5 billion surplus. General obligation bonding requires a supermajority of the Legislature to approve, making bipartisan agreement a must-have, but cash bonding out of the surplus needed only a simple majority.

After failing to pass a bonding bill for the first time since 1983 during the last two-year budgeting session, lawmakers again were on the verge of not delivering, as Republicans withheld votes on general obligation bonding in opposition to how Democrats wanted to deploy cash bonding initiatives, before a deal was finally struck.

Chisholm received $3 million in cash bonding for the public safety building that, through other funding sources, will see its residents pay only $1.9 million of the $11.9 million price tag. Many Republicans last session, Farnsworth included, ultimately supported the general obligation bonding but didn’t register a vote either way on cash bonding. 

“If Republicans don’t support the bonding bill, there won’t be a [general obligation] bonding bill, so you want a combination of both,” Lislegard said, adding he believed both methods of bonding were warranted. “We need Republicans and Democrats to come together to pass a GO bonding bill for the state of Minnesota.”

Walz said Wednesday that the bonding disagreement was one of ideology and the surplus provided the state with potentially a once-in-a-lifetime chance to directly fund projects rather than bond them out, but said the state’s improved bond rating showed reason to spread out debt through general obligation bonds.

“I think it’s a combination of both,” he added. “ People ask a very logical question, ‘Why would you do bonding and incur debt when you have a surplus?’”

“These projects are multi-year and one-time funding, which I think makes sense and we used it on everything from checks to roads, that makes sense to do that. But overall, I think to spread this debt out, it makes the case that we are financially strong.”