A wide variety of local projects have been eliminated — at least temporarily — by a flurry of vetoes issued by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who accuses Democrats who control the Legislature of spending too much and reforming too little.

While the Republican governor and DFL leaders butt heads, south-central Minnesotans are left wondering about budgets for their favorite projects or their place of employment as the legislative session moves into its final 10 days.

“It makes a big difference who’s governor, doesn’t it?” said Joe Kunkel, a political science professor at Minnesota State University. “The governor’s got the veto, the governor’s got the line-item veto.”

And Democrats controlling the Legislature don’t have the two-thirds majority needed to override Pawlenty’s vetoes.

“All he needs is one-third plus one in one house and a willingness to go to the wall,” Kunkel said.

The vetoes set the stage for some hard negotiations and leave a lot of government-financed programs in limbo.



Two lakes, three vetoes

Funding to remove tornado debris from Lake Emily just east of St. Peter was wiped out when Pawlenty vetoed the entire jobs and economic development budget bill. The compromise bill worked out by a House-Senate conference committee had included $75,000 to clean up the lake after an August tornado dropped debris into it from damaged and destroyed lakeside homes.

Another area lake clean-up project has now been struck by a pair of vetoes. Plans to reduce the amount of sediment and other pollution going into Sibley County’s Lake Titloe were funded partly in the state capital improvements bill, commonly called the bonding bill, and partly in the environment and natural resources budget bill.

The bonding bill was vetoed May 1, eliminating $165,000 for reducing the amount of sediment in the Rush River upstream from Lake Titloe.

Pawlenty signed the environment funding bill Tuesday but used a line-item veto to eliminate $200,000 to help Gaylord set up holding ponds for its storm water to keep it from going directly into the heavily polluted lake.

“Although this is an important water quality initiative, it is more appropriately funded in an upcoming capital improvements bill, either this year or in the traditional bonding year,” Pawlenty wrote in his veto message.



Economic development

The veto of the entire economic development bill hit a number of local institutions.

Included in the vetoed bill were the St. Peter-based Rural Policy and Development Center ($1.5 million), rural Waseca’s Farmamerica agricultural interpretative center ($128,000 a year for two years) and the Treaty Site History Center in St. Peter ($100,000).

A $63,000 appropriation for Blue Earth County’s Riverbend Center for Enterprise Facilitation and identical amounts to start similar programs for would-be entrepreneurs in Faribault and Martin Counties were in the vetoed bill as well.



Other spending bills

Pawlenty also vetoed the funding bill that finances all state departments on Monday, the funding bill for health and human services programs on Tuesday and the funding bill for colleges and universities on Wednesday.

With the state Constitution requiring the session to end at midnight on May 21, lawmakers and Pawlenty have a lot of negotiating to do and not much time to do it.

Kunkel said the session is demonstrating the deep political divide in Minnesota. Democrats are investing in education, the environment, health care and other areas their voters support. Pawlenty is vowing to block tax increases that he says will harm the state’s economy and is refusing to sign spending bills that will require tax legislation that boosts income taxes on wealthier Minnesotans and gas taxes that will hit all drivers.

The current rash of vetoes might be giving Democrats a public relations victory, making the governor look uncompromising, according to Kunkel.

“It’s a very Bushian approach — that there is no compromise, that compromise really means ‘Do it my way,’” Kunkel said.

But the first round of budget bills and the ensuing vetoes are likely to be forgotten by the next gubernatorial election, he said. They’re also just the opening stages for the serious negotiations that will come next.

“I think we’re headed to quite a big showdown,” he said. “... This is the real deal now.”

For people watching the fate of smaller items like the Lake Titloe clean-up, the final result might not be known until very late in the dealing when it’s decided if another bonding bill should be passed and signed into law, said Rep. Terry Morrow, DFL-St. Peter.

“If that gets resurrected, I think it gets resurrected in the 23rd hour,” Morrow said.