welcome to minnesota legislative report our region's longest running public affairs program lawmakers from northeastern minnesota are joining us today for a recap of the week's activities at the state capitol this is your opportunity to call or email your legislative questions and have them answered live on the air minnesota legislative report starts now hello and welcome to minnesota legislative report i'm your host tony cerdich it's been another busy week at the state capitol in saint paul with the second deadline friday for bills to become state law before the end of the session this afternoon you'll have a chance to ask questions of the lawmakers who represent you call the number on your screen or email questions to ask at wdsc.org we have great guests to answer those questions today first senator tom bach is an independent from cook who represents senate district three welcome senator bach thank you and representative mike sundeen is a dfl-er from esco representing house district 11a welcome representative sundeen great to have you both here thanks for having me yeah we'll start in the house as we normally do representative sundin a question for the viewers just to get to know you a little better why did you run for office for the house for the first time you started cloquet school board why did you decide to run for the house of representatives well prior to the school board episode i've always been active in the labor community and served my local union and district council in many capacities and i just thought this would be the next step in improving working conditions for not only my trade and all the construction trades but you know labor in general and i've been successful in doing so great quarter century ago a little more than that senator buck why'd you get into elected office you know my path was pretty similar i i was in 1994 when representative batalia from two harbors decided to retire i was a business representative for the carpenters union on the range and i was the president of the iron range building and construction trades council and it just seemed like a natural progression from union leadership into politics for the same reason that that mike stated is uh if your goal is to improve the standard of living for working class people uh you know you you transition from working for a local union that's doing that negotiating contracts and working conditions to the legislature where you can you hope you can make even a bigger impact and uh that that still is kind of in the front of my mind kind of every session is how can we make it a little better place for the people to pack a lunch bucket and go to work every day great and we'll talk about a lot of those issues today and just as a reminder please email or call in your questions for your legislators and we'll get to them as soon as we can we're going to start as we did last week with a few of the issues that were left over even from last legislative session and the two that have been somewhat interconnected for some people are the unemployment insurance trust fund and the frontline worker issue and senator bach can you give us an update on where we're at the unemployment insurance trust fund is in deficit and if it stays in deficit uh businesses have to pay a additional tax to go in there deed says we've passed the deadline we're still at a deadlock between the legislature and the governor can you give an update on that well the uh what happens with the unemployment fund is employers pay a payroll tax into it and that's what funds uh participants that draw unemployment and if we ever get into a situation where the fund is not stable and runs out of money it automatically triggers borrowing from the federal government and in this case the borrowing happened because of all the layoffs related to the pandemic and we've got about a 1.2 billion dollar loan that's due to the federal government that employers are going to be assessed and a surcharge on top of the regular unemployment payment they make to the state fund to start paying back that federal loan that's going to happen now in april it's we we've been in the situation a number of times any time we get high levels of unemployment that borrowing automatically is triggered and employers end up paying it back i think the reason this time for there being so much attention to this is it wasn't the employer's fault that they had to lay people off the governor basically shut down main streets closed the schools and a whole lot of businesses uh all the restaurants all the bars were put in a situation of having to lay everybody off so it seems that they shouldn't carry the brunt of having to to repay the federal loan when there wasn't any they're doing they weren't voluntary layoffs that the company was doing so the governor proposed in his budget to to use 2.7 billion of the surplus that is the federal loan plus what was in the account when the pandemic started there was a balance in there so he proposed 2.7 billion the senate passed that back oh gosh early in the session we passed the same provision that the governor had proposed the house hasn't taken that up yet as often happens at the legislature things end up getting linked and there was a deal there was a deal made uh last summer to provide 250 million dollars of uh stipends to frontline workers and at the time we were thinking mostly about people working in healthcare that had to work through the pandemic that we were going to give them a stipend of 250 million dollars the hosts once they saw that the budget surplus get so big they kind of raised the bar and want to do more than 250 million so the two issues have now gotten linked if we're going to do for the business community the unemployment fund we should do for those front line workers that that bonus pay for them so we're just kind of stuck there i actually suggested to the to the governor last week and he said dom that's a good idea i said you know it seems to me governor there is a deal uh let's do 1.2 billion the actual loan amount not 2.7 1.2 and then let's do the 250 million that everybody agreed to last august i'd like to think that that's kind of the compromise uh but so far leaders have been talking about that and it hasn't it hasn't uh developed yet but the governor did tell me that he would support that so i'm i'm hoping that maybe maybe this week before the break we can they can come to an agreement and get that done great and so senate passed the ui unemployment insurance the house frontline workers where are we at in the house on these two issues well just to fill you in i actually serve on the workers comp advisory council and it's been an education for me on how things work there and to add on to what senator bach has just mentioned we established a presumption of for the covid workers if it was presumed if you're in a high risk occupation such as a nursing or police law enforcement fire department emergency services that if you were to fall ill it was automatically presumed that you got it at work so uh at the covered at work so those numbers actually elevated the number of people on uh on the work workers comp as well so it's uh like uh the senator said everything's interconnected you know great the other outstanding uh issue uh is goes with uh reinsurance and the bill got passed in a bipartisan way signed by the governor uh representative sundin we'll start with you to talk about the importance of passing that reinsurance bill uh that was very contentious uh amongst uh some people and uh you know just uh are you bailing out these insurance companies and it's a massive amount of money going into bailout insurance companies and uh we're kind of between a a hard place and a rock and it's just uh something you have to do to preserve the health coverage for so many people senator bach well uh i let me just say i support obamacare but the truth is when it was passed largely because of the provision in there that says insurance companies have to cover pre-existing conditions which is a good provision in that probably the best provision in that whole health plan it raised premiums about 15 percent it's a big cost item so in order to cushion some of those premium increases the legislature several years ago created this reinsurance program for people that don't get their insurance through their employer so if they've got to go on the healthcare exchange and buy insurance we actually are paying some money to insurance companies to help hold premiums down for those people that don't get it through their regular employment so it's a it's a good program the senate wanted to extend reinsurance for five years uh the house didn't want to go that far so we compromised on three so the the extension that we passed and the governor just signed us for a three-year period to extend uh the reinsurance program and we use some general fund money and some money out of the healthcare access fund that pays for minnesota care thanks and just a reminder again folks please call or write in email in with any questions you have this session is generally the second year it's not a budget year though there's a large budget budget surplus the main order of business is a capital investment or bonding bill and i have two retired card-carrying union members here so hopefully we can get into the meat of this and we have the chair of the capital investment committee in the senate so senator bach do you want to talk about what you're thinking about size of the bill importance of the bill some kind of broad parameters of why you feel this is important this session well i've always supported bonding bills and and because i'm out of the trades and it creates a lot of construction employment and i often tell members of the different trades unions to just think about your career as as you've worked through a career in one of the trades whether it's in the painters or in the carpenters in my case think about all the public buildings you worked on courthouses and schools and libraries and colleges and roads and bridges and waste water treatment plants and water treatment plants public infrastructure spending on construction is a significant piece of the industry and i think we're going to get a bill this year everybody seems to want when all the leaders seem to want one the the size of it i don't know yet i'd like to do something about the size that we did in 2020 the the the which that year was about 1.35 billion of go bonds general obligation bonds uh and then there were some additional trunk highway bonds and some other types of bonds in there but it's the geo number that we always look closely at if we did a bill that size the debt service on it would be about 9 million next year but then it rises to about 76 million dollars a year in the the two years beyond that the budget the state budget our structural balance is plenty strong to be able to support that i hope to be able to get that in the senate i don't know exactly where the house is going to be on that but the senate's always had a handicap in bonding bills because the constitution says that any bill that puts the state in debt has to originate in the house so the house really has to pass something the senate can't be unconstitutional for us to for the senate to take the lead on it so we always have to wait for the house on that the same is true for tax bills they have to originate in the house bills that affect revenue so i know we we spent i spent five weeks on the road traveling all around the state with the committee looking at projects we looked at 170 or so projects around the state there's a lot more than that the department of uh administration and the governor's people i think they've received about five billion dollars of actual requests from local units of government for projects and state agencies so we're not going to be able to do anything near what the need is out there but it was pretty surprising to me traveling around the there's a tremendous amount of wastewater infrastructure uh and i mean we all want our wastewater treatment plants to have a you know as clean a discharge as possible all over the state small towns bigger towns they need to make significant improvements in wastewater and if the state doesn't help with that it gets put on the monthly bill of of minnesotans and in most cases uh a bill too high for most people to afford so the state's got a partner in that with local governments making those improvements our state colleges and universities especially our two-year campuses the whole technical college system was built in the 70s and so the buildings now are 50 years old there's a tremendous amount of maintenance to be done on all of our state college buildings around the state and at the university of minnesota uh we've got to keep up with that stuff because maintenance doesn't get cheaper i mean the longer you ignore it the more a building deteriorates and and it ends up costing more later and the state agencies too same thing i mean the department of natural resources owns more buildings in the state than anybody and same thing they're just way way behind in maintenance in all of our state-owned buildings also in addition to the colleges and universities so the senate bill will be really heavy on deferred maintenance on publicly owned facilities on wastewater on roads and bridges transportation and you can you can get to a billion dollars pretty fast that way sure great representative sundin uh views from the house size of the bill and any particular projects that you're looking to push forward from your district several you know we we can boost that up any time that's great you know we came from the the same background there but uh you have to remember this is uh this is the property of the state of minnesota you take care of your house you take care of your cars everything you own you take care of and the state of minnesota should take care of their facilities as well you know we have the prisons to look after and maintain and the schools the roads it's all an investment in the future of minnesota and that said people should remember sure it's a big number but that money is spent right here in minnesota on minnesota wages on the suppliers that supply the bricks and the mortar for these projects and this is good for business it's good for labor it's uh it's good for the future of the state of minnesota and any dollar you expend it's it stays right here in minnesota so it's not wasted money ever you know i've often wondered uh you know when we do a construction project and all the people in the trades go to work on it they pay a lot of income taxes because they're you know they're not they're not low income jobs they're very very family sustaining jobs so a lot of income tax ends up coming back to us that covers a pretty big piece of the debt service because if you didn't authorize the project the man hours of construction wouldn't be there so the income tax wouldn't be there to some extent uh the bonding bill kind of pays for itself and the sales tax that people pay and in the income tax that the individuals actually perform the work pay good point yeah i believe it's called a virtuous economic cycle nice i learned something today so uh senator bach as somebody who chairs the committee and has to is in charge for passing this bill the bonding bill also requires a super majority vote out of both uh bodies which means bipartisan just the way the numbers are uh how do you think about that when you're putting a bill together uh and i'm going to be coming to you to talk about the egg committee but with a super majority needed how do you think about that you talked a bit about what your priorities are kind of the buckets of them but in putting a bill together that needs to pass bipartisan super majority what are your thoughts on that well it's i think it's a little bit easier in a year like this where there's a lot of retirements because historically what has happened is the bonding chair counts their majority votes that they have and in in that case i've got 36 i need five more in the senate so historically what's happened is the bonding chair will kind of sweeten the bill with some projects in somebody's district to try and buy their vote that's been less successful recently as as the caucuses have gotten more rigid and a little more unwilling to compromise it's been harder to get people to kind of break away from the caucus but i think that will probably will be different this year when you have so many retirements uh i've got to count to five and and it's easier for somebody that's not running again to try and get something significant done for their district they don't care as much about the unity in the caucus because they're not going to be there next year so i don't think it's going to be difficult finding the five votes that i need to to get it done you know the house is always a little harder in the house i believe they need 11 11 republicans in the house so in order to get it done but they'll i think they'll probably have the same kind of approach i think great uh representative sundeen you are the chair of the agriculture committee yes your your your big bill is going to be heard actually tomorrow exactly we're rolling it out tomorrow yeah can we get a preview of what to expect in that bill things you're proud of things you're pushing forward well the house bill's uh uh i'm going to back it up a year you know last year the ag committee my committee was the first one out with their bill and we were on time before the regular deadline and we didn't extend it into august or september or anything like that but uh very proud of that and also the most bipartisan bill so there's a lot of cooperation on the committee and i expect very similar results this year and i guess the the difference between the the big ag bills that we were typically seen we're reaching into the inner city and some of this urban farming and smaller farm operations try to get some of the immigrants involved and boost their participation if you drive down university avenue in saint paul you'd be amazed at the vendors out there these smaller vendors are actually supplying a heck of a lot of food throughout the state you know you see csas and farm groups out throughout the state but it's a major thing down in the twin cities so we're trying to foster those smaller farms we've also got you know a little bit of a snarl going on with this disaster or the drought relief it's a smaller bill but uh we want to get that out probably this week and we're looking for compromise on that as well uh the governor's got some ideas the senator the senate has uh i i would say very very little input on this you know i'm disappointed with uh some of the ideas that aren't coming out of the senate so uh we got plenty to work plenty to work on and uh looking forward to getting my bill out first in the most bipartisan fashion and generally the agriculture bill tends to be a bipartisan bill uh in your time you've probably seen that as well you know it i don't want to say it's easy to pass but but it is generally the first of all the budget bills of about a dozen budget bills that's passed it's one of the smaller ones even in 2011 when we went into a 21 day government shutdown a tough time the ag bill passed on june 30th before the the shutdown happened so uh it's a bill that always attracts some bipartisan compromise and and uh and in the case of you know drought relief or now we got avian flu coming again into our turkey population and and people should know that minnesota produces more turkeys than any state in the country it's big business in minnesota uh we're second or third in hogs but uh we're a big ag state and uh so any kind of drought or or things like the avian flu issue that impact our our agriculture industry is a big deal minnesota and a big deal in the country because we produce so much uh you want to talk about the avian flu and anything that may be in your bill to help with that well yeah we saw in 2015 you know a very crippling episode of the flu hit minnesota farmers and barns and it was just a disastrous situation where the uh barn would be uh diagnosed with the avian flu and they'd have to smother those animals and millions and millions of uh critters were lost uh turkeys chickens and in the uh egg industry it was damaged luckily some of the surrounding states uh survived it far better than we did so there was wasn't a break in the food chain uh but the prices of turkey you know it did go up and uh it affects every all the consumers great well we've got a bunch of questions now in uh from our viewers and so i'm going to start with this one a viewer wants to know and center back if you wouldn't mind starting here what's going on with the state retirement funds that were or could be invested in russia do you want to just give a real quick update on the bill that was passed well yeah that's we're going to divest of everything we have in russia all of our state agencies are not going to be able to do any work over there anymore that's a good thing i i think what's going to be interesting to watch is how long an attention span people have because the ukrainian russian thing is going to resolve itself and how long will it take or will trading partners just go back to normal i hope not i hope that there's a serious lesson for a regime like russia in this that they're that the world's just not going to go back to business as usual but the european countries especially are pretty dependent on them it's about 10 percent of the crude oil produced in the world and if you saw what happened to the price of nickel i mean russia produces a lot of nickel you have to have nickel cobalt and lithium to produce a battery for electric vehicle the price of nickel in the first few weeks of that of that war over there went up by 130 percent uh you know we wouldn't have stainless steel if it wasn't for nickel and we produce almost none in this country so i'm hoping that one of the places minnesota could benefit is it'll be interesting to see if people start to look at global trade a little differently than they do right now right now i think the sentiment has been that global trade's a good thing but it seems like there's some risk to your national security if you start to become dependent on on countries that aren't stable right uh and i don't know how stable china is uh certainly they would like to have taiwan back uh that's everybody knows that sixty percent of the computer trips in the world are made in taiwan if china were to take taiwan back i don't know if we could make a car in this country anymore much less anything else that needs a computer chip so there's a lot of areas in our economy i think we've let ourselves become awful vulnerable because of all this this global trade and i hope that we learn a lesson from that and we start to bring some of the manufacturing that we've pushed offshore and the critical metals uh that that we've allowed to be developed elsewhere when we have them here in the ground in our country i hope we start to think about not becoming too vulnerable to to other places around the world that aren't that stable yeah we have some sunday anything to add fully agree with uh what the senator has said but uh if we're gonna start manufacturing uh more products you know that we do need we need the people to do it right now we're in a labor shortage in the united states and uh we've we've got to get an influx of people into the labor force and train them properly to do these jobs because we're i i grew up in a family with eight kids you know that was pretty common back in the day but you don't see that anymore we uh we used to make our own workforce but now we're going to have to import some yes a lot of other questions coming up this one represents sending comes to you you are carrying a bill that will provide funding to reintroduce elk in minnesota had a committee hearing last week uh how's that issue coming along that's an it's an interesting bill uh it came out of the fond du lac uh tribe of ojibwe and uh was happy to carry that bill we're gonna look at that and see if we can they're looking for a million bucks to uh reintroduce uh elk i was talking to representative eklund about this we're roommates as well so uh we get to chat about this quite quite a little bit and he told me a story about walking through the woods and he saw these trails there were caribou trails well it's been centuries since we really had caribou in minnesota but i don't see any problem with reintroducing some of these native species to the state the difficult the yeah i guess the difficulty i'm having with the elk is you know it's they're susceptible to that chronic wasting disease you know just like a whitetail deer herd and i'd hate to threaten that whitetail deer herd or what's left of them uh with that disease so uh to their credit i will say the uh fond du lac band is asked to cooperate with the dnr and make certain if we're to do this we're going to do it right so we're not reintroducing any diseased animals into the population it might be a few years off but i'm looking forward to seeing it great senator box well i i don't have an opinion on elk but what i do think we should spend put some effort into is bringing back minnesota's moose population and it's as simple as doing something with predator control i mean we spent millions of dollars on a on collaring uh wolves collaring uh moose to figure out why is there all this mortality going on and we learned that about two out of three calves that are born are either killed by timber wolves or by black bears so something has to happen on the predator side if we're ever going to bring our moose population back and i hope to live long enough to see that happen i i was fortunate i've actually shot two moose in minnesota i got a license back in 1994 and then i had to sit out about 12 years or so and i got another license so i would i was one of the lucky people that shot two it's a pretty short list but we haven't had a season now for a number of years and uh it's interesting because if you look at what's happened uh we we didn't have any moose and then the timberwolves were almost wiped out and the moose population came back roaring back in the 70s and there was a period in the late 70s and 80s and into the mid 90s where the success rate in the moose season was like 80 some percent there were a lot of moose around and then what happened as a result of the timberwolves being put on the endangered species act that wolf population continued to grow and we went from a few hundred wolves to several thousand wolves and as that population grew the population of moose went down it's a natural cycle you've seen it happen on isle royale also the and uh i i hope that someone's gonna take that on someday because the moose is such a majestic animal it's really quite a quite a joy to be able to shoot one and i'd like to see that opportunity available to minnesotans in the future absolutely this is kind of where we part ways tom you like moose i like shooting elk they're a pretty tasty critter but i i agree wholeheartedly that uh predator control is you know an issue that we have to address better it's uh growing up north of you up in cochrane county you know that it was so common to see uh timberwolves and then now you don't see the other animals that they feed on so it's you raise a good point predator control needs to be addressed great well we've got a ton of questions around property taxes and so i'm going to kind of try to put them all together and have you guys talk about it senator bach former tax chair sit on the tax committee currently a lot of questions about property taxes in particular around seniors seniors living on a fixed income really trying to square the circle on how can you afford to stay in your home when the taxes go up and your cost of living kind of stays the same so what do you see as potential opportunities for property tax relief at least from what the state can control well most of the problem that people are experiencing is rising valuations the property tax is uh it's related to your asset right and as your value of your asset goes up your property taxes go up so much of what you see happening it's not the fault of the county or the local unit of government it's or the school for that matter it's an issue of rising valuation especially if you live on or near a lake and even our forest land property now is going up exponentially and i think that's going to continue to happen as some of this remote work that's going on is going to continue into the future so more people are going to be able to spend a little bit more time at the cabin than they have in the past so there'll be more demand i think for for for property up in in northern minnesota i just want to remind people there's the state has two programs for property taxes one is the property tax refund program so if your property taxes are high in relation to your income you file out the you file the property tax refund application by by august i believe and then the state will send you a check and you'll get part of your property taxes rebated back to you the other one that we have and that you don't see happen a lot except you're going to see it happen more now the way valuations are going up if your valuation on if you didn't make any improvements to your property and the valuation of your property went up by more than 12 percent uh the there's there again there's a form you can fill out and the state will rebate to you sixty percent of the tax increase that that is attributable to more than 12 percent increase in your valuation so if your valuation goes up by you know 20 25 30 i get some emails 50 percent uh if you if you go through the process you can get some of that rebated back to you through the targeted refund program but there's not a lot we can do with the fact that your property's worth more than it used to be now if if everybody's property was going up in value property taxes wouldn't change but what's happening is there's some some pockets in saint louis county for example where valuations are going up fast and so what ends up happening is they pick up a larger share of the property tax burden and then in some of our smaller towns where values aren't going up their taxes actually go down so it's a it's a complicated process roger mo a former long time leader in the senate gave me some advice one time when i was running for governor in 2010 he said tom if someone asks you about property taxes tell them they're too high and move on don't explain the system it is a pretty complicated system but uh you know it's a good thing people's valuations are going up but it does it it has an impact on your pocketbook unless everybody's are going up and especially seniors from what i'm hearing uh on here representative sundin it seems like uh the house tax committee is is looking at property tax relief yes are you up to speed on that during a little bit back it up a few years when we did address the property tax issue with the refund program we added money to the program and uh actually change the threshold a little bit so more people could actually apply for it and successfully get it and we're very proud of that work i don't know gosh what is it six years ago thereabouts okay but uh i guess one of the problems with that program is it's underutilized a lot of people uh maybe they assume they don't uh qualify but it doesn't cost anything to apply for it every 15th of august you have to have your application in and i would encourage anybody that wants to complain about their taxes to do something about it and do apply for that you know we spend we spend a lot of money on it uh it's i believe last time i looked it's over 300 million dollars a year that the state rebates back to to property owners through the property tax refund program okay so yes well you know given the surplus that we have now everybody's got ideas on how to spend it i think pumping some more money into that program and raising that threshold a little bit certainly couldn't hurt great well we're going to get through some more questions from viewers somebody wants to give wants an update considering high price in gas uh where are we at with the northern lights express and the train uh proposed from this area down to the twin cities you know i think it's a pretty hard sell right now uh i you know i never say something's not going to happen but it's not going to happen this year i mean what what what's happened to us is the southwest light rail from minneapolis out to uh eagan and eden prairie is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and no one can figure out why the legislature the senate with a unanimous vote asked for an audit of that project that southwest light rail project if we thought it was going to be about 900 million dollars that thing's going to come in at a couple billion dollars to build so i think there's an awful lot of apprehension until we learn more about what happened with southwest light rail why the cost went up so exponentially i don't think the legislature is going to take on another passenger rail project before the state of minnesota is going to invest that uh you know a more enormous amount of money to make this happen i think uh the triggering point is going to be the price of gas and as soon as it hits five dollars a gallon or maybe more that's going to really trigger the interest in the northern lights express and people will be commuting and differently and working differently you know if they're riding the train they can still open up their laptop and keep on plugging but it's gonna it's gonna be economically driven great another uh question from a viewer uh any movement on selling wine and alcohol in grocery stores this year you know that issue has been around as long as i've been in the legislature and all of a sudden we don't hear about it any longer when when groceries started sort of started putting a second entrance in that was kind of took all the wind out of that that argument i've never been supportive of it just because i've always been very sensitive to our little municipal liquor stores uh i can just tell you the little town of cook that that i grew up in that little muni in that town nets out about 200 dollars a year in net profits to the city that otherwise would be property taxes so the the notion that uh there in in those towns that have muni's it's probably a pretty significant property tax increase if you allow people to buy their alcohol in a grocery store but grocery stores certainly can do it they just need to have a separate entrance and a lot of them are starting to do it in the case of super one up here they they've designed virginia just went but went through there today uh they've got a standalone building but it's right alongside the grocery store but but i haven't heard anything about that issue now since people started to put second entrances in yeah anything that represents cindy tom points out a good economic distinction there the the bigger stores can do this the smaller ones cannot afford to invest into this uh type of delivery of the alcohol wine spirits whatever and it's a typical story about the big dogs can do it and the little guy little guys get left behind great well in real time here one of the viewers i was very interested in the tax rebate conversation but wanted to get a little further clarified senator bach how do you go about getting that tax rebate or applying for it the the property tax rebate yes i uh go to the department of revenue's website and there there's a link on there where you can go to forms and click on the form that says it's ptr property tax refund okay and just print the form off and if someone needs some help with it call my office we'll we'll send a form in the mail to you but it's pretty easy to download at the department of revenue's website great i believe they have forms available at most libraries as well so great thank you uh senator rood has a bill to raise the limits on walleyes uh this year uh representative sandeen are you familiar with the biggest change the changes i think it was a statewide for walleye limit and i haven't weighed in on it i haven't uh paid that much attention to it myself but uh i think it'd be a lot easier rather than looking at all the different lakes so you know i don't want to break the law i'm certainly capable of it if i don't know what the limits are you know on various lakes so uh i i wouldn't be opposed to that no it's it's not going to happen uh dnr doesn't even support it they manage lakes individually now in the case of lake vermilion where i live the limits for they can they can change limits i i don't think the legislature should get into the business of managing game and fish we just we just don't have we don't have the expertise to do that that needs to be left to the department if we start setting uh limits like that in the legislature the next thing is we're gonna we're gonna determine when the seasons are and i just think that needs to be left to the department and there's i mean you take a look at the boundary waters for example there are 1100 lakes there in my district where you you can't have a motor on them right why would we go to four fish in in those lakes you know it's there's not a resource question uh so i i'm pretty certain it's not going to happen not this year at least does your opinion hold true with predator control too all right next up uh another question about uh climate change legislation uh this viewer is wondering uh are there any climate change bills currently being considered and what is the likelihood of passage represent sundeen we'll go with you first most of those go through the energy committee and i'm not on that and some of them through deed we deal with a little bit of climate control i guess with the ag bill you know there's some new varieties of wheat coming out of the ground some perennial wheat and those type of things that are lower till uh methods for growing and i'm supportive of the research going on there so other than that no i'm not on that committee so yeah i'm not on energy either but i i will say i support the idea of electric vehicles and they're gonna i think they'll become more popular uh as the price gasoline is probably gonna be sustainably higher than than we've known it to be they're awfully expensive so there's kind of two issues around electric vehicles i think that the legislature is going to have to get their arms around one is currently the gas tax is what funds our road construction and our road maintenance plowing plowing maintaining everything and as we move away from gasoline as the fuel source we're going to have to figure out how we replace that money that goes into the dedicated constitutionally dedicated highway fund and there have been a few proposals around to potentially raise the annual license tabs on electric vehicles and park that money in the highway fund in an election year uh probably not going to go anywhere people don't want to write campaign literature that says you raised someone's taxes so it's probably not going to happen but it it does need to happen the other thing you know the governor's been pushing pretty hard on building out infrastructure because right now it's kind of hard to find a place to charge an electric vehicle that that infrastructure has got to get built out uh this year and i think we will probably make some some headway on that and then there's the issue of and i was just having a conversation with the legislator the other day about these electric vehicles and i said you know general ford or general motors and ford can make all the electric vehicles they want but if you don't have the critical minerals that you need to make the batteries they're never going to drive them out of detroit so we are going to have to figure out as we ramp up electric vehicles where is all that copper nickel lithium cobalt where is it all going to come from i can tell you i was incredibly disappointed when earlier this year i read the new york times three days in a row ran out like a full paid story on what happened to the world's cobalt supply about 60 percent of the world's cobalt comes out of the congo and that was a large piece of that was owned by american companies and and the the way the story read in the in the new york times both the obama administration and the trump administration absolutely just fell asleep they got so obsessed with afghanistan that they were not paying attention to what was happening in the congo and china came along and those american companies sold that cobalt resource to china so now china owns most of the world cobalt that we're going to need to build batteries you need cobalt for the battery you need and lithium and nickel and that's going to be i think the big challenge going forward is where are these metals going to come from to make the transition to this renewable energy economy both of you are retiring this year from the legislature after a number of years of service so a couple of questions this one's a little different do you have an idea how much time legislators spend fundraising while they are in session too much really i don't think i do anything actually uh we we're prohibited from taking any money from any lobbyists or pacs during the legislative session uh i think most people don't especially after you've been around a while you're busy with the session you don't have time to be to be doing that but although i did do some fundraising this session uh when we had the tribute for senator thomas sony my good friend and your former senator on march first i made some calls and raised uh quite a bit of money for never surrender here in hermantown the non-profit that uh that supports people with als so there's some events that happen for non-profits like that where legislators kind of use their position to raise some money for charitable purposes and i think the public doesn't understand sometimes the reach that a legislator has to help a non-profit that they that they support and and uh this summer i'm gonna i'm gonna do my golf event again this year i wasn't going to because i'm retiring but i've decided to do it and i'm going to try because i won't be raising money for a campaign i'm going to pick a non-profit to raise some money for and i expect you know we'll probably be able to raise fifty thousand dollars for the non-profit that we that we select so it's uh you know and i've been doing a food shelf event in december uh every december since to raise money for the the food shelves in the the aoa service territory uh proctor hermantown and north and uh some years we've raised uh up to 150 000 that night for uh to help the food shelves in northern minnesota uh i think we're we're probably bumping up against one and a half million that we've raised with that event so there's a lot of legislators that do a lot of kind of use their position as a way to raise some money for charitable purposes that they care about also it's not just raising money to run a campaign sure and it's illegal as you said to raise money from lobbyists and and those sorts of groups during the legislative session during session you know but uh a lot of a lot of legislators uh tom tom's fortunate i'm fortunate we never had to work real hard for the money but some people are just obsessed with raising money for the party for themselves and it's a distraction is what it is at the end of the day you know i i i went down to saint paul to work for the people i didn't go down there to keep raising money for my own campaign so there's such a concentration on the money aspect and um that's the part of the politics i just did not enjoy it yeah on senator bach you you raised the name of dave tomasoni friend of all of ours at the table and most folks down at the capitol being retiring as well and a very emotional bill signing this last week around the funding uh 25 million dollars 20 directly to als research i'm going to start with representative sundeen to just talk about the importance of that funding and and talk about senator thomas sony as one of probably the longest serving legislators currently retiring from northeastern minnesota heard a statistic recently that over 500 years of legislative service is going to be retiring this legislative session and senator thomas sony holds a fairly significant chunk of that in this time i do i wasn't going to mention that either both both of the iron range legislators retiring but represent sandino talk a bit about that als funding and senator thomas certainly there there's a little bit of resistance on the on that funding measure but uh the people are thinking a little too small i think that was such a good effort for such a good man you know even if i wasn't never real close with uh uh senator thomas sony but uh almost whenever i saw him is friendly it was great and uh you know you knew he was respected by everyone in his community and everybody that sent him down to saint paul a lot of people are very fortunate to work closely with him i wasn't one of them but my seat mate representative listlegard took on that banner and really worked hard in the house to make certain that happened and it's a very emotional day for representative gard i'm so very proud of the work that he did and i guess that's kind of a testament to the quality of people that we would get to work with down there as a fellow former iron range legislator the time you spend together uh is immense and i know he's a dear dear friend of yours uh it's very unusual to have a bill like that happen so early in session to spend that amount of money why don't you take some time talking about our friend dave yeah you know i will we have been hooked at the hip for more than a couple decades at the legislature almost for three decades and uh i'll never forget the day i mean this time last year he was having some trouble with his left arm and i went we're in the same office suite in the capitol and uh so i i remember telling me you know i'm going to the doctor friday because i'm having this trouble with my arm i can't i can't get my arms up and fold my collar down after i tie my tie and and my response was geez david yeah man i got arthritis in my shoulders and i can't get my belt through my back loops anymore some days my wife has to do it and so we kind of were joking about how jesus getting old is it's really tough and so he was going it's a very hard disease to diagnose so there was a number of you know we kind of we kind of work monday through thursday and friday's for most people's a day to be home meetings in your district uh get get caught up on some of the work that got pushed aside during the during the week when your office is just spinning with people coming and going in committee hearings and so friday's kind of a day to get caught up and spend time back in your district well this time last year on fridays david was going to the doctor at fairview up in hibbing and uh so uh i'll never forget the monday morning when he came in and in june last year and uh he came in so i immediately went to you know to his office there in our suite and i said you know david what did you what'd you find out friday at the doctor and he said and he had a hard time saying it he said i i i've got als and my heart just sank because we had had a former senator from granite falls die from it in 2011 senator gary coobley so we i had some idea what uh what it was about and uh i said so you know david what's the prognosis and he said they told me there's nothing they can do and my heart just sank and so then over the course of the summer we started to talk some about jesus is there anything we can do you know we maybe can't help you but is there anything we can do for uh the next person that gets diagnosed and what we learned is there's been very very little research done on als because it affects a pretty small cohort of people you know it was first diagnosed back in the 1860s and it didn't really get a national name until lou gehrig got it in 1939 and then he died in 1941 and it kind of started to become lou gehrig's disease but because it affected so few people about 450 people in minnesota on any given day have it about two die every week and about two more get diagnosed but because there's only about 5 000 people in the country that have it in any given year it just wasn't the kind of a disease that a lot of research dollars were driven to research dollars get driven to places where you can do the most good where the most people potentially are impacted so it's something that we don't know how curable it is we don't know is there a drug that can put it into remission if not cure it at least slow it down because the research just hasn't been done and so of all the bills that i've ever carried and there's been a lot over the decades i have never ever and senator thomas sony was the chief author of it but i had to shepherd it through the process as the second author i've never ever carried one that was so hopeful that maybe just maybe uh this money going to the predominantly we'll go to the university of minnesota in the mayo clinic some to essentia uh the grant program because they're all doing some als research now this will take it to a whole nother level matter of fact the the main doctor at the university of minnesota uh when he testified on the bill said this is a game changer in in the research area so our hope is and david and i have talked about this is that maybe someday uh that when someone gets diagnosed there'll be some kind of a treatment of some kind and wouldn't it be wonderful if that research that led to some drugs that could help mitigate the impacts of als or maybe cure it was developed in minnesota would not be wonderful you know and our minnesota research institutions uh the whole medical device industry much of the medical device work that's been done in the world is being done in minnesota you know pacemakers started here in 1946 and and uh so minnesotans and our research we've changed the health of the world in a big way and i'm hopeful that that our bright research minds in the state are going to be able to to change this disease also but it's it it's been an emotional time for all of us that have been so close to a colleague i can tell you to a person in the senate everybody would tell you that david thomas sony's the most liked member of the state senate he doesn't have a partisan bone in his body he just wants to do good work and he's going to be badly missed by the by the senate uh republicans democrats everybody alike he's just a wonderful person yeah and as i said before both of you also retiring this year after time serving on the school board and and in the house and the house and the senate representative sundin do you have any advice for those coming after you in how they could be a good legislator biggest lesson you learned in elected office in the house of representatives get your decision making process in line and maintain it okay i went down there to serve the people of my district secondly i went down there to serve the state of minnesota the last is the party okay the party gets you there helps you get there and uh it's important to get started but never forget who you're serving it's been just just an honor beyond belief to go down there you know the people that raised their hand and get sworn in on opening day you've been there you've been there and it's it's a about 5 000 people have had that opportunity opportunity to raise their hand and swear allegiance of the state and i'm so proud of every last person that has served because i feel that commitment every day and it's an honor and we just have 60 seconds left to kind of wrap up over a quarter century in the legislature last thoughts senator i think uh for new people search out a mentor and and uh i was very fortunate when i came in erv anderson from international falls was the speaker doug johnson my senator a long time uh taxed her at the time a mentor is really important to help you learn the process and then to to mike's point remember that you represent everybody not just the people that voted for you and and sometimes the party might be disappointed your party might be disappointed in some of the votes you take but everyone just needs to remember everybody deserves the right to be represented not just the ones that voted for you so that's that's critically important and then to a new member i'd say uh find an area that you're really passionate about whether it's in education or ag or taxes or health and human services and get good at one area of of the legislature because the breadth of it all is just too big to be an expert at everything but get really good at something and then other caucus members will look to you for for advice and counsel great well we are out of time and i'd like to thank representative mike sundin and senator tom bach for being here this week join me again next sunday for another edition of minnesota legislative report when we will welcome more legislators from northern minnesota to the program for the team at wdsc i'm tony cerdich have a great evening [Music] you