With 4 days left to work, lawmakers can't agree on big issues

With just over four days left in the 2016 session, Gov. Mark Dayton and top lawmakers still haven't reached agreements on the biggest outstanding issues.

Dayton met privately on Wednesday with House and Senate leaders, but the negotiations broke up quickly with no deals in sight.

Despite this week's exchange of offers on transportation funding, negotiators have set that issue aside to focus instead on taxes, bonding and how to spend the state's $900 million budget surplus.

Dayton has drawn a new line in the sand with a list of spending requirements. Standing outside his Summit Avenue residence, Dayton said he told Republicans that he won't sign a tax bill unless he gets what he's after in a supplemental budget.

"This is my list of must haves, and it's Minnesotans' list of must haves. It's not about my getting what I want. It's about getting what Minnesota needs. I'll stand on that."

Dayton said he pared back his original supplemental budget proposal but his spending priorities haven't changed.

He wants money for universal preschool, rural broadband, racial equity initiatives and a handful of other government programs.

On transportation funding, Dayton said he'll leave that issue to House and Senate negotiators to try to figure out.

"Well, I think it's a failure, a failure of the Legislature if they can't reach a transportation bill this year," he said. "We'd lose another year in terms of undertaking the projects that are ready to go."

Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt left the meeting quickly to head to back to the Capitol for a scheduled floor session.

Daudt said he wasn't sure if the talks were making progress. "Well, we have to get a few of these out of the way, right? We have to get a few of these out of the way before we can get to the real deal. So, it's fine. Whatever."

DFL Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk said he thinks an agreement on the size of a tax bill is within reach. He also thinks the governor's spending requirements are doable.

But Bakk is lowering expectations for a transportation bill. With Republicans unwilling to support metro area transit projects, Bakk said transportation is no longer in play.

"I've consistently said that any kind of a transportation proposal has to include transit," he said. "So if the Speaker is taking transit off the table and wants to put it on the side and talk about it next year, there's not a path to get a transportation bill this year. Now if he were to reconsider that, we're certainly open to talking about that."

Daudt later said he did not take transit off the table for this session, but he wants to hold off on that discussion until road and bridge funding is resolved.

Back at the Capitol, lawmakers were debating the newly released bonding bill proposal from House Republicans.

The $800 million package of public construction projects is bigger than an earlier House GOP bonding pricetag of $600 million. But it's significantly short of the $1.4 billion that Dayton wants.

Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, who chairs the House Capital Investment Committee, said the bill is focused on key priorities. He said the bonding requests this year far exceeded what can fit in a reasonably sized bill.

"We continue to grow the pile of projects and grow the scope of the bonding bill. And frankly, that pile and scope are not unlimited. We have to have a reasonable figure of bonding. We can't fund everything."

Democrats argued the bill is too small. They criticized what Republicans left out of the bill as well as some of what they included.

Bonding bills need a three-fifths super majority to pass, and DFL lawmakers sounded like they're not willing to help reach the 81 vote threshold in the House. And there are only 73 Republicans in the House.