Legislative Session Recap

On May 22, the Minnesota Legislature adjourned a historic legislative session that included a massive bonding bill, increased education funding as well as a never before seen level of new funding for energy investments and programs.

CEEM is disappointed legislative leaders and the Walz-Flanagan Administration could not come to an agreement to pass critically important funding for Minnesota’s clean energy future. Over the next few months, we will be working to educate candidates and will be engaging our members to participate in this candidate education process to set up the clean energy community for success in 2023 and beyond.

“The business community needs a voice. You need to be involved more because there are voices bigger than yours and I have to jump over those rocks every day. This is serious. We can be clean energy nice but opponents make this path a lot harder. All we need to do is send the truthful message and be a neutralizer to those who want to stop this movement.”

In 2021, CEEM targeted opportunities to accelerate Minnesota’s economic recovery by removing red tape and creating market opportunities for energy efficiency and clean energy development.

The following webinar recap is based on the 2020 Legislative Session Recap Webinar hosted by CEEM on May 27, 2020 at 1pm CDT. The slides are available for review, but there are no recordings of the event. There were 60 attendees on the webinar to hear speakers Benjamin Stafford, CEEM’s Director of Policy and Public Affairs, Senator Eric Pratt, R-Prior Lake, and Steve Kelley, the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s Commissioner. CEEM’s Executive Director, Gregg Mast, also joined the group to provide a welcome and updates on CEEM’s next steps.

In what will go down in history as one of the most tumultuous times in our state’s economic history, the 2020 legislative session started and ended in very different places. COVID-19 changed conversations about many different aspects of daily life, including work at the Capitol. The state of Minnesota started the 2020 legislative session with over a $1 billion surplus, but recent forecast numbers have shown the immediate impact of job losses and business closures have resulted in a $2.4 billion deficit.

With Minnesota remaining the only divided legislature in the nation, this being a budget year, and still being in the middle of a global pandemic, we headed into the 2021 legislative session with cautious optimism. Given the split, viable policies needed to have bipartisan agreement and be big enough for the legislature to consider with their limited time among a number of other pressing issues.

The 2019 Minnesota legislative session is officially a wrap. With a new governor and a slate of new legislators, change was in the air at the start of session. Several bold policy proposals aimed to facilitate ambitious clean energy growth in the state. CEEM and the clean energy industry asserted a strong position in important policy debates. In the end, however, significant divisions between the DFL-led House of Representatives and the Republican-led Senate meant fairly little policy was enacted.

After a contentious three month legislative session, with long hours logged by those working in and for clean energy, the end of session came with a large question mark hanging over the work.