Minnesota’s government shutdown ended Wednesday morning.
Gov. Mark Dayton at 9 a.m. signed the budget bills necessary to restart the state government and formally end the 20-day shutdown — the longest in recent U.S. history.
“I’m not entirely happy with this,” Dayton said after signing into law the 12 bills that had been passed just hours earlier in a special session. “It’s not what I wanted, but it was the best option that was available … It gets Minnesota back to work.”
State lawmakers returned to the Capitol Tuesday at 3 p.m. and worked overnight, eventually passing the nine remaining budget bills and three others in a marathon special session that ended around 4 a.m. Wednesday.
The majority of the budget bills passed largely along party lines, with members of the Republican majority approving them and Democrats voting against the bills.
Among them was the higher education funding bill, which includes about $27.2 million more than the U. Minnesota budgeted for the next fiscal year, but reduces overall state funding to the University by more than 10 percent.
In addition to the budget, the governor signed a $531 million bonding bill, $88.8 million of which will go fund projects at the University from the physics and nanotechnology building ($51.3 million), the Higher Education Asset Preservation and Replacement maintenance funds ($25 million) and money to mitigate the light rail’s effect on laboratories ($12.5 million) on campus.
The deal for what eventually became a $35.7 billion budget for the next two years was set in motion Thursday at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, when Dayton announced he would accept a Republican proposal offered June 30 before the state was shuttered.
The two sides eventually agreed to a budget framework that would spend more than what Republicans had insisted on, and does not include any of the tax increases on wealthy Minnesotans that Dayton had pushed for since the Legislature convened in January.
The state will begin to call back its 22,000 laid off employees Thursday morning, according to the Minnesota Management and Budget’s shutdown website, but Dayton said operations at government agencies have already began to reboot.
MMB Commissioner Jim Schowalter said in a conference call Tuesday that it may take weeks for state agencies to restore their normal operations.
“There are a backload of issues that need to be addressed,” Schowalter said.
It’s too early to tell what impact the shutdown and his decision to accept an offer from Republicans may have on Dayton if he chooses to seek re-election in 2014, said David Schultz, professor of public policy at Hamline University.
The more important question, Schultz said, is what Dayton will do with the last two years of his first term.
Every state lawmaker is up for re-election in 2012. Dayton and the next state Legislature will square off again on the state’s budget in 2013.