Gov. Mark Dayton Thursday vetoed HF 2038, a bill that would have taken money from the state’s budget reserves to buy back part of the remaining school shift money.
In a letter about the veto, Dayton said he share’s the Legislature’s desire to repay the debt to school districts as quickly as possible.
“For this reason, my budget proposals last year did not rely on additional borrowing from either our schools or our future (tobacco bonds).”
This session, Dayton said he supported legislation that would repay the school districts with revenues raised from closing corporate tax loopholes, which allows companies to avoid paying Minnesota taxes on their foreign operations.
“Unfortunately, the legislative majority decided that protecting large corporations’ tax breaks for operating overseas was more important than paying back our schools responsibly,” he wrote.
Instead, writes Dayton, this bill raids the just-filled budget reserve to pay back the rest of last year’s school shift.
“Admittedly, this notion has superficial appeal. After all, there is no ready constituency for protecting the budget reserve,” he wrote.
However, he wrote, this action would “wrongly perpetuate the terrible practice of the past decade: trying to solve an immediate financial problem by substituting a larger problem, which will not be visible until later.”
