With 9 days left in the Minnesota Legislative Session, leaders still without a major budget deal

SAINT PAUL, Minn. (GRAY) – When lawmakers return to the House and Senate chambers on Monday, they’ll have just one more week before their May 19th adjournment deadline. By that date, they’ll need to draft a finalized state budget, pass it through both chambers, and send it to the governor’s desk; but one key piece to the puzzle is still missing.

Legislative leaders in the House and Senate, as well as Governor Tim Walz, have yet to agree on global budget targets. Without a common budget framework between the three involved parties, progress on several major budget areas has stalled.

Their initial deadline for global targets was May 2nd. After a week of late-night negotiations each day since, they remain without a compromise.

Still, leaders remain optimistic about the direction those talks are headed.

“I know the second was what we talked about, that’s what we had all kind of had on paper,” said House Speaker Lisa Demuth (R - Cold Spring), “But the fact that we have continued talks is a good sign.”

Leadership has kept the key details of those discussions murky, presumably to maintain the integrity of their negotiations. The little we can glean suggests that progress is happening at a slow pace but that all sides are committed to maintaining goodwill.

“The discussions that are in the room right now, all the people coming into it, are pretty uplifting,” said Governor Walz on Thursday.

House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman shared some numbers on Monday, indicating there was a lot of ground to clear between the House and the other involved parties.

“In terms of the framework, the governor’s structural balance is 50%, the Senate is pretty close to 50%, and the House is more like 20-25%,” Hortman said on Monday, “the House left a deficit in the tails, so that we’re talking about numbers first.”

The House’s proposal leaves a structural imbalance on the bottom line in FY 2028 and 2029 — the years the deficit is currently forecasted for.

It’s unclear how much, if any, movement has occurred since Hortman’s comments on Monday. Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy (DFL - St. Paul) indicated Friday that the discrepancy in numbers was still present.

“They don’t have a budgetary balance at the end of four years, and their targets didn’t necessarily do much to impact the structural imbalance in the out years,” she told reporters, “So we’ve had a fair amount of debate about that.”

Friday was the first day since the original May 2nd deadline that the leaders did not negotiate, as Governor Walz was in Crosslake for the annual fishing opener. Leaders will join him Saturday morning to continue their negotiations on the water, in a practice that’s colloquially called “walleye diplomacy.”