Summer may be slow in coming elsewhere in Minnesota, but it's already warm and sunny in state government's financial offices. There, managers are looking forward to balancing the state's books on June 30 — the end of the state's fiscal biennium — with upward of $300 million to spare.

Or, more accurately, to send to the state's school districts. Minnesota's schools are still owed $808 million, the residue of a series of state aid payment delays and accelerated accounting of property tax receipts that helped keep the state solvent during the Great Recession.

Together, these maneuvers are "the school shift," in State Capitol parlance. It's been deployed repeatedly in the past four decades to put the state's ledgers into balance every two years, as is constitutionally required.

The shift functions as a secondary reserve account for the state and as an IOU for schools, compelling most districts to bear the burden of short-term borrowing to keep their own accounts in the black.

Though shifts aren't automatically used when the state falls into deficit, an automatic mechanism exists for unwinding a shift. It gives schools first claim on surpluses forecast during a biennium, after the state's own $650 million reserve and $350 million cash flow accounts have been replenished.

The 2013 Legislature added a new, stronger component to that auto-repayment provision. It provides that the school shift will claim any surplus remaining when the state's biennial books — both revenues and expenditures — are balanced after June 30.

The old law would have had schools wait for those proceeds until a new state revenue forecast was issued in early December. That delay would put schools at risk of losing the end-of-June surplus, should the economy turn south again or state spending demands swell this summer and fall.

The new law's added assurance and the economic sunshine the state has enjoyed this spring make it likely that state aid payments to schools will be back on their normal schedule after the 2012-13 books close sometime in late summer. That requires $257 million to accomplish.

Ending the early accounting of school property tax receipts would require $551 million and may take longer. But a push from the House DFL majority to pay off that portion of the shift by a specified date, and to raise a tax to do so, faltered in negotiations with the DFL-controlled Senate and Gov. Mark Dayton at the end of the legislative session.

We're glad it did. The House's preferred tax option was a surcharge that would have given Minnesota's top earners a marginal tax rate second only to California's. Though designed to be temporary and "blink off" automatically when the shift was repaid, the surcharge would have dealt Minnesota an anticompetitive blow.

But we also admired the House DFL insistence that the state ought not let the shift linger indefinitely on its books. For House DFLers, erasing the shift was a 2012 campaign promise. But their position wasn't just about politics. It was about getting Minnesota's fiscal house in order so that it is fully prepared to withstand the next economic storm.

That includes winning back Wall Street's confidence. Minnesota's bond rating dropped, and borrowing costs rose, during the Great Recession. Repaying the shift promptly is bound to be noticed favorably by bond rating agencies, said state Finance Commissioner James Schowalter.

House Speaker Paul Thissen was able to elicit from Dayton and Senate leaders a verbal commitment to take more definitive action in 2014, should the new and improved automatic measures be insufficient to erase the shift from the state's books. He said this week that he intends to hold them to their word. Minnesotans who understand the value of sound public financial management should do the same.

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