Minnesota Chamber talks up the need for tax legislation

The hunt begins this week among myriad interests at the Minnesota Legislature for a piece of the $900 million Minnesota budget surplus projected for the remainder of the fiscal biennium through June 2017.

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce will focus on legislation that would lower state business property taxes and increase transportation funding without a gas-tax hike. The Republican-tilting chamber also wants the research-and-development tax credit increased in a state that ranks in the top 10 nationally for R & D investment and bioscience-related patents.

The chamber, among other business-friendly measures, also wants Minnesota to raise from $2 million to $5.4 million the amount that is exempt from state estate taxes, conforming to federal level.

Minnesota has a diversified, job-growing economy that has outperformed neighboring states since the Great Recession, a very low seasonally adjusted 3.5-percent unemployment rate, a high business-formation rate and among the highest state-workforce participation rates.

President Doug Loon said last week that adapting the chamber's tax strategies will increase state competitiveness, performance and prosperity.

The chamber has published a 31-page "business benchmarks" booklet and will announce its priorities at an event Tuesday. It generally holds that Minnesota business is overtaxed and the state is failing to maintain infrastructure or produce a next-generation workforce.

Gov. Mark Dayton said the chamber gave the state's business climate unfairly low grades and referred to the report as a "hatchet job," even though the chamber made some positive findings about high patent issuance, technology innovation and otherwise. The tenor-was critical-to-cautionary.

"There is good news in here," Loon said. "We recognize the areas we do well. We want to protect that. Minnesota businesses are reinvesting and adding employees."

The chamber seeks a rollback in the statewide business property tax, which brought in $856 million last year, on top of property taxes paid to local governments. It totals about 30 percent of the average business property-tax bill. Minnesota commercial property taxes in rural areas are the second highest nationally and No. 6 for metro properties, according to the chamber.

Another bill would raise funds for transportation without raising the gas tax. The chamber-favored legislation would take about $500 million in the next two-year budget period from auto-parts sales taxes and $165 million from vehicle rental and leasing taxes and dedicate that funding to transportation. That money now goes to the state general fund.

Dayton said late last month: "We need to protect the fiscal integrity that we have worked very hard to achieve in recent years … a big [Republican] tax cut and shifting hundreds of millions … into transportation would put us into a very precarious situation if there is a downturn in the next couple of years."

These budding builders are all aces

The sixth annual ACE commercial-design competition among several high school teams concluded last week. Shakopee High finished first, but everybody won.

The four-month learning season featured 68 mentors from 19 local architectural, construction and engineering firms who worked with 54 students from Humboldt, Como Park and Harding high schools in St. Paul; Minneapolis high schools Edison and Washburn, as well as St. Louis Park, Shakopee and Irondale high schools. The relationships culminated in some very creative student-designed plans for redevelopment of the St. Paul Ford plant and Minneapolis Armory sites.

"We teach interested students about our industry in 16 weeks," said Jon Bonkoski of Mortenson Construction. "Then they design a 3-D solution, including how much it will cost and how to do it, and they present to about 150 industry professionals, parents and student peers. This is so much fun, and these kids are something.

"We are reaching out to the public schools to raise awareness and diversify our industry with students of color and females. We're just starting to get students who are finishing their college careers. We're starting to hire them."

Neal St. Anthony has been a Star Tribune business columnist and reporter since 1984. He can be contacted at nstanthony@startribune.com.