Governor's race, in person, on the issues: Mark Dayton

Education is crucial. We started a lot of initiatives in the past couple of years that now need to be implemented and evaluated for their effectiveness. Early childhood education will need to be expanded, to reach more children. All-day kindergarten — we need to make sure that's being implemented well statewide.

The "read by the end of third grade" initiative is really important. I'm told that over half of the school districts in the state have applied for that program. It's not everybody, and it needs to be. We need to identify best practices and successful strategies, and use our regional centers of excellence so that schools are aware of what's most effective, and are encouraged to adopt those approaches.

We have teacher evaluations now. I signed that bill in 2011, and the system is starting now. There's no question that we should be identifying teachers whose performance is substandard, who don't demonstrate a willingness to improve, and get them out of the profession. We'll be taking that on next session.

In higher education, there's been such a shift in the cost burden [to students]. In fiscal 2012, in inflation-adjusted dollars, state support for higher education was the lowest it's been since 1981. We need to pay close attention to affordability. I don't know if we can afford to go all the way with the tuition freeze that MnSCU and the University [of Minnesota] have proposed. We should ask, or require, the systems to shoulder, say, half of that with real cost savings.

Then we need to realign programs with the jobs of the future, particularly on MnSCU's vocational and technical campuses, rather than the jobs of the past. If I'm re-elected, I'm going to have a series of economic growth summits around the state in December, and bring in leading businesses and college and university officials to look at how well higher education is responding to business needs.

I'd like to lower tax rates for individuals, and I'd particularly like to lower the top corporate (income tax) rate. That tax is really regressive, because if you're a large corporation doing most of your business outside of Minnesota, your effective rate is only 3 or 4 percent. If you're a small business doing most or all of your business in Minnesota, your rate is 9.8 percent or very close to it. I proposed taking that rate down to 8.4 percent. That's a more affordable revenue loss than a personal (income tax rate) reduction would cause.

In 1999 and 2000, the Legislature reduced the personal income tax rates two years in a row. It was very popular, but when you look at the decade of lost revenues and what transpired thereafter, and what we're now having to make up for in areas like higher education, you have to weigh carefully any new cuts.

Transportation will be one of the principal issues in the next legislative session. It's been avoided for various reasons for the last two years, and those reasons are behind us, the last of which is this election. We have to face up to the insufficiency of the funding. The task force I set up [the Transportation Finance Advisory Committee] projected that we're $6 billion short of expected state and federal revenues in the next 10 years, just to maintain the status quo.

Minnesotans are in agreement on two things. One is that they want to see more investment in roads, bridges and public transit. Second is they don't want to pay for it. Bridging that gap is the challenge the next governor and Legislature have to face. That's why I sent [Transportation Commissioner] Charlie Zelle out for the last year and a half, going around the state to make the case to people that there's no free lunch here.

I intend to push for more funding. Last session we came forward with a proposal for a wholesale sales tax on gasoline, plus taking money that's now going to the general fund from transportation-related sources and redirecting it to transportation. For public transit, I proposed a half-cent metro sales tax increase in 2013. That was not successful, but I'll try something like that again. I'm not wedded to one idea. But I'm wedded to improving our system. We can't afford not to.

The record shows, going back 20 years, I was not a big fan of light rail. But I'm not going to kill the Southwest light-rail project. I think we should learn from it. One of [the lesson] is: Tell us ahead of time where the bottlenecks are, so we aren't backed into a corner with a route that is going to set us up for political roadblocks and lawsuits. I'll insist that we know the cost of extending this, too.

The things that the Affordable Care Act wants to accomplish are important advances. Its goals are laudatory, and the approach that they took was a hybrid between the public sector and the private sector. We set up our own exchange because everybody, except for Republican legislators, saw big advantages over the federal [exchange]. That's already the case, and will become more apparent in years ahead. When we took on that responsibility, it required $170 million, mostly for technological infrastructure so that three different health payment systems could come together — private insurance through MNsure, MinnesotaCare and Medical Assistance [Medicaid].