Legislature getting down to business

With a nearly $5 billion budget deficit to address, the Minnesota Senate on Tuesday debated ... postage stamps.

To be sure, there were the usual sights and sounds for the opening of a legislative session: new members lost in the tunnels with kids and grandmas in tow; promises to work together in a bipartisan fashion as never before; a new recognition of the enormous challenge that lies ahead over the next five months.

The 2009 state Legislature launched itself Tuesday on a journey that could prove to be, as Senate Minority Leader Dave Senjem said, "historic, epic, even cataclysmic." The immediate task at hand is to reconcile a $4.8 billion budget shortfall projected for the next two fiscal years, with a floundering economy expected to deplete state coffers even further, and health care, road projects, schools, prisons and local government aid all potentially facing the budget knife.

"We know where we are today, we know where we're going to be at the end, and I'm not sure at this moment we know how we are going to get there," said Senjem, a Rochester Republican.

Accepting another term as speaker of the House, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, sounded the conciliatory tone, even as she has raised the possibility of including a tax increase in the budget mix to remedy the deficit, defying Gov. Tim Pawlenty's pledge not to raise taxes.

"To the members of the minority, my pledge for you is to increase our respect for each other and our trust with each other," she told House Republicans, after she was reelected by an 86-42 vote along party lines.

Flush from working with Pawlenty on a short-term $426 million budget fix that may have heralded a new, more cohesive relationship, DFL Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller also spoke of continued cooperation. He pledged to take Republican Pawlenty's proposals, which will be presented in the governor's State of the State Address on Jan. 15 and budget plan on Jan. 27, and fashion a bipartisan solution, which he said could even be accomplished by the Legislature's May 18 deadline for adjournment.

As the Legislature convened, more than a hundred protesters -- representing everything from welfare rights to unions to opponents of the Iraq war -- held a rally on the Capitol steps and later marched into the Rotunda. The rally was sponsored by the Minnesota Coalition for a People's Bailout, and spokeswoman Deb Konechne told the crowd that "what we need now is a bailout for the people, not the billionaires."

Coalition leaders said they wanted legislation that would place a two-year moratorium on home foreclosures, as well as a two-year moratorium on any evictions of tenants from foreclosed buildings.

Among the lawmakers, too, fissures were immediately apparent.

While the first moves of a session are often designed to be housekeeping items such as setting committee structures, Senate Republicans offered several amendments designed to set a tone of forcing government to get its own house in order.

Although soundly defeated, the amendments included provisions for limiting Senate travel and other expenditures. One amendment would have reduced the number of postage stamps each senator receives for the session from 5,500 to 3,500. The author of the proposal, Sen. Amy Koch, R-Buffalo, said the move could save as much as $56,000 a year.

Staff writer Mike Kaszuba contributed to this story.