Lori Sturdevant: The business lobby finds an open mind in Dayton

"How about that probusiness governor?" I tweaked Minnesota Business Partnership exec and pedigreed Republican Charlie Weaver last week, expecting a quip in return.

But Weaver kept his ready wit in check.

He, too, had noticed that not every move made in the past two months by Gov. Mark Dayton has justified the horror with which some of his organization's CEO members regarded the DFLer's candidacy last fall.

On Monday, for example, Dayton dropped his proposal for a high-income tax surcharge that Business Partnership members -- and not many other Minnesotans -- would have been called upon to pay.

He proposed a boost in the research and development tax credit that partnership businesses have sought for years.

He called for an end to the hold that the previous governor and Legislature had put on business tax refund checks. (That was a 2009-10 gimmick to make the listing state budget look technically and temporarily balanced and keep the state solvent enough to pay its bills.)

On top of that, Dayton agreed to something the Business Partnership had championed and that Education Minnesota, a DFL ally, mightily resisted -- an alternative path to teacher licensure for recent college grads and midcareer professionals.

Weaver called the grown-up dealmaking on that bill "a blueprint for how the rest of the session could go."

Then on Thursday, Dayton made jaws drop in both the environmental and business communities when he signed a bill to speed and streamline environmental permitting. It was scored at the Capitol as a business coup.

That's a one-week string strong enough to support at least a tentative claim that the business lobby and the governor with the department-store name have a good thing going, I suggested to Weaver.

He didn't disagree.

"It's been a hopeful start" to the session, Weaver said. Of Dayton: "This clearly is a guy who wants this session to be successful for Minnesota at the end of the day."

So do the CEOs of the state's largest companies who comprise the Business Partnership.

That's why I took a closer look at the 2011 session wish-list that group has issued, to discern whether its bullet points point to success -- that is, bipartisan compromise -- at the session's end.

On that list is flat-out rejection of the centerpiece of Dayton's budget-repair plan: higher income taxes for the top 5 percent of the state's filers.

That matches the message the GOP-controlled Legislature sent on Thursday.

Republicans attempted a little political show-and-tell by bringing Dayton's tax increase to the House and Senate floors for a vote. Dayton advised DFLers to vote no on what he called a stunt, which reduced the maneuver's value as a political "gotcha."

Every legislator but one voted no.

But if it wasn't clear already, it's plain after Thursday's vote that the search for a bipartisan sweet spot on a budget deal must veer away from the income tax.

The partnership's list uses words more subject to interpretation when it discusses the sales tax -- words like "update" and "broaden the base to include additional goods and services."

It notes that the sales tax in Minnesota falls on such a narrow base that, despite a 6.875 percent rate, seventh-highest in the nation, it generates the 18th-highest revenue per capita.

Is that a pointer toward a tax-raising deal businesses could accept? Weaver's answer is also subject to interpretation.

The partnership sides with Republican legislators when they say that total state revenues need not be increased to balance the budget, he said.

But he cited a list of goods and services Minnesota exempts from the sales tax that many other states don't -- clothing, tattoos, dry cleaning, haircuts, manicures and more.

"What's the purpose for not taxing those things? Does it make us less competitive if we do?" he asked. "That's the lens we're looking through on everything that's proposed at the Legislature this year. Will it make us more or less competitive in the global economy?"

Competitiveness isn't the only consideration that ought to guide tax policy. But Weaver is right to remind lawmakers that it's much more important today than it was in the mid-20th century when the state tax structure's skeleton was built.

I don't know where this session's sweet spot lies.

But I know that if business's newfound friend in the governor's office can show that he shares business concerns about competition, and if Weaver and his GOP allies show that they understand the importance of fairly shared sacrifice to a successful democratic society, compromise will be easier to find.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist.