Dear Neighbors, This week, we continued our progress of passing bills off the House Floor. With the tied House, basically any bill that makes it to the point of being scheduled for a vote on the House Floor already has the bipartisan support needed to pass. The tie is interesting when it comes to amending bills on the House Floor. If you have your entire caucus behind your proposed amendment, all you need is one member from the other caucus to alter a bill, which we’ve already seen happen a few times. Working together, we’ve passed a bill regulating HOAs. A quarter of Minnesotans live in HOAs, a number that’s certain to grow with 82% of new homes being part of an HOA. The package of policies we passed provides transparency, best practices and strong consumer protections with HOAs. We also passed a bill banning predictive market wagering, and unanimously passed a tenant-landlord relations bill. These are all good bills - they still don’t touch on some of the time-sensitive issues I highlighted in my previous update - but my hope is that some bipartisan progress will lend itself to even more in these final weeks. After we had passed our scheduled bills, my DFL colleagues and I attempted to bring forward a bill that limits the salary of public utility CEOs. CEO pay grew 20 times faster than workers’ wages in 2025. I don’t find that acceptable anywhere, and certainly not at Minnesota’s public utilities. Xcel energy has raised energy bills year after year, all while increasing their CEO’s pay by 97% since 2021. In fact, the Xcel CEO got a $4 million bonus paid for by rate payers, when at the same time Xcel is going before the Public Utilities Commission to request rate increases. The bill we brought forward - and Republicans blocked, would’ve reigned-in these salaries. You can watch my colleague Rep. Andy Smith’s remarks here: |