Good morning.  It’s all over except for the goodbyes.

The Minnesota Legislature is done passing bills and lawmakers are turning toward the campaign. The 2026 session went right up to midnight, with some critical bills passing just before the final bell. A few straggling items ran out of time, including a couple of health and transportation measures sought by the Senate and a proposal to put term limits on future governors that the House tried to scoot over the finish line. Both the House and Senate will return for formalities today, but no formal action can be taken on legislation.

Lawmakers aren’t quite done with their time together. The Minnesota House returns at 10 a.m. today for members who are leaving the place for good to give retirement speeches. The Senate is in at noon for the same. The list of retirements is 11 House members who will leave the Capitol altogether. Another seven so far are looking to trade the House for the Senate and eight are after other jobs in politics. In the Senate there are 15 outright retirements and two pursuing other offices away from St. Paul.

Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign the bills approved in the last stretch, including measures to prop up HCMC in Minneapolis and to cut costs for home and car owners. The final package closely tracked the agreement struck last week. There were hiccups in getting it all assembled and upset lawmakers over the shape some of the bills took. The closing night also produced frustrations from rank-and-file members of both parties about the closed-door negotiations involving mainly leaders that led to the deal. Some lawmakers urged a change in practice when a new governor and maybe new legislative leaders arrive next year. That’s a familiar call and yet the opaque process has gotten more so in recent years despite the pleas for greater transparency. House Speaker Lisa Demuth said more single-subject bills passed than in other years to keep the catch-all bills to a minimum. “There’s always improvements that can be made but we were as transparent as possible,” she said. “I think we did a good job with transparency this year.”

The bonding bill, which is a sprawling construction projects finance package, is one of those major proposals that emerged on the last day and passed with ease. Under the terms, the state will borrow $1.2 billion to finance a range of public projects around Minnesota. Those include building repairs on college campuses, drinking and wastewater treatment initiatives, local road repairs and community centers. A separate cash package was also passed to get even more projects going. The list of projects that got the go-ahead can be found here.

Legislative staff are what makes the wheels turn at the Capitol even if they don’t always get the attention they deserve. Lawmakers are honoring a longtime aide, current Senate Republican chief of staff Jason Fossum who has fallen suddenly and seriously ill. Fossum has served the Minnesota Legislature for more than two decades, first in the House and then in the Senate. He was recently diagnosed with brain cancer and hospitalized. “He hasn't missed a sine die in over 20 years,” Sen. Karin Housley, R-Stillwater, said on the Senate floor last night while presenting the pair of projects bills. To honor Fossum, lawmakers included a provision that dedicates $1.5 million to Winona State University to create the Jason Fossum Legislative Engagement Center where students can discuss their political studies. A graduate of Winona State, “not a day went by that he didn't mention that Winona State was the Harvard of the Midwest,” Housley said.

Among the items that did get broad bipartisan backing was the HCMC rescue plan. HCMC, a critical safety-net hospital that serves patients from all over the state, has struggled for years due to uncompensated care and faces new pressure from federal Medicaid cuts. Last night, both chambers approved about $200 million in direct payments to Hennepin Healthcare, which owns HCMC, to be doled out half this year and half next year. An additional $500 million would be put in a reserve fund for HCMC to draw on over the next five years. The bill also includes additional state oversight over HCMC’s budget. Sen. Melissa Wiklund, DFL-Bloomington, said the bill will not only help HCMC “regain stability” but will also hold the hospital accountable to the state.

 

Money for IT upgrades will soon be headed to counties and tribes. People access programs like Medicaid and SNAP through their counties or tribal governments, but the technology staff use to get those dollars in people's pockets dates back decades. A bill that will give about $90 million to counties for human services IT upgrades over the next few years and establish an ongoing fund for future upgrades is headed to Gov. Tim Walz, who is expected to sign it. Republican Rep. Paul Torkelson of Hanska championed the bill. “The technology that the counties are forced to use by the state of Minnesota dates back to the late 1980s early 1990s,” Torkelson said on the House floor yesterday. He said the technology is so slow and difficult to navigate it makes it harder for counties to retain employees. “What young person would like to sit down in front of a green screen and watch the wheel of death for a while before they can even enter an address the first time? And in many of these applications, they have to enter the same address three or four times." The bill also creates the Human Services Modernization Advisory Council and a legislative commission to guide statewide technology upgrades.

More iron industry workers can qualify for unemployment insurance extensions. Lawmakers also approved a measure that allows some iron industry workers laid off between November, 2025 and March 2026 to apply for up to 26 weeks of additional benefits. Last year the Legislature approved benefits extensions for some 600 laid off Iron Range workers. Lawmakers say they're moving to add workers laid off since that prior window closed. Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown and Rep. Spencer Igo, R-Wabana Township, championed the bill. Hauschild said his district’s economy depends on a successful mining industry. “It's the equivalent when a mine goes down on the Iron Range that a big corporation in the Twin Cities would be going down and laying off their workers, for example, Target or 3M,” he said. Igo said the money will support about 75 steel workers in his district who might have to leave Minnesota to find other work without this benefits extension. “These men and women, our community that I represent, want to stay here, live here, and thrive here,” Igo told MPR News. He said he expects a new mining operation to be up and running in about six months so this funding will help “bridge the gap” for workers until then.

The wildfires in northern parts of Minnesota are burning hundreds of acres and threatening many structures. Gov. Tim Walz is headed north today to survey the firefighting efforts and the damage. Minnesota has a contingency account for natural disasters, but if the fire season proves worse than prior years, there could be pressure to replenish it. All of that is to say don’t rule out a … special session sometime down the road if the damage and response costs mount.

Lawmakers passed several bills to address fraud this session, ranging from new investigative authorities to cutoff mechanisms when fraud is suspected to a tax on ill-gotten gains. The fraud issue is certain to remain a campaign point nonetheless. The Star Tribune published a story Sunday that puts the Walz administration’s actions on Feeding Our Future under the microscope . Some former officials at the Department of Education told investigators — or the newspaper — that they were discouraged from being more aggressive in choking off fraud when they suspected something was amiss. Walz is no longer seeking reelection but the drip-drip of fraud attention isn’t fading.