Minnesota House Bonding Committee Hearing Requests in Moorhead Today

Murphy said they were told earlier this year that the dollar amount of a bonding bill could be upwards of over $3.5 billion.

MOORHEAD, MINN.  – Minnesota House members are in Moorhead and other northwestern Minnesota communities Thursday, hearing pitches for projects vying for state bonding dollars.

Hermantown Democrat Mary Murphy, chair of the House Capital Investment Committee, says last legislative session while assembling a bonding bill that ultimately didn’t pass, lawmakers heard the local needs and want to address those now so “we’re not playing catch-up forever.”

Murphy said they were told earlier this year that the dollar amount of a bonding bill could be upwards of over $3.5 billion. She said the state could do that without harm to its AAA credit rating on Wall Street.

Murphy isn’t saying yet what the number in her committee’s bill will be. In recent years Democrats have proposed bonding bills in the one-and-a-half-billion-dollar range. Republicans’ number has generally been much smaller and the final dollar figure has ended up somewhere in the middle.

Besides Moorhead today, the committee will be in Detroit Lakes, Thief River Falls and Bemidji. Friday, it’s Browerville, Little Falls, Becker and then back to the Twin Cities. It’s the first of five tours the group will make.