YIPA'S LEGISLATIVE AGENDA

YIPA’s Legislative Committee has been meeting during the fall of 2011 to develop its Legislative Agenda for 2012.

Legislative Environment:

The latest forecast for the current 2011-2012 biennium is that there is a budget surplus of over $800 million. This money will have to be used to build back the “rainy day” reserve fund and also pay the interest on past borrowing. However, these same Economists are predicting a very large deficit for the upcoming 2013 – 2014 biennium. Structural problems persist as the schools are owed money and we borrowed from the Tobacco Settlement. We believe this will make it nearly impossible to find bill authors for the upcoming 2012 legislative session to carry a bill seeking to increase the funding for the YIP. In addition, the 2012 legislative session is not a budgeting session and bringing appropriation bills forward without a strong core of legislators to move the bill forward would probably be unsuccessful.

The Committee also discussed the possibility of bringing our statute changes forward (these were developed in 2010 and did not get a full hearing during the 2011 session), but felt that without the right champions the requested changes would not be heard in committee.

Legislative Agenda: 

Based on this legislative environment the Legislative Committee recommended and received approval by the membership of the following 2012 Legislative Agenda for YIPA and its membership.

• Protect the current base funding for the YIP from further reductions
• Develop a process to find and educate legislators that will champion the YIP
• Work with these legislators to create a bill for the 2013 legislative session that will ask for an increase in funding and our previous statute change language.
• Develop a strategy for getting the YIP in front of Governor Dayton and asking him to propose an increase for the YIP in his 2013-2014 biennium budget.