Dear Neighbors,
I hope you’ve had a great summer so far! It turns out that this is the last week I can send you legislative updates (not last week), so this is my last update until after the election. I have been wanting to discuss the topic of “Accountability in Government” and I’ve included a short essay on the topic at the end of this post.
Whether running or not, legislators cannot use state resources for unsolicited communications during an election period because it might create an unfair advantage. While I won’t be able to send out these updates for a while, you can still follow me on my legislative Facebook page.
MN Consumer Data Privacy Act
Peter Callaghan at MinnPost wrote a nice story about my Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act last week.
Share your Input on Prescription Drug Pricing
As I discussed last week, we’re doing a lot of work to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. DFLers are interested in hearing from Minnesotans about how prescription drug prices impact their health care, what affordability concerns exist, and which drugs might benefit from pricing transparency. If you are interested in providing your insights, you can complete the Public Input on Prescription Drug Price Transparency in Minnesota form to share your experiences and help guide the Minnesota Department of Health’s ongoing drug price transparency work.
July’s New Laws
On July 1, several new policies and investments we passed at the State Capitol this year took effect. These laws aim to grow the middle class, support our kids, protect our environment, expand and enhance access to our elections, and so much more. So many of these laws have been worked on for years, and I’m excited to see the positive impact they’ll have on Minnesota. You can read about these new laws and more in this summary of what was enacted on July 1.
Accessibility for All at State Parks
Thanks to the dedicated disability justice organizers in our state, all-terrain track chairs are now available at 13 Minnesota State Parks. Track chairs are all-terrain, electric-powered chairs that can be used on designated trails within the park. These chairs can help visitors explore areas of the state parks in new ways, often on trails that are not suitable for regular wheelchairs.
Track chairs are available year-round in some locations, and seasonally in others. To reserve a chair, call the park you plan to visit.
The nature of Accountability in government
Whenever something goes wrong with a government program there are inevitably calls to find “the” responsible party, lock them in prison and throw away the key, coupled with frustration about a lack of “accountability” when this doesn’t happen. The Legislature frequently commissions its Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) to diagnose the underlying causes of a program’s failure, but the purpose of their analysis is to help us write legislation in a way that the problem is not repeated, not to identify the name of the singular individual who should accept the blame. There have been a spate of OLA reports issued of late, including one on the “Feeding our Future” scandal, and, Judy Randall, the Legislative Auditor, herself, was interviewed on MPR, last week, voicing frustrations with the seeming lack of impact that her office’s reports sometimes have.
I worked with Judy on the MNLARS replacement project and strongly supported her promotion to lead the Office. She had written a report identifying several of the causes of the MNLARS failure, which included:
- The Legislature had appropriated money to create a MNLARS test plan but had not appropriated money to execute it.
- It was impossible to program MNLARS to calculate vehicle registration fees correctly in every case because there were contradictions in the related legislative statutes.
- Someone in project leadership had decreed that a vehicle should be identified by its license plate number (which can change) instead of its vehicle identification number, or VIN (which is unique and immutable). This one mistake, which was deeply embedded in the system, took 18 months to correct.
So, tell me, whose pelt should be hanging on the wall for the failure of this project? The person(s) responsible for the bad design decision are long gone. Which legislators should be held accountable for its collective contribution to this failure?
As a freshman legislator in 2019, I didn’t waste a minute trying to assess blame. Instead, I read Judy’s report, spoke with the people who were using the system and the members of the technical expert panel that had been convened to recommend an approach to replacing MNLARS and then drafted legislation to fix all the legislative issues that had contributed to the MNLARS failure. The new driver and vehicle services system, MNDrive, was successfully implemented on-time and on-budget in 2020.
I field more “accountability” questions about Southwest LRT than any other single project. As a member of the Metropolitan Council and the project’s Management Committee during the “Design” phase of the project, I had a close-up view as the engineering process played out. The route had been chosen by Hennepin County officials, long since departed, based upon the assumption that the existing freight rail line in the corridor would be rerouted to another corridor. When that planned reroute proved to be unsafe, it became necessary to squeeze freight rail, light rail and bike/ped trails into the same narrow Kenilworth corridor.
The City of Minneapolis was strongly opposed to taking any residential property along that corridor to enable these rails and trails to be built at grade (which would have been the right thing to do) so the engineering firm recommended that a tunnel be constructed through watery sand and gravel at the pinch point between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles. It wasn’t until the construction company began trying to drive the sheet piling called for in the engineering company’s design that it was discovered that the watery sand and gravel was laced with boulders that rendered the driving of sheet piling impossible. The project was paused and a substitute engineering design using more expensive and time consuming “secant walls” was devised and construction was resumed with an extended timeline. There was really nothing further that the Walz administration or current Met Council could have done to mitigate the problems that they inherited, and the project was already well past its point of no return.
There have been a number of OLA reports about this project, and I spoke with OLA staff during their research. However, none of the resulting OLA reports discussed any of the political constraints or engineering issues that I’ve discussed here. The OLA’s primary expertise is in financial auditing. When we ask them to go outside their comfort zone to perform analysis of engineering issues or political issues like those in play with the Southwest LRT project their analysis often misses the mark. If the legislature sometimes appears dismissive of the OLA’s work, it’s because the Office can be reluctant to acknowledge its own limitations.
Exposing fraud in benefits programs is in the Office’s sweet spot and its recommendations are generally on the mark in its reports on programs like the school lunch program that spawned the “Feeding Our Future” scandal. Some of these programs were passed by the State Legislature (like the rental assistance program that I discussed last week) while others were passed by Congress but administered by state agencies (e.g., the Paycheck Protection Program or meals for schoolchildren). As I discussed last week, most of these programs were intentionally rushed into federal or state law to buffer workers and families from the impact of the pandemic, with little consideration of the implementation challenges -- and this rarely went well. Minnesota was one of the first states to get up to speed with its expanded Unemployment Insurance coverage in 2020 (because of its relatively modern Unemployment Insurance system) but that’s of little comfort to displaced workers who nonetheless waited weeks for their first unemployment checks to arrive at the beginning of the program.
The lesson for the legislature in these cases is that we must be more mindful of the practicality of our legislation – including giving the implementing agencies sufficient time and funding to ramp up the administration of the new programs, while acknowledging that the prosecution of fraudsters on the back end will always be a necessary part of the process. (So far, about 70 people have been indicted for fraud in the Feeding our Future scandal.)
As satisfying as it would be to always be able to pin the blame on a single guilty party, most failures are group efforts and the people who are most to blame are usually long gone before the chickens come home to roost (and it’s the same in the private sector, as well). The important thing for us is to learn from the mistakes so that we don’t repeat them. The Office of the Legislative Auditor plays an important role in our learning process.
Keep in Touch
Don’t hesitate to reach out if I can provide any assistance. Please follow me on my Facebook page for further updates and invite your friends and family to do so as well.
Thanks for the honor of representing you at the Capitol.
Sincerely,
Steve Elkins
Representative, District 50B
Minnesota House of Representatives
rep.steve.elkins@house.mn.gov