Yesterday, the Senate Transportation Committee gave final approval to their omnibus policy and finance bill (SF 2082-Dibble). This legislation contains favorable “no-fee” transaction reimbursements for deputies and remains absent of any language allowing DVS to conduct DL renewals online. SF 2082 now moves to the Senate Finance Committee for approval before going to the Senate floor.
However, yesterday the House Transportation Committee finally released their version of this omnibus bill (HF 2438-Koznik). This companion House bill has identical language concerning “no-fee” transaction reimbursements for deputies, but it does INCLUDE the DVS proposal for online DL renewals.
The House Transportation Committee heard the bill this morning, less than 24 hours after unveiling it. MDRA lobbyist Jim Hirst testified and focused on these two items in the short amount of time (2 minutes) that all testifiers were provided.
In essence, we voiced our support for the “no-fee” reimbursements in the bill with the hope that the funds allocated ($2.1 million per year) would be sufficient—but it’s certainly a good start! We acknowledged and thanked Deputy Commissioner O’Hern for her leadership and commitment to us on this topic from last year.
We then quickly pivoted to the topic of online DL renewal and stated that while we are not opposed to the goal of customer convenience, we reminded the committee of two recent legislative funded studies specific on deputy registrar operations (King report and Barry Dunn report) which recommended DVS REVENUE SHARING with deputies when online services are offered by the State. Absent this consideration in the bill, we would be opposed to this expanded DVS online proposal. We also rebutted frequent DPS/DVS criticism on revenue sharing (offices shouldn’t be compensated for work they don’t do) by reminding the committee that DVS shifted considerable workloads to deputies with no compensation for MNLARS and remains so with MNDRIVE.
The House Transportation Committee then passed HF 2438 after two hours of testimony and a spate of mostly technical amendments, thus meeting today’s legislative committee deadline to process the bill. The bill now moves to the House Tax Committee, after which the House Ways and Means Committee, and then to the House floor. Both the House and Senate will now be on break until April 21. Once they return, there will be one month left of session to complete their work, including conference committee action to finalize a single bill of agreement between SF 2082 and HF 2438.
MDRA will be asking members to contact targeted lawmakers after Easter regarding these issues. Please be aware and be ready to respond when our request goes out to you!
Thank you, members!
MDRA Legislative Committee
Jim Hirst, MDRA lobbyist
